Abhijit Sengupta

Purpose. We examine the impact of innovation effort on exports of resource constrained emerging market firms (EMFs), and boundary conditions imposed by complementary tangible and intangible resources on this relationship, using the lens of the Knowledge Based View (KBV).

Design/methodology/approach. Analysis is based on annualized data from 19,057 Indian firms over the period of 2009-2017, controlling for endogeneity and selection bias (using Heckman correction), firm-level controls, year and sectoral fixed effects, within robust Tobit and OLS regressions. Export intensity and R&D intensity are our key dependent and independent variables, respectively.

Findings. The baseline impact of innovation effort on exports is found to be a concave inverted U-shape, exhibiting decreasing returns. Availability of complementary resources significantly impacts the nature of this relationship by weakening it for more resource constrained firms. Faced with relatively greater scale-related constraints, the impact of innovation effort on exports disappears. Greater process-related constraints weaken the relationship as well.

Originality. Theoretically, these findings shed light on a nuanced relationship between a firm's search for knowledge assets and access to foreign markets within resource constrained emerging market contexts. The limitations in the use and applicability of the KBV for EMFs' internationalization success is highlighted, with suggested directions of future research.

The private sector provision of inclusive product/service innovations to “base of the pyramid” (BoP) communities poses varied challenges to different private sector actors such as multinationals, domestic firms, and non-corporates. There is uncertainty regarding the viability of the BoP approach, that inclusive product innovation creation and diffusion can create “mutual value” by improving the lives of BoP communities, while also generating profit for innovators. Our paper contributes to this ongoing debate by highlighting the conditions under which introduction of inclusive innovations can create mutual value in BoP contexts. A framework mapping out the challenges (or chasms) encountered during the design, production, marketing, adoption, and diffusion phases of the inclusive innovation (DePMAD framework) is developed. It is then validated using 57 published case studies of inclusive product innovations, of which only 44 % of the innovations were still catering to the BoP after six years. QCA and univariate analysis show alternative paths and highlight the key role of partnerships for survival of inclusive innovations in the market. Not all chasms are equally important in explaining survival patterns, with the design and adoption chasms being most critical. Innovations introduced by non-corporate entities survive more often than those by corporate entities.

The paper investigates the potential impact of entrepreneurial motivation, entrepreneurial intention and academic researchers’ perceptions of departmental and university support on academic entrepreneurial engagement in a context of weak or missing institutional support. A conceptual model linking motivation, intention and perceptions to entrepreneurial engagement is developed and tested on primary data collected from academic researchers in Nigeria. We find that while entrepreneurial motivation strongly influences entrepreneurial intentions of researchers, the link between intention and engagement is weaker. Perceptions of departmental entrepreneurial orientation positively mediates a significant proportion of the latter link. In contrast, perceptions about the university’s supportive framework and facilities play a relatively weaker role. Subsequently, the implications of these findings on policies and incentives for entrepreneurial academics and universities in weak institutional settings are explored.

This paper examines how universities’ knowledge exchange (KE) profiles evolve in relation to changes in the composition of their funding sources. Using the dynamic capabilities framework as a conceptual lens, we examine how changes in the share of KE versus research income in a university’s financial portfolio are related to the mix of KE channels it uses and of types of stakeholders it engages with, that is, its KE profile. Relying on an 8-year panel of 110 UK-based universities we show that, universities whose share of KE income is higher relative to others, are associated with a higher degree specialization in both KE channels and stakeholder types. Conversely, universities whose share of blue-sky research income is higher relative to others, are associated with greater diversification in both. Some of these linkages are negatively moderated by higher levels of tangible and intangible resources: universities with greater intangible resources are less responsive to variations in research and KE income shares on KE channel diversity; while universities with higher tangible resources are less responsive to variations in research income share on KE stakeholder diversity.

In a context of increasing managerialization of higher education and growing importance of the so-called ‘third mission’, universities increasingly seek to align their knowledge exchange (KE) profiles—i.e., the KE channels they use and the stakeholders with which they interact—to their institutional objectives. Using the lens of management control systems theory, we mapped changes in KE profiles to different management interventions. Building on 12 case studies of UK universities and combining content analysis and qualitative comparative analysis, we found that a) universities that had diversified their KE profiles had implemented belief and interactive control system interventions to encourage all staff members to exploit a wide range of KE opportunities; b) universities that had increased their KE specialization had implemented boundary and diagnostic control system interventions targeted at staff members performing specific KE activities; and c) universities that had reoriented their KE profiles had used a mix of interventions.

