Purpose This study aims to investigate how investment promotion agencies (IPAs) attract funds effectively from emerging to established countries. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative action research (AR) study with data collected from focus groups and semi-structured interviews, observation and journaling. Comparative case studies are also presented to provide an external perspective to the researchers’ internal action researcher positions. Findings The research identifies four main factors that impact IPAs’ effectiveness in seeking a strategic asset in the UK from a developing country, China. The factors are policy advocacy, targeting industry, regional strategy and cultural adaption, which provide positive and significant influences on IPAs’ effectiveness. Research limitations/implications Little research has been published about the roles of IPAs in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) from a developing to a developed country. The study uses an AR approach and case studies, which have not previously been used to investigate IPAs’ performance. The study extends the sparse extant research and provides insights into what influences the performance of IPAs, thus contributing to knowledge and practice. Practical implications The findings provide insights into the ways in which IPAs influence FDI flows. The research contributes to discipline knowledge and practice by identifying factors influencing funding in a non-traditional manner, that is from a developing to a developed country. Originality/value Little research has been published about the roles of IPAs in attracting FDI from a developing to a developed country. The study uses an AR approach and case study, which have not previously been used to investigate IPAs’ performance. The study extends the sparse extant research and provides insights into what influences the performance of IPAs, thus contributing to knowledge and practice.

This paper explores women's leadership in Saudi Arabia's three university settings-gender segregated (women or men-only), unsegregated (co-educational) and the majority of partially segregated universities where women's campuses exist within male-dominated universities. While Saudi Arabia's accelerated reforms are creating new opportunities for women's leadership, these are not reflected in the higher education sector yet. In adopting a feminist institutional theory perspective, this study employed a feminist qualitative approach, including 14 semi-structured interviews in Saudi Arabia's three university settings. The findings revealed that the barriers to women's leadership were most significant within the partially segregated universities, rendering women leaders as effectively powerless. In contrast, women's leadership flourished in the women-only university setting. As such, the findings suggest that the dominating partially segregated model is ineffective and problematic for women's leadership, and contradict the dominant view that gender segregation disempowers women. These insights have implications for the transformation of Saudi Arabia's higher education sector, aligned with the Kingdom's Vision 2030 policy.

This paper integrates the divergent epistemologies of the organizational learning view and the knowledge-creation view on how new knowledge is created in organizations. The former view adopts an information-processing perspective and emphasizes the importance of deep knowledge and higher-level learning, whereas the latter view adopts a social constructionist perspective and stresses the importance of tacit knowledge and interactive dialogue. The paper's integration uses the theorization of knowledge levels, specifically the shifts and movements in knowledge trajectories and the inverse relationship between the degree of tacitness and explicitness. The paper contributes greater coherence in our understanding of knowledge creation and generates new meaning/insights. The paper concludes by highlighting potential interpretations/insights and implications before presenting limitations and future research directions.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate organizational culture’s perceived importance and practice as it unfolds across hierarchal layers of a formalized organization. Organizational culture is important in innovation and change and becomes significant if its importance and practice are shared across all levels of an organization. Highly formalized organizations are not an exception to this. Yet, there is a shortage of empirical evidence on how the organizational culture’s perceived importance and practice unfold across the senior-management, middle-management and operational levels of a formalized organization. Design/methodology/approach Applying a theoretical frame incorporating information asymmetry, knowledge sharing and cultural participation, this paper examined three important facets of culture, namely, trust, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Using a Jordanian bank’s case study, this paper collected data using a mixed-methods approach; quantitative to identify variations across levels and, subsequently, qualitative to explore the nuanced patterns in the perceived importance and practice of the three facets across different organizational levels in the context of a formalized organization. Findings The findings suggest that the importance and practice of the three cultural facets are shared, as well as differentiated across organizational levels based on purposiveness, person/situation-dependency and nature of work and nature/relevance of knowledge. Originality/value Using a multi-level lens provided insight not yet gained by current work in the field. This allowed us to unearth nuanced differences in the perception of organizational culture across organizational hierarchies. The paper contributes to the scholarship on organizational culture in the context of formalized organizations and to managerial practice by offering insights on how a shared practice of trust, collaboration and knowledge sharing is distributed across organizational levels, not captured before. This paper also suggests propositions related to each of three cultural facets, not spelled out before.

Feedback loops are instrumental in the organizational knowledge creation (OKC) process across the highly uncertain and dynamic innovation's front-end. Therefore, managers should be aware of how these loops unfold, how to recognize meaningful patterns and how to steer them towards planned and emergent outcomes. Easy to say, difficult to practise! This empirical paper focuses on knowledge–conceptualization – the new knowledge's generation-crystallization journey – and develops a unique model of feedback loops as dynamic processes of OKC in the context of the innovations’ front-end. Using ten qualitatively studied innovations, the authors identify five front-end OKC stages (generation, evaluation, expansion, refinement and crystallization) and pattern these based on their overlaps to explore the associated feedback loops. This model distinctively illustrates increasing–decreasing, diverging–converging and frequent negative-cum-positive loops, and illuminates the complex and rich patterns of loops not captured before.

