Publications

This paper provides lessons from a series of qualitative research projects that were adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure their continuation and completion.

This paper is part of an emerging research agenda that explores gendered attitudes to intrapreneurial behaviour. This is an extremely under-researched area of research which tends to borrow heavily from studies into female self-employment. The paper demonstrates that rather than focus upon female attitudes to risk or lifestyle choices, the primary issue facing potential female intrapreneurs is implicit and explicit gatekeeping by male-dominated "innovation teams".

Extant literature has highlighted key national actors that play important roles in both policy-making and fostering innovations and these are the government, industry and academia. Their roles have been well explicated in system theories of innovation like the national innovation system, ‘Triple Helix’ model and ‘Mode 2 Knowledge Production’. However, the current gap between the desired level of global public goods (or in the mitigation of global public bads) and in their actual production leads us to wonder if there is a missing piece of the puzzle. Is there a key national actor that has been ignored in the conventional thinking around innovation and climate change? We think that the missing piece of the puzzle is the role that civil society plays in innovation systems. This editorial introduces a special issue that tackles these questions.

This paper sets out to assess perceptions of food retailers regarding climate change, greenhouse gas emission and sustainability in the Nelson Mandela Bay region of South Africa. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the food retailers' greenhouse gas emissions strategies.

SMEs often fail to market their business and their green marketing initiatives effectively. This paper assesses how the promotion of green social media marketing could provide a possible solution to SMEs failed marketing efforts within the metropoles of Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.

The study of technical innovation in Professional Services has attracted growing interest among scholars, who have sought to analyze the process of organizational change and service transformation. However, very little attention has been devoted to understanding the process of adoption and diffusion of technical innovation in professional sectors. In this paper, we suggest that the relevance and peculiarity of institutional dynamics at play in the professional sectors warrant a specific focus aimed at laying out how they affect adoption and diffusion of technical innovation.

Customers’ data points sources are growing, through the Internet of Things (IoT), telematics and interfacing with third parties’ platforms. Third parties provide either by-product data about their clients, or data that are generated for the specific task of a more accurate measurement of behaviour. One of the core building blocks in insurance is understanding risk – therefore, innovation around data points (sources and analytics) to proxy risk is the engine behind its digital transformation. While the value of data points is clear for the providers of insurance products and services, the customers have not only less control over their data, but also hardly benefit from the creation of those data points. In this paper we provide a case study from the British car insurance industry, about a data-driven product that pivoted into a re-designed personal data right architecture, which included transparency, traceability and usability of customers’ digital traces, and enabled customers’ ownership rights over their data.

The world is in the midst of a digital transformation. An intensified prevalence and use of digital technologies is fundamentally changing organizations and economies. However, the notion of 'digital transformation' is both theoretically and empirically underspecified. This paper rethinks the digital transformation narrative theoretically by embedding the concept in concurrent debates about technological revolutions and neo-Schumpeterian innovation theory.

The study examines the Israeli Government Loans for SMEs in 2015. We tested Loan Adjusted Additionality and Loan Baseline Additionality and found that 53% of loans taken from the Government Loans Foundation (GLF) are additional loans. SMEs would not have taken a loan, or any part of one, if not for the Government Loans Foundation Scheme. Our contribution to the literature is by including Indirect Additionality, demonstrating the importance of the GLF Scheme, not only by assisting SMEs in their financial planning and growth but also, by signalling early stage business resilience, reducing the risks for commercial banks through regulated, financial due diligence.

This article reviews how context has been considered in studies on SME internationalization. It examines 333 articles published during the period 2010–2020 in leading international business, entrepreneurship, strategy and international marketing journals. It identifies their key findings, discusses the theoretical perspectives informing this literature, analyzes conceptual and methodological challenges, and suggests paths for theory development and future research.

This paper investigates whether different categories of links (core and discretionary) to external resource providers are associated with the international performance of SMEs, as well as the perceived importance of external links for providing specific forms of assistance toward internationalization. A study of 180 internationally active SMEs examines whether these features vary according to the SMEs' contexts, specifically their industry and level of home economy development.

The concept of ‘open social innovation’ (OSI) has not yet been fully understood, particularly in relation to social enterprises (SEs). This paper explores the use of OSI as a means of achieving social change through two in-depth, longitudinal, qualitative case studies with Scottish SEs.

This paper reports the findings of a thematic narrative review of peer-reviewed articles exploring innovation in UK independent homecare services published between January 2009–August 2021. Our analysis of 15 papers reveals four broad innovation types: personalised funding, operational models, workforce development and assistive technology. We conclude that research focused on innovation in independent homecare offers important insights into the positive and negative outcomes of different types of innovation for providers, care workers and people receiving care.

Dynamic, volatile, and time-sensitive industries, such as tourism, travel and hospitality require agility and market intelligence to create value and achieve competitive advantage. The aim of the current study is to examine the influence of big data (BD) on the performance of service organizations and to probe for a deeper understanding of implementing BD, based on available technologies.

This article argues that the concept of civic capital affords considerable insight into systems of urban economic development, usefully bridging gaps in both institution-centric and social capital approaches. While the concept has been applied in the literature on urban governance and economic development, its use has been fragmentary and has not seen broad engagement. This review of the state of the literature situates the concept of civic capital relative to existing literature in the field, highlights its relationship to other concepts, and reviews several qualitative approaches that apply the concept to case studies.

The ‘recycling’ of people, capital and ideas is a key process that can support activity in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Previous research has shown that knowledge recycled from prior employment is important for the entrepreneurial ecosystem and we expand upon this to understand which types of knowledge, as well as individual motivations for transferring this knowledge. We have created a novel dataset to track employee career trajectories within an ecosystem, showing the extent to which employees derive experience from within the ecosystem as well as the extent to which they recycle their entrepreneurial experience by returning to employment.

This study considers the act of entering into new technological domains for Research and development (R&D) purposes as one of the most intense entrepreneurial activities within large established firms, referring to it as R&D entrepreneurship. Attempting to detect factors that could strengthen (or weaken) the impact of R&D entrepreneurship on innovation performance, this article examines the moderating role of three important R&D strategies, namely the knowledge plurality, internal focus, and R&D collaboration.