Emerging and developing countries are characterized by severe information asymmetries in knowledge markets, which when combined with other institutional weaknesses, leads to very low levels of interactions between universities and industry. Using data from a sample of Indian universities, we identify university specific publicly available organizational characteristics which, acting as " signals " , may reduce the information asymmetry problem and catalyze knowledge exchange (KE) partnerships. We find that strength of passive signals such as university ownership structure and reputation, and active ones such as volume of patents filed, impacts a university's KE performance positively. The impact of each signal is very KE channel specific, and the magnitude of this impact is large. We also find that signal strength negatively moderates the direct linkage between research and KE, implying that signaling is more relevant for universities where there is greater separation of its research outputs and KE performance.

A large number of modern consumer focussed industries are characterised by fast paced technology driven innovations - smart phones and other computing devices, software, home audio and video technologies, automobiles, pharmaceuticals etc. being a few notable examples. Such industries are research driven and are characterised by their unique technological ecosystems. Competition within such industries is not limited to pricing and marketing strategies alone, but is driven by R&D as well, whereby new features, new variants and upgraded technology is c onstantly being introduced to attract customers (Frambach, 1993). Consequently, firms often tend to use the existing intellectual property (IP) framework within their industries as a standard tool against rivals - both for defensive and offensive purposes (Litchenber, 2002).

This paper develops novel behavioural models of open innovation (OI) for competitive markets and uses them to compare the impact of two types of OI frameworks – open source (OS) and patent-licensing (PL). The dynamic consequences of OI, for both OS and PL, are studied using a complex adaptive systems approach. We examine how profits, technology levels, R&D investment, technology adoption and market structure evolve under each and are impacted by underlying market characteristics. While both OS and PL are found to be equivalent in technology outcomes, OS comes with additional advantages to participating firms. Firms in the OS framework earn higher profit and are more efficient with their R&D investments. The industry is less concentrated under OS than under PL, except when market size is very large. In both frameworks, consumer preference for new product adoption has a significant impact. When consumers adopt newly introduced products relatively quickly, market concentration is the higher and overall rate of technological progress slower. These results contribute towards a deeper theoretical understanding of OI, opening new avenues for future research.

High penetration of distributed technologies would call for a different way to manage electricity reliability for semi-independent households. One option could be to allow customers to withdraw power from the grid when their home system fails. This behavior, however, could constitute an existential threat for utilities: if consumers use the network less, and continue to pay according to their usage, the utility might be unable to recover its costs. This paper investigates whether the creation of a reliability insurance market would help to deal with these concerns. We propose a business model where utilities offer insurance to semi-independent, yet risk averse households, against the prospect of a blackout, when a pay as you go system is no longer available. With the use of an Agent Based Model, we test if contracts from this market can converge into a theoretical optimal contract where bounded perception of risks and losses impact the price of insurance and potential revenues of utilities. We find that such a market could exist as consumers efficiently transfer all or a portion of their risk to the utility, based on their willingness to pay and risk profiles, which allows them to avoid blackouts at the margin.

This paper explores the impact of regional and firm level heterogeneity on MNE performance from an operational perspective. We find that the underlying economic growth of a region and the MNE’s overall product diversity significantly impact returns from downstream operations in specific regions. Based on a 10 year panel dataset of 1249 US based MNEs, results show that the incremental impact of the degree and speed of operations within a given region, is greater for regions exhibiting faster economic growth than for slower growing ones. For slower growing regions only, product diversity of the MNE becomes important and negatively moderates the link between operations and performance. Previous literature has shown that MNEs largely follow a regional strategy and has ignored the role of inter-regional differences, and how firm level characteristics interact with region specific ones. Once inter-regional heterogeneity is introduced, a more complex picture of the internationalization performance link emerges than has been addressed previously, with significant implications for the theory and practise of internationalization.