Responsible I(m)ovation in Asia Pacific regions

Over the past 20 years, a debate has developed on the differences between innovation and imitation strategies as mechanisms by which businesses operating in the Asia Pacific region may gain a competitive advantage. The current research contributes to this debate from a different perspective by exploring some of the challenges and opportunities associated with the combination of both strategies into what has been defined as imovation. Imovators and imovations do not stand alone in business ecosystems. Rather, they should be embraced in the context of sustainability-related virtues and emerging capabilities, such as ethical behaviour, co-responsibility and positive social impact. Taking dynamic capabilities as a theoretical lens, this paper conducts an empirical investigation of responsible imovation in a sample of 180 enterprises operating in the Asia Pacific market. In particular, this research evaluates the relationship between dynamic capabilities and imovation capabilities using a logistic regression analysis whereby we correlate the three main features of imovation strategies: strategic alliances, strategic decision-making and product innovations. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to focus on responsible imovation in the Asia Pacific market from an empirical perspective. The research highlights the key organisational and individual actions with the potential both to preserve existing capabilities and to create and integrate new ones. Our findings highlight the importance of technology adoption for responsible imovation to become more effective and accessible to imovators in the Asia Pacific business ecosystem. We conclude that responsible imovations combined with product-level innovations and core dynamic capabilities pave the way towards more rapid growth and a more sustainable competitive advantage.

Measuring adoption of industry 4.0 technologies via international trade data: insights from European countries

The investigation of the adoption of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies and its implications, both at the macro and micro level, has attracted growing interest in the recent literature. Most studies have looked at the production and diffusion of related innovations and knowledge, but what do we know about the adoption of these technologies over time and across countries? In this paper, we look at three I4.0 technologies and present a new empirical perspective able to overcome the limitations of existing attempts at measuring their adoption, generally based on small-scale and country-specific studies. Our study provides a methodology that allows measuring adoption across countries for a relatively long time period. In so doing, we build on the well-established idea in the international economics literature that trade of capital goods captures technology diffusion, and so adoption across countries. We provide preliminary and comprehensive evidence on the adoption of these I4.0 technologies in Europe and set the premise for monitoring its evolution and implications on a large scale and over time.

Entrepreneurial Intention and Multidimensional Proverty

The authors intend to identify the level of entrepreneurial intention and multidimensional poverty of the population of a Spanish rural municipality; secondly, they want to know the impact of the factors that, according to the theory of planned behavior, determine the entrepreneurial intention; thirdly, they attempt to show the characteristics of the relationship between the entrepreneurial intention and multidimensional poverty; and, fourthly, and in light of previously generated knowledge, strategies, programs, projects, and/or actions that contribute to the reduction of multidimensional poverty will be proposed. This research provides social utility and is original to the extent that it remedies a weakness in the literature consulted: the deficit of studies that contemplate, from both the theoretical and empirical perspective, the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and multidimensional poverty.

Some Preliminary Considerations for the Legal-Economic Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility

This review article presents some preliminary considerations and describes the evolution of corporate social responsibility, which is necessary for an informed study of this “tool”. In that sense, the authors resort to a preliminary exploration of the conceptual framework of the legal-economic approach presenting social responsibility and the relationship that subsists with “property rights”, the relevance of “transaction costs”, among other aspects. They also explore the interrelation between social responsibility and its forms of legal exercise and its characterization in areas that involve linking it with workers, unions, and consumers. The aim is to highlight its importance and build a contribution where social responsibility will be studied from an analytical and empirical perspective. Thus, it is sought to conclude that the company considers implementing and complying with good corporate governance standards since they expand the shared vision of business management, effectively allocating resources to obtain the most significant benefits of establishing a corporate social responsibility regime.

Mining brand value propositions on Twitter: exploring the link between marketer-generated content and eWOM outcomes

Content marketing has become a mainstream channel for brands to engage the market with value propositions. Through content, brands control, instigate and co-create value with its target audience. However, the nature of value propositions embedded within the cycle of content co-creation and their impact on eWOM outcomes has received scant attention from an empirical perspective. In this paper, we propose a value proposition-based framework around content marketing using established business perspectives. We employ bidirectional Twitter data from brands and customers to unearth descriptive, diagnostic and predictive insights into value propositions. Using a sample of marketer- and user-generated data from 10 Coffee (n(MGC) = 290, n(UGC) = 8811) and Car brands (n(MGC) = 635, n(UGC) = 7035) in 2018, a taxonomy of value propositions based on the literature was proposed and validated. The results of our study identify (a) descriptive insights explaining differentiation of brand value propositions, (b) diagnostic insights relating to consumer sentiments in response to the value proposition mix and (c) predictive insights of models predicting brand-specific values’ influencing Like, Share, Comment and Positive/Negative valence. Our results show that an effective social media marketing strategy selectively uses elements of the marketing mix (i.e. 4 P’s) within value propositions to attract favourable eWOM outcomes.

Smithing Queer Empiricism: Engaging Ethnomethodology for a Queer Social Science

Is queer social science possible? Early queer theorists disparaged empiricism as a normalizing, modernist discourse. Nonetheless, LGBTQI+ social scientists have applied queer concepts in empirical projects. Rather than seek a queer method, we ask, Is there an empirical perspective that (ontologically) envisions social relations more queerly—attending to discursive and materialist productions of reality? Dorothy Smith’s work foregrounds people’s activities of engaging texts and satisfies Black queer studies’ and new materialisms’ critiques of early queer theory. Underutilized and often misread, especially its ethnomethodological sensibilities and its vision of actors as relational, practical actors, her work shows how my race is not mine, it is ours; your sexual orientation is not yours, it is ours; their gender is not theirs, it is ours. Smith offers an ontology without essence, grand theory, or normativity, facilitating a range of queer, interpretive projects—from the intersectional to the transnational to the embodied.