This study investigates the efficacy of public R&D support. Compared to most existing studies, we do not stop at substitution effects or general innovation outcome measures, but we are interested in knowing where the policy effect is highest: on innovation close to the market (i.e. incremental innovation) or on innovation that is still far from the market and hence more risky and radical. Using firm level data from the period 1999 to 2011, we find that the policy hits where the market failure is highest, that is, for radical innovation. Taking into account that the Swiss funding agency encourages collaboration, we find no evidence that the impact of the policy is positively effected by various R&D collaboration patterns.
We report findings from an in-depth single case study about a failed new venture initiative in a large firm that suggest that attentional agency (i.e. the exercise of discretion by managers over the distribution and allocation of attention of other organizational members) and the incompleteness of governance channels (i.e. the formal and informal mechanisms set up by managers to provide the necessary information to guide their attention) are key determinants of the distribution of organizational attention and behavior of organizational members. Our findings demonstrate the central role of individual discretion, as opposed to structural determinism, to organizational attention and behavior. They also suggest that attentional agency and incomplete governance channels may lead to incoherence in the implementation of a strategic initiative as well as a drift away from initial scope and objectives and languishing of the initiative, which may be countered by a focus on quality of attention. Finally, they highlight the crucial role of the quality of top management attention, rather than top management support per se, in determining the performance of a corporate venture.
This paper extends research on ethical leadership by proposing a responsibility orientation for leaders. Responsible leadership is based on the concept of leaders who are not isolated from the environment, who critically evaluate prevailing norms, are forward looking, share responsibility, and aim to solve problems collectively. Adding such a responsibility orientation helps to address critical issues that persist in research on ethical leadership. The paper discusses important aspects of responsible leadership, which include being able to make informed ethical judgments about prevailing norms and rules, communicating effectively with stakeholders, engaging in long-term thinking and in perspective taking, displaying moral courage, and aspiring to positive change. Furthermore, responsible leadership means actively engaging stakeholders, encouraging participative decision making, and aiming for shared problem solving. A case study that draws on in-depth interviews with the representatives of businesses and nongovernmental organizations illustrates the practical relevance of thinking about responsibility and reveals the challenges of responsible leadership.
International survey datasets are analyzed with increasing frequency to investigate and compare attitudes toward immigration and to examine the contextual factors that shape these attitudes. However, international comparisons of abstract, psychological constructs require the measurements to be equivalent–i.e., they should measure the same concept on the same measurement scale. Traditional approaches to assessing measurement equivalence quite often
lead to the conclusion that measurements are cross-nationally incomparable but have been criticized for being overly strict. In the current study, we present an alternative Bayesian approach that assesses whether measurements are approximately (rather than exactly)
equivalent. This approach allows small variations in measurement parameters across groups.
Taking a multiple group confirmatory factor analysis framework as a starting point, this study applies approximate and exact equivalence tests to the anti-immigration attitudes scale that was implemented in the European Social Survey (ESS). Measurement equivalence is tested across the full set of 271,220 individuals in 35 ESS countries over six rounds. The results of the exact and the approximate approaches are quite different. Approximate scalar measurement equivalence is established in all ESS rounds, thus allowing researchers to meaningfully compare these mean scores and their relationships with other theoretical constructs of interest. The exact approach, however, eventually proves to be overly strict and leads to the conclusion that measurements are incomparable for a large number of countries and time points.
We use an analytical model to study the effects of customer-specific synergies – i.e. synergies that arise when firms sell multiple products to the same customers. At the firm level, we show that the profitability of a customer-specific synergy depends upon cross-market correlation of customer preferences, differs when the synergy is cost-based versus differentiation-based, and can be negative even when the synergy is kept proprietary to a single firm. We also show that returns to imitating such a synergy may decline as it strengthens. At the industry level, we find that exploiting customer-specific synergies causes endogenous market convergence at a point that depends upon whether the synergy is cost-based or differentiation-based and whether it is imitated.
