Article by C. THEODORAKI, D. B. AUDRETSCH, D. CHABAUD
Publised in Review of Entrepreneurship

Over the past 15 years the literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems has emerged as important and compelling. This article reviews the literature at the intersection of entrepreneurial ecosystems and place in order to identify what is known and what is not known about the role of place in entrepreneurial ecosystems. This article sheds light on the definitions, methodologies, typologies, challenging and crisis contexts prevalent in the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature. It then introduces the six papers selected for the special issue and synthesizes their contribution with regards to future directions of entrepreneurial ecosystem research. This article concludes by highlighting the advances, gaps, and research directions towards a better understanding of the importance of research linking entrepreneurial ecosystems to place.

Article by J. PINKSE, F. LÜDEKE-FREUND, O. LAASCH, Y. SNIHUR, R. BOHNSACK
Publised in Organization and Environment

Business models for sustainability (BMfS) enable organizations to create social and environmental value for a wide variety of stakeholders. As BMfS are new for well-established industries, their implementation requires deep organizational change to overcome path dependencies of existing business models. In this article, we present a framework which outlines the organizational change process involved in BMfS development. The framework shows that organizations can experiment with novel configurations of value, resources, and transactions, and follow discursive and cognitive pathways to enable BMfS legitimization and implementation. Although the value, resources, and transactions levers can be used either separately or in concert, discursive and cognitive pathways are most powerful when pursued together. We use our framework to highlight the contributions of the articles in the special issue and to propose new directions for BMfS research. We argue that future research should investigate the impacts of BMfS on the sustainability challenges they seek to address.

Article by F. DERRIEN, A. GAREL, A. ROMEC, J.-P. WEISSKOPF
Publised in Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis

We explore the effects of online customer ratings on financial policy. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relationship between customer ratings and restaurant debt. We use the locally exogenous variations in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity tests to establish causality. Favorable online ratings reduce cash flow risk and increase resilience to demand shocks. Consistent with the view that good online ratings increase the debt capacity of restaurants and their growth opportunities, restaurants with good ratings use their extra debt to invest in tangible assets.

Article by C. LEYRONAS, S. LOUP
Publised in Journal of Knowledge Management

Understanding the value of creation processes for entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurial ecosystem remains a significant challenge. Entering the black box of the ecosystem and adopting the entrepreneur’s perspective is thus essential The Resource-Based framework combined with a multi-level analysis allows for the identification and analysis of value based on the entrepreneur’s interactions with their ecosystem and other companies within it, in terms of both resources and capabilities.

Article by B. LEE, S. MISRA, C. HAON
Publised in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Although fostering innovativeness has long been one of the most important concerns for marketing theory and practice, CEOs continue to identify the lack of an innovation culture as one of the main obstacles they must overcome. Corporate culture permeates from the top of the corporate hierarchy. Therefore, the role of the corporate board can be critical for nurturing an innovation culture and thus stimulating innovativeness inputs. As marketing training and orientation emphasize innovation to create customer value and drive growth, marketing-experienced board members (MEBMs) can be particularly instrumental in fostering innovativeness inputs through their direction and counseling. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate whether the marketing expertise and information brought by MEBMs contribute to firm innovativeness inputs. Furthermore, based on the governance literature, we identify three specific CEO job characteristics that influence a CEO’s information processing capacity and ability to implement strategies based on that information, thus enhancing MEBMs’ effectiveness in fostering innovativeness. Analysis of a large representative dataset reveals that marketing expertise brought by MEBMs increases firm innovativeness inputs and that CEO risk-taking incentives, insider CEO, and CEO duality enhance MEBMs’ effectiveness in fostering innovativeness inputs. The results highlight the value of having marketers on the corporate board and the importance of their counsel to CEOs.

Article by C. CANTA, A. NILSEN, S. A. ULSAKER
Publised in Journal of Empirical Finance

This paper studies empirically the relationship between competition and risk taking in banking markets. We exploit an unique dataset providing information about all bank loans to Norwegian firms over several years. Rather than relying on observed market shares, we use the distance between bank branches and firms to measure the competitiveness of local markets. The cross-sectional and longitudinal variation in competition in local markets are used to identify the relationship between competition and risk taking, which we measure by the non-performing loans and loss provision rates of the individual banks. We find that more competition leads to more risk taking. We also examine the effects of bank competition on the availability of loans. More competition leads to lower interest rates and higher loan volumes, but also makes it more difficult for small and newly established firms to obtain a loan.

