Export promotion programs （EPPs） are widely used to support the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises （SMEs）, yet evidence on how firms at different export stages use specific services remains limited. This study examines heterogeneity in EPP usage and export-related capabilities using survey data from Japanese SMEs, classified into direct exporters, indirect exporters, and non-exporters. The results show that overall EPP usage is low across firms, with limited differences observed only for selected services. Non-exporters rely more on market-oriented seminars, whereas direct and indirect exporters make greater use of consultant services, indicating that EPP usage does not increase uniformly with export advancement. In contrast, exporters exhibit consistently higher international business knowledge, stronger executive commitment, and greater export-related production capacity. By including non-exporters and indirect exporters, this study shifts attention from program effectiveness to service-specific usage and capability alignment. The findings suggest that export-stage classifications alone provide an incomplete basis for policy targeting and underscore the importance of aligning EPP design with firms’ underlying capabilities and managerial engagement.
How do resource-constrained entrepreneurs secure investment without relying on economic signals? This study addressed the critical question through a systematic review: Specifically, focusing on legitimacy through storytelling and prosocial orientation, our review suggests 1） Entrepreneurs' storytelling triggers prosocial motivation in investors; 2） The warm-glow effect moderates investment decisions in ventures with ambiguous economic returns; 3） The difficulty of balancing entrepreneurs' prosocial orientation and economic signals in securing investment. In prosocial contexts, overt economic signals may hinder investment acquisition. This suggests that in situations lacking strong economic signals, the warm-glow effect emerges as a moderator in investment acquisition, and entrepreneurs employ storytelling in legitimacy building. This paper offers a novel perspective on investor motivation and provides practical insights for entrepreneurs to build competitive advantage through prosocial and emotional appeals in the VUCA era.
This study aims to identify the factors that enable diversified firms with multiple unrelated core businesses to achieve high performance. Diversified firms benefit from advantages such as business scale expansion, risk diversification, and effective utilization of managerial resources, thereby contributing to high competitiveness and sustainable growth. Previous research suggests that, for diversified firms to perform well, it is important to strengthen a single core business and generate its synergy with non-core businesses. However, the discussion on unrelated core businesses is limited. Moreover, cases of diversified firms that maintain multiple unrelated core businesses while achieving high performance are rare. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, this study focuses on Company A, a diversified firm with two unrelated core businesses, and analyzes the reasons for its high performance. The analysis reveals that the coexistence of the two businesses is supported by their equal scale, distinct markets, core technologies, and each firm holding the largest global market share in their respective fields. Furthermore, the unification of control systems across businesses generates synergistic effects, contributing to superior company performance.
Accounting misconduct remains a pervasive challenge in corporate governance. This study investigates how family ownership and board-level family involvement influence both the occurrence and detection of accounting misconduct in listed Japanese firms. Drawing on agency theory and the socioemotional wealth （SEW） perspective, and using data from 2015 to 2022, I apply a partially observable Bivariate Probit model to disentangle the latent processes of misconduct and its detection. Results reveal that while family ownership is associated with a lower observed incidence of misconduct, it also reduces the probability of detection. When controlling for detection bias, the underlying propensity for misconduct in family-owned firms appears higher, suggesting that concentrated control may enable opportunistic behavior while simultaneously concealing it. Moreover, family representation on the board further suppresses the likelihood of detection without significantly altering the underlying misconduct risk. These findings highlight the dual role of family governance as both risk-enhancing and risk-concealing. From a SEW perspective, families may prioritize legacy and internal harmony over transparency, thereby shielding wrongdoing from external scrutiny. This study underscores the importance of separating misconduct occurrence from its observability and cautions against relying solely on detected cases when evaluating ethical outcomes in family firms.
This study analyzes the impact of a founder’s legacy on strategic adaptations made by successor generations in response to environmental change. We describe in detail the case of Hirose Paper Mfg. Co., Ltd., which manufactures wet-laid nonwoven fabrics. The founder, Shinji Hirose, established a nonwoven technology-based strategy for his company that focused on investing in cutting-edge synthetic paper. He also established an identity for the company as being development-oriented, with a track record of beating the competition by producing a wide range of differentiated products using superior technology and emphasizing the importance of their functions. Both strategies were passed on to the successor as the founder’s legacy. Later, one of the company’s employees succeeded in spinning nanofibers and mass-producing nanofiber nonwoven fabrics on his own, leveraging the founder’s identity. In addition, the company’s current president used the changes in the business environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to create a new business for nonwoven nanofiber fabrics. We find the strategy of relying on a nonwoven technology, a legacy from the founder, enabled the successor generation to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. In addition, the founder’s identity drove technological innovation and fostered new businesses created by the successor generation.