Although entrepreneurial practices and processes are evolving and changing globally, models of entrepreneurship remain masculinized, embedded in advanced economies and associated with notions of individual agency, heroism and control. Rarely is defiance considered. In this paper, we explore the defiance practices of displaced women operating in the Jordanian patriarchal economy and society and consider how this enabled their nurturing of entrepreneurship. Indeed, we argue that socially excluded women actually defy their contextual embeddedness through their entrepreneurial activities. In so doing, we respond to calls for research that explores the contextual embeddedness of women's entrepreneurship, and contribute to shifting the focus towards the more silent feminine end of the entrepreneurial process. We consider the defiance of invisible displaced women entrepreneurs operating in the under-researched context of Jordan. Longitudinal, ethnographic investigation revealed the creation of a secret production network led by, and for, displaced women. This paper focuses on the five founders of this network, which they established to mobilize and manage the production of traditional crafts and, by so doing, to defy the stifling limitations imposed by their restrictive contractors, community and family members.

Tapping diverse experiences is recognised as important for knowledge creation. The authors examine how learning and knowledge creation are affected if a distinction between the extent and nature of employees' involvement, and differences in levels within these, is made. They offer propositions suggesting that the extent and nature of employees involvement differ in their relative contribution to different facets of knowledge creation, including shared understanding, know-why, knowledge creating behaviours and new product creativity. Finally, the authors discuss theoretical implications, future research directions and limitations of this research.

Tapping diverse experiences is recognised as important for knowledge creation. The authors examine how learning and knowledge creation are affected if a distinction between the extent and nature of employees' involvement, and differences in levels within these, is made. They offer propositions suggesting that the extent and nature of employees involvement differ in their relative contribution to different facets of knowledge creation, including shared understanding, know-why, knowledge creating behaviours and new product creativity. Finally, the authors discuss theoretical implications, future research directions and limitations of this research.

This study focuses on how the interplay between a firm's absorptive capacity (ACAP), and its technological and customer relationship capability contributes to its overall performance. Using structural equation modeling in a sample of 158 firms (316 questionnaires, two respondents per firm) from South Korea's semiconductor industry, we find that a firm's ACAP leads to better performance in terms of new product development, market performance and profitability when used in combination with the firm's capability to engage state of the art technologies in its new product development program (NPD) (technological capability) as well as cultivate strong customer relationships to gain customer insight in NPD (customer relationship capability). By highlighting the interactive nature of absorptive capacity's antecedents and how these relate to firms' performance, this study contributes to the understanding of the role of ACAP as a mechanism for translating external knowledge into tangible benefits in high-tech SMEs, thus leading to important theoretical and practical implications.

This article develops and tests absorptive capacity’s relationship with one of its important forerunners – systems thinking – which, although postulated as an important element, has received little empirical attention in the absorptive capacity literature. Our contribution lies in the introduction of unique pathways through which systems thinking influences absorptive capacity and how it affects various interrelated dimensions of high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises’ performance, by examining evidence from South Korea’s semiconductor industry.

Organisational knowledge creation (OKC) is a complex and relatively uncharted path, especially in terms of the dynamic journey that new knowledge makes from its generation to crystallisation. This journey is crucial for managers to understand in order to allocate limited resources effectively. In this paper, we employ a qualitative approach and explore this journey as it unfolds during the early phases of the new product development process in 10 cases of discontinuous innovation. We develop a knowledge-conceptualisation framework which not only illustrates the OKC journey as it progresses along a number of empirically derived stages and how these overlap with one another, but also how individual and teams contribute to or interact along these stages to create new knowledge. We thus provide a solid basis for the much-needed theoretical advances in knowledge creation and present specific benchmarks required for managers to facilitate the knowledge-creation process within their organisations.

Organizational knowledge creation, as reflected in new product/service development, is a vital process for firms to master. Critical to the development of new products/services is the management of the front‐end phase, which crucially determines the eventual fate of a new product/service idea. However, studies on how knowledge is created at the front‐end of the new product development process are rare. This empirical paper addresses this gap by focusing on knowledge conceptualization – where new knowledge from its generation is crystallized into a concrete and explicit form. Employing a qualitative methodology, the paper examines ten discontinuous projects and develops a front‐end knowledge conceptualization framework. The framework consists of the identified knowledge conceptualization stages and illuminates the pattern of overlaps, outcomes, contributors, knowledge, interactions and volatility across each stage. Our main contribution is a knowledge‐based appreciation of the dynamic and interactive nature of the new product/service development's front‐end phase in the context of discontinuous innovations, and thence the paper provides clear managerial learning points for the effective management of this phase.

Project management is widely regarded as a knowledge-based process. Critical to this process is the initial project-conceptualisation phase, especially in the context of technological innovations, but which has received little attention in the literature. Specifically, hardly any study has examined how project activities overlap, how project roles evolve, what skills are required and how much time is spent across different knowledge-based project-conceptualisation stages, or sets of activities. We explore these patterns and their knowledge-based explanations through a cross-case analysis of four technological innovations. Our contribution is a knowledge-based project-conceptualisation framework that deepens the appreciation of the evolving nature of the critical project management aspects across the highly uncertain project-conceptualisation phase. We then offer practical steps for project managers to effectively manage this project management phase.

Higher-level knowledge is regarded as the source from which managerial, as well as creative, competencies originate. However, how higher-level knowledge is translated into different levels of these competencies remains to be analysed in depth. In this paper, we examine the specific mindset and cognitive actions, through which higher-level knowledge is translated into managerial or creative competencies and the different levels within these competencies. Our aim is to deepen our understanding of how knowledge and competencies are interlinked. Our contribution is to show how managerial and creative competencies at the cognitive level are orthogonal to each other and specify the level at which these competencies are translated into. Finally, we offer theoretical and managerial implications and directions for future research.