Article by L. HERWEYERS, I. MOONS, C. BARBAROSSA, P. DE PELSMACKER, E. DU BOIS
Publised in Journal of Cleaner Production

The production and consumption of single-use plastics (SUP) has disastrous consequences for the natural environment. Understanding which consumers are more likely to avoid SUP and why is crucial. Building on a comprehensive action determination model of ecological behavior, this study aims to specify the most relevant drivers and barriers to consumers’ intentions to avoid SUP. The results of a qualitative study (N = 32) and a quantitative study (N = 3,000), conducted across multiple countries (United States, Russia, and Belgium), reveal that positive attitudes and subjective norms regarding SUP alternatives enhance consumers’ intentions to avoid SUP. Our analysis also shows the existence of four consumer segments—SUP addicts, SUP avoiders, the apathetic, and situation-driven SUP users—who differ in their intentions to avoid SUP and their motivations. While habits in using SUP, and situational constraints and hygienic concerns regarding SUP alternatives do not play a significant role in the whole cross-national sample, they represent crucial barriers for specific segments such as SUP addicts and situation-driven SUP users. The study concludes with several marketing and design recommendations for promoting and developing reusable alternatives for single-use plastics.

Article by Abhishek Behl, Vijay Pereira, Achint Nigam, Samuel FOSSO WAMBA (TBS Education), Rahul Sindhwani
Publised in Journal of Knowledge Management

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of NFTs in revolutionizing innovation management and information systems. Innovations done by firms are blatantly used by other firms to develop cheap knock-off. This leads to huge economic loses to the firm investing in research and development activities. Firms are in need of trusted, immutable and verifiable means of storing information which cannot be used by others, even if publically available without their consent. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) appear to be one such solution to this problem that has recently attracted a lot of investor interest. Using NFTs the information is tokenized and is stored in a secure manner.

Design/methodology/approach

Through this scoping review, the authors investigate the influence of NFTs towards the innovation management from the dual aspects of management and information systems. This scoping review is underpinned by the five-stage framework by Arksey and O’Malley. The five stages of Arksey and O’Malley’s framework were used in this analysis to classify the literature through five stages of identifying the initial research questions; locating relevant studies; study selection; charting the data; and compiling, summarizing and reporting the results.

Findings

This study suggests that NFTs on the blockchain have significant potential to revolutionize innovation management and information systems. Theoretical frameworks used in investigating the role of digital tokens in blockchain management are mainly based on contracts, diversity theory, portfolio theory and faking likelihood theory. The study reveals gaps in the literature, particularly in the under-researched areas of behavioural psychology and social psychology theories. The appropriate regulation and regulation authority for different types of digital tokens are required. The study also presents archetypes that represent patterns in the current landscape of blockchain tokens, which have significant potential for future research and practical applications.

Originality/value

This study is unique in its approach to assessing the future of NFTs in the field of innovation and information management. While many existing reviews have focused on describing the progress and development of NFTs in the past, this study takes a forward-looking perspective and projects the future potential of NFTs. This innovative approach allows for a deeper understanding of the potential impact of NFTs in various fields such as entrepreneurship, innovation management and tokenomics. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature on NFTs by providing insights and recommendations for future research and practical applications.

Article by Timo Mandler
Publised in Journal of Business Research

This paper examines the influence of stakeholder orientation on the design of managerial incentives. Our tests exploit the quasi-natural experiment provided by the staggered adoption of directors’ duties laws (i.e., state-level laws that explicitly expand board members’ duties to act in the best interests of all stakeholders).

We find that the enactment of these laws results in a significant decrease in the sensitivity of CEO wealth to the stock price. This decrease is mostly driven by firms most exposed to pressures to maximize short-term stock price. Our results suggest that the decrease in the sensitivity of CEO compensation to the stock price is an important channel boards use to internalize stakeholder orientation.

Article by Samuel FOSSO WAMBA (TBS Education), Muriel Fotso, Elaine Mosconi & Junwu Chai
Publised in Annals of Operations Research

Plastic waste management represents a fundamental challenge in terms of environmental pollution and health in many emerging countries. Yet, some firms believe improved plastic waste management could lead to value creation and capture, especially from a circular economy perspective.

This study draws on a longitudinal research approach that involved 12 organizations in assessing plastic waste management’s contribution to Cameroon’s circular economy. Our findings suggest that plastic waste management for value creation is still embryonic in Cameroon. Moving to the full value creation and capture stage will require overcoming various challenges identified and presented in the paper. We then discuss our findings and put forward several future research avenues.