1,720,982 research outputs found
Introduction to the proceedings of the Piccola Impresa/Small Business 5th Workshop: “Beyond the crisis: what is the future for small businesses? Challenges, opportunities and lessons learned”
Full text linkIn this volume, we are pleased to present the proceedings of the 5th Workshop organised by the journal Piccola Impresa/Small Business in collaboration with the Association for the study of small enterprises (ASPI), the Research Center on Entrepreneurship and Small-medium firms (CRIMPI), the Italian Academy of Business Economics (AIDEA) and the European Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ECSB). The workshop title was “Beyond the crisis: what is the future for small businesses? Challenges, opportunities and lessons learned”, and it took place online on December 4-5, 2021.
The aim of the conference was to bring together scholars of entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprises, to discuss the emerging issues following the Covid-19 pandemic.
As we have highlighted in the call for papers of the workshop and a previous editorial published in the journal mentioned above (Pencarelli et al. 2021), the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the largest public health crisis in living memory, with serious—and still unpredictable—consequences for the global economy. Available data clearly shows that SMEs have particularly suffered from economic downturn: their inherent weaknesses have amplified and accelerated the effects of the crisis compared to larger firms (Cowling et al., 2020; OECD, 2020). Notably, in Italy, the Covid-19 outbreak has challenged SMEs’ survival after a decade of a slow and incomplete recovery (CERVED, 2020, 2021)
Serial crowdfunding in start-up development: a business network view
No full textPurpose
Even though the crowdfunding (CF) literature is rapidly reaching its maturity phase, the topic of serial CF (i.e. the participation in more than one CF campaign) is as much promising as still largely under explored. This study thus aims to offer a thorough view of the dynamic and complex processes characterizing the participation of the start-ups to more than one campaign adopting a business network perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
In line with an explorative research aim, a multiple case study analysis is performed by taking into consideration four start-ups engaged in more than one CF campaigns with different combinations of equity and non-equity CF, adopting the actor–resource–activity (ARA) model as theoretical framework.
Findings
Multiple CF campaigns are embedded in the overall changing startup’s network and are affected by the concurrent and overlapping startup’s development processes. From this standpoint, the adoption of the ARA model suggests to reconsider the “serial” dimension of multiple CF campaigns. These processes can be more or less “linear” as they could be affected by the combination of CF schemes and by the degree of alignment of actors, activities and resources, whose “assembly” can be facilitated by learning processes and impaired by unexpected circumstances.
Originality/value
This paper explores in depth the startup’s serial CF journey, building on recent studies calling for stronger analyses of the directions and outcomes of innovative funding trajectories pursued and implemented by new business ventures. From this standpoint, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to consider a complete spectrum of combinations between CF schemes within serial CF, thus allowing for a better understanding of the role of such a factor within a dynamic and contextual view, that is, that offered by the business network perspective. This paper also contributes to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing research on start-ups
Interorganizational R&D projects in clustering contexts: A resource interaction perspective
No full textInterorganizational relationships have been acknowledged as engines of innovation. Collaboration often takes the form of interorganizational projects (IOPs) concerned with R&D and innovation activities, and a context where R&D IOPs are implemented is high-tech clusters. Notwithstanding the attention on local innovation, there are limited insights into the features, functioning, and impact of cluster-promoted formal mechanisms. This study provides an understanding of how cluster firms participate in cluster-promoted R&D IOPs and the main effects of their involvement in the development of technological and organizational resources. A case-study methodology is adopted to analyze the development process of the Apulia Space Project, implemented in the Aerospace Technological Cluster of the Apulia Region (Italy). The Resource Interaction Approach and 4R model are the frameworks of reference. The study shows that the cluster-promoted IOP represents a valuable organizational resource itself and its effectiveness is increased if its "project identity" embodies a strong "shared cluster identity"
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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