Eurasian Business Review最新文献

Perseverance in R&D effort is the first fundamental step towards any kind of innovation. We investigate the beginning of the innovation story, rather than its end, through duration models. Among the drivers of our unconventional IO approach, we focus on heterogeneity, path dependence and market power, measured as elasticity of firm-specific demand. The Schumpeterian hypothesis emerges at the firm level. Heterogeneity at the industry level reveals Schumpeterian and Arrovian patterns, as well as U-shaped and inverted U-shaped patterns. We suggest considering the entire supply chain from a holistic perspective when evaluating mergers and innovation policies that support small firms by reducing their financial uncertainty and improving their institutional environment.

This paper explores how value chain governance affects the innovation performance of suppliers of intermediate products. We take advantage of a unique dataset of Italian firms to identify governance regimes based on the perceived levels of technological capabilities of suppliers and explicit coordination in the value chain. Our results indicate that ‘modular’ value chain governance is more conducive to innovation for suppliers, especially when these firms have medium capability levels. Conversely, market-based governance modes relate strongly to lower innovativeness amongst suppliers, particularly those with lower capabilities. These patterns are also reflected in the sales of innovative products. Our results go partially against other findings in the GVC literature, whereby relational value chains are usually seen as providing the most favorable environment for learning and innovation.

How do the individual pillars of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors perform in times of war? Focusing on euro area stocks around the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we investigate this question using an event study methodology. Our findings suggest that firms with higher governance scores experienced stronger abnormal positive stock returns, implying that investors particularly valued well-governed firms amidst the uncertainty and adversity. However, the importance of good governance was lower for countries with higher dependency on oil imports from Russia. In contrast, social and environmental considerations appeared to receive less attention from investors during this crisis period. Our study highlights the heterogeneous nature of ESG factors and underscores how their relevance can be context-dependent, especially in uncertain times marked by geopolitical conflicts.

Production innovation enables businesses to remain relevant and drives economic growth. However, many business leaders struggle to identify existing innovation opportunities and are unsure how to execute them with existing resources. This article suggests that organizational innovation—the innovation of a firm’s management practices—helps managers maximize product innovation outcomes. Drawing from firm-level data from the Corporate Innovation Survey of Korea, we find that product/service innovation is positively associated with three types of organizational innovation—the innovation of human resource practices, production processes, and value chain relationships. This suggests that business leaders can maximize their product innovation outcomes by engaging in organizational changes together with product innovation activities. In addition, we explore the channels through which organizational changes enhance product innovation: innovating the management control system helps managers retain top creative talent; value chain innovation leverages the external knowledge necessary for innovation; all three types of organizational innovation are advantageous for acquiring knowledge sources, helping organizational members develop new ideas and novel solutions.

Textual data are the last frontier in the empirical literature on proximity between firms. While there are a growing number of studies using textual data, no robust methodology has yet emerged, nor has any attempt been made to compare the resulting findings with standard measures of proximity based on existing classification systems. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a methodology that can be an effective and applicable tool for measuring proximity between companies. Second, we compare the resulting indicator of proximity, which we refer to as “business” proximity, with industrial and technological proximity scores based on activity codes and technology adoption, respectively. Third, we use business proximity to explain economic performance, assuming that knowledge sharing can occur between employees working in similar firms. Having established the soundness of the methodology, the empirical results confirm the substantial information content of the descriptive texts and provide evidence on the likelihood of spillover effects between firms that are close in the business and geographical dimension.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the main internal drivers of the increase and adoption of online activities carried out by firms in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on several measures of firm-level performance has been debated in many papers, not enough effort has been devoted to investigating its digitalization impact, especially with respect to the drivers of firms operating in transition countries. To this end, we explore a very detailed firm-level dataset, drawn from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) combined with the Covid-19-ES Follow-up Survey, for 22 Eastern European and Central-Eastern Asian countries. Our findings reveal that (i) higher online activity is associated with higher digital and technological endowment of the firm and (ii) this relationship is shaped by external factors, such as country-level digital infrastructure.

This paper, through an analysis of the relationship between internationalization and a novel concept of performance at the firm level, sheds new light on this stream of literature, as our analysis presents a new approach by examining the internationalization-performance relationship at the firm level and arguing that this relationship is dependent on firm-specific assets. To test this argument, we use a sample of 267 manufacturing firms in Spain. We use a Bayesian stochastic frontier model with random coefficients to adequately capture the heterogeneity of resources across firms. The results reveal that the effect of internationalization on performance is heterogeneously distributed across firms. Finally, the strategic implications of these results for achieving a sustained competitive advantage by firms are discussed.