1,721,077 research outputs found
Establishing Entrepreneurship Education with a Bottom-up Approach: insights from a longitudinal case study.
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Knowledge Intensity and Knowledge Bases in Internationalization Patterns of SMEs in the Food Sector.
No full textInternationalization patterns among speciality food companies: some Italian case study evidence
No full textPurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of internationalization patterns among speciality food small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), investigating dimensions that may have a bearing on such patterns, using a series of case studies. In particular the investigation seeks to gain new insights about differences among companies in their internationalization patterns. These differences are examined in a framework which tries to relate three company‐level dimensions (market, technology and space) to internationalization patterns. The three dimensions are derived from the constructs developed by Storper and Salais, and Straete.Design/methodology/approachTwo research questions (RQs) are formulated: Is there a relationship between the internationalization pace of speciality food SMEs and their technology, market, and space dimensions? Is there a relationship between the internationalization modes of speciality food SMEs and their technology, market, and space dimensions? A qualitative approach was adopted and cases from a broad dataset were used. The present research is an explorative research: it is intended to provide insights from which hypotheses might be developed.FindingsThis paper provides an empirical and conceptual contribution to the food internationalization debate. On the empirical side, it provides new evidence on speciality food internationalization, showing a rather diversified set of internationalization patterns, both in terms of pace and modes. On the conceptual side, it shows that the three dimensions of technology, market and space may help to enrich the comprehension of internationalization phenomena. While data collected seem not to provide insights from which hypotheses might be developed concerning RQ1, they seem on the contrary to provide useful insights concerning RQ2.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations of the research generally relate to the use of a small sample. Future research should strive to obtain larger samples, develop a set of relevant finer‐grained hypotheses and test those using appropriate statistical techniquesPractical implicationsIdentifying the impact that the three dimensions might have on internationalization patterns and vice versa may help to focus on these specific elements when companies make their internationalization decisions. On the same line, public policy agencies could benefit from these first results for better clustering companies targeting their internationalization supporting initiatives.Originality/valueThe findings add to the limited body of knowledge on the key influences on internationalization patterns within the food sector.</jats:sec
Learning by failing: What we can learn from un-successful entrepreneurship education.
No full textThis paper aims to understand why some Entrepreneurship Education (EE) initiatives in secondary schools are ineffective. Specifically, the goal of this paper is to identify mistakes, which could have been responsible for the failures and to derive some useful lessons from them. From a theoretical perspective, it reviews entrepreneurship literature in order to examine the main five constitutive elements of EE in secondary schools: what should the goals of EE be, who should attend EE, who should teach it, what should be taught and how it should be taught. From an empirical perspective, it provides descriptions of the unsuccessful EE initiatives under investigation and discusses failure by collecting the opinions of stakeholders (teachers, principals and students) involved
A knowledge management approach to organization competitive advantage: evidences from the food sector
No full textThis paper uses a comparative case study approach to investigate how two small Italian food producers manage their knowledge. The first company under consideration is mainly focused on marketing, while the second on the technology knowledge domain. This paper enriches the existing literature by documenting examples of how companies can successfully manage organizational knowledge on the basis of their relative knowledge domain. This research claims that not only knowledge domain but also innovation behavior seem to be the contingencies that mostly impact on knowledge management system features. In fact, the different combinations of the two variables have deeply different requirements in terms of knowledge management
Leveraging on knowledge: Knowledge management in a cluster of Italian small and medium enterprises.
No full textKnowledge management for gaining a sustainable competitive advantage: evidences from the Italian food sector
No full textInnovation and SMEs: misaligned perspectives and goals among entrepreneurs, academics and policy makers
No full textThe present research stems from the results of a survey on the innovativeness of a sample of Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). These results, largely based on self-reported data by entrepreneurs or managers, showed that the considered SMEs were important developers of radical innovations in contrast with data published by local institutions. This misalignment between the entrepreneurs’ opinions and the official data, that are typically defined and selected by academics and policy makers, motivated a new
research aimed at analyzing the intimate reasons for it. The research is rooted in the social construction of innovation perspective and is based on interviews with the three main innovation stakeholders, identified as: entrepreneurs, academics, and policy makers. The results show the existence of deeply different perspectives concerning innovation, starting from its definition, to the effective policies to promote
it, to the role of intermediary institutions and so on. Sometimes, these views show diverging goals among the stakeholders and, consequently, contrasting opinions on effective supporting policies. These results can partly explain the misalignment between the survey’s output and ‘‘institutional’’ data and, maybe, also the failure of many supporting initiatives that are largely documented by our
survey and also by literature. The aim of the paper is to investigate the different perspectives on innovation held by the considered stakeholders, highlighting the points of major contrast together with similarities in order to provide new insights into the problem
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