Developed for management decision's “The Practice of Making Decisions” section, this study examines a concrete managerial dilemma: what can managers learn by considering how deeply digital technologies are embedded in the urban environment alongside their availability? We examine how urban digital embeddedness is associated with innovative small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs') digital orientation (DO) and its four dimensions. The study combines city- and firm-level information for 24 Italian cities and 243 innovative SMEs observed over 13 years. Urban digital embeddedness captures citizens' use of home banking, municipal applications and broadband services. SMEs' DO is derived from annual mission statements and assessed across digital technology scope, digital capabilities, digital ecosystem coordination and digital architecture configuration. Relationships are estimated using a two-way fixed-effects Spatial Durbin Panel Model. The findings show that urban digital embeddedness is most consistently associated with firms' stated digital capabilities and digital ecosystem coordination, followed by digital architecture configuration, while evidence for digital technology scope is comparatively weak. Managers should look beyond digital technologies when making digital-strategy decisions and consider how technologies are actually embedded in the surrounding environment. Urban digital embeddedness can provide decision-relevant signals when evaluating locations, setting investment priorities, assessing external ecosystems and planning firms' digital transformation. The study reframes the smart city as a managerial decision environment rather than a technological backdrop. It positions urban digital embeddedness as a source of contextual signals and DO as the organisational expression of strategic digital choices made by managers.
This study investigates the associations between initial external partnerships, financial resource mobilisation, and the early growth of micro-sized new technology-based firms (NTBFs). Drawing on survey data from Swedish micro-sized NTBFs, the study tests four hypotheses concerning market-oriented and institutional partnerships, as well as informal and formal sources of external financing. The empirical approach combines Pearson correlation analysis with multiple regression models. The results indicate that partnerships with subcontractors and universities/research institutes are positively associated with early firm growth, whereas partnerships with local authorities are negatively associated with growth within the externally funded subsample. The negative association with local authority partnerships should be interpreted cautiously, as it may partly reflect selection effects or underlying firm characteristics rather than a direct adverse effect. Within the small subsample of externally funded firms, exploratory results indicate that crowdfunding is positively associated with growth, while funding from family and friends is negatively associated with growth. These financing-source findings should be interpreted as exploratory and conditional. The financing analyses are based on a relatively small subsample of externally funded firms, and the findings are derived from Swedish NTBFs, limiting generalisability. Future research should employ longitudinal and comparative designs to further examine the role of external partnerships and financing in NTBF growth. Managers of micro-sized NTBFs should prioritise partnerships with subcontractors and universities/research institutes and carefully evaluate the strategic value of different financing sources. Policymakers should strengthen mechanisms that facilitate university-industry collaboration and access to scalable financing channels. The study contributes to entrepreneurship research by providing new empirical evidence on which external relationships and financing channels are associated with growth among micro-sized, young NTBFs – an often overlooked group in growth studies. It further offers policy-relevant insights by highlighting the heterogeneous value of different partnership types and funding sources in early-stage firm development.
This research aimed to (1) analyze the ability of government and nongovernment institutions in coordinating and collaborating to form institutional synergy in empowering digital literacy in micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) and (2) formulate a “2C” Model (coordination and collaboration) that facilitates effective institutional synergy Qualitative and quantitative methods were used with informants from institutions within the city government and state-owned enterprises. Qualitatively, in-depth interviews were conducted to obtain information on the implementation of coordination and collaboration. Quantitatively, weaknesses, opportunities and threats from the implementation of coordination and cooperation were analyzed to obtain strengths Public institutions underexamined coordination and collaboration despite shared objectives, leading to fragmented programs and underutilized resources. This research proposed 2C model, positioning coordination and collaboration as a foundational process and strategic mechanism to integrate cross-sector resources and build institutional synergy for enhancing digital literacy in a developing-country context. The results connect two institutions under different leadership with the same goal of improving digital literacy in MSME. Therefore, the developed 2C model serves as a guide for institutions to synergize, coordinate and collaborate, combining various inputs and processes to increase the number of small and micro businesses.
This study investigates how chief executive officers’s (CEOs’) impending retirement is associated with corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) controversies, aiming to shed light on the theoretical tension between opportunistic motives (based on agency theory) and legacy conservation motives (based on reputation theory). It seeks to illuminate the micro-level behavioral correlates of ESG risk events during leadership transition periods. Utilizing a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2017 to 2023, this study employs fixed-effects regression models. CEO retirement is measured as the final two years of tenure; ESG controversies are measured using reverse-coded Wind ESG controversy scores. The analysis examines the main association, moderating conditions, plausible pathways, and heterogeneity, supported by extensive robustness checks including propensity score matching and two-stage least squares. We find that CEO retirement is positively associated with corporate ESG controversies, a pattern more consistent with the opportunism perspective than with the competing legacy-conservation prediction. This association is attenuated by higher CEO age, positive external expectations, and effective internal control, but strengthened by financing constraints. Mechanism tests are consistent with plausible pathways involving lower substantive ESG investments and more frequent corporate violations/speculative behaviors. The association is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and industries with weak market competition. This study expands the antecedents of ESG controversies by introducing the perspective of CEO career dynamics, moving beyond prior focus on institutional or governance factors. It provides nuanced empirical evidence consistent with the “opportunism” perspective in the CEO retirement literature, while indicating the situational dependency of the observed association through key boundary conditions.
Purpose This article provides empirical support to a long-debated theory in behavioral and organizational management literature regarding how the incentive conflict of firms' executives affects the firm's efficiency. Design/methodology/approach The study employs panel regression techniques, using efficiency measures derived from data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) as dependent variables, and a novel measure of C-suite incentive conflict as the independent variable, based on annual data from US companies covering the period 1992–2018. Findings Our results show that incentive conflict improves firm efficiency and thus support the constructive impact of C-suite conflict on firm efficiency. We find that the positive impact of incentive conflict on firm efficiency is weakened when the CEO is more powerful. Our findings provide support to agency theory by documenting that a more diverse board of directors reinforces the positive relationship between incentive conflict and firm efficiency. Research limitations/implications One limitation of this study is that the dataset is restricted to the period ending in 2018, which may limit the ability to capture more recent developments in corporate governance practices and executive incentive structures. Although the findings provide important insights for corporate executives and policymakers, extending the dataset to more recent years would improve the timeliness and generalizability of the analysis. Future research may address this limitation by incorporating updated data to examine whether the observed relationships persist under evolving global economic and governance conditions. Practical implications Our study provides two key implications for promoting sustainable business models for the corporations. First, the positive impact of incentive conflict on firm efficiency may suggest that employers design executives' compensation packages where the Vega differences between CEOs and non-CEO executives are above the median can be a benchmark. Second, corporations may design policies to minimize CEO's power and improve the positive impact of incentive conflict on firm efficiency by increasing the presence of minorities in the board of directors. Originality/value First, to the best of our knowledge, this study is a pioneer study in examining the relationship between firm efficiency and workforce conflict using a novel measure of incentive conflict. Second, this study involves an interdisciplinary investigation by applying econometric methods on financial data to provide empirical support to a long-debated theory about the impact of C-suite incentive conflict on firm efficiency in behavioral and organizational management literature. Finally, our study has at least two important policy implications for corporations. First, the positive impact of incentive conflict on firm efficiency may suggest that employers to benchmark the industrial median of incentive conflict to design executives' compensation packages where the Vega differences between CEOs and non-CEO executives are above the median. Second, corporations may design policies to minimize the CEO's power and encourage the presence of minorities in the board of directors to improve the positive impact of incentive conflict on firm efficiency.
