Publications

Since Schumpeter’s (The theory of economic development, 1934) seminal work on economic development, innovation is considered as one of the main drivers of firm performance and economic growth. At the same time, technological innovations vary considerably in terms of impact with only a minority of new inventions contributing significantly to technological progress and economic growth. More recently a number of indicators derived from patent ...

The study of volunteerism has generated multiple conceptual frameworks yet no integrated theory has emerged. This article identifies three major challenges, or layers of complexity, that a unified theory of volunteering faces. First, volunteering is a complex phenomenon that has permeable boundaries and spans a wide variety of activities, organizations, and sectors. Second, different disciplines attribute different meanings and functions to ...

Research Summary: Research on foreign market entry has rarely considered that multinational firms’ new entries may be affected by the configuration of their existing affiliates. We argue that in making entry decisions, firms take into account how an entry into a new location helps increase the operational flexibility of their affiliate portfolios due to options to switch operations across affiliates in case of diverging labor cost developments ...

One of the central elements of Living Labs is the focus on end user involvement in IT-product and service development processes (Ståhlbröst, 2008; Ståhlbröst et al., 2009). Whereas users definitely play a central role in Living Lab research, usersU+2019 motivations to participate in such long-term, rather intensive research and development tracks are nevertheless largely unexplored. The question is not any longer about why we should involve ...

Agriculture Innovation System (AIS) thinking and approaches are largely perceived as a sine-qua-non for the design and implementation of effective and sustainable agriculture development programmes. AIS has gained popularity in the agriculture innovation literature and has been embedded in policy documents of agriculture sector institutions in many countries. However, there is much less evidence of AIS thinking influencing the behaviours of ...

The need for leadership within district health systems is critical for the effective delivery of services and for inter-sectoral collaboration for health. Leadership capacity development (LCD) has not, however, been prioritized within health systems, and the systemic capacity (i.e. roles, structures and processes) that is needed to develop managers who can lead is not always in place. This paper aims to contribute to understanding how to ...

In this first paper of the special issue, we identify some trends in open innovation research by analysing how the literature on this topics has evolved since the introduction of the concept in 2003. Research on open innovation has been mushrooming ever since and the scope has been broadened in different directions. Researchers also started to analyse open innovation at different level of analysis from the individual actors in organisations to ...

How to improve technological capability and generate core competence is one of most critical issues faced by companies in a serious competitive business world, especially those in developing countries. The theory of open innovation provides a new model to make the strategies of technological capability generation without a well-established capability base, while it requires a company to improve its capabilities on alliance strategies and ...

This theoretical paper aims to contribute to the promising stream of research which focuses on behavioural perspectives and processes within the corporate board, by delving into one of the research areas perhaps plagued most by the well-known methodological (i.e., input-output studies) and theoretical (i.e., agency theory) research fortresses of past board studies: board leadership. In adopting a team approach to the board of directors, our ...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to exemplify, by means of a Belgian case study, the transition of multiple certification schemes currently employed in the food sector towards a single retail driven higher end spot market. Design/methodology/approach - Data were obtained by means of focus group sessions, a survey, in depth inter-views and a literature review. The theoretical framework builds upon institutional economics, the competitive ...