Prof. Miralles’ talk focused on the new capabilities that SME’s have to develop to face the challenge of innovation. Using some examples like Azula (http://azulalg.com) and eKutir (http://www.ekutirsb.com), Prof. Miralles introduced how SME can become more competitive by innovating in their business models.

The core idea of his talk was that some of the capabilities that SMEs need to innovate are not easy to acquire and develop. Specifically, as part of their organizational culture, some SME are not ready to change their cultural settings and find restrictions to competitiveness.

To solve these limitations, Prof. Miralles suggested to adhere to an open innovation perspective. In this vein, SMEs must find partners among their customers and suppliers to be able to develop new capabilities. Also, SMEs must become an agent of their close innovation ecosystem and interact with innovation agencies like AVI (Agència Valenciana de la Innovació, http://innoavi.es) or ACC1Ó (http://www.accio.gencat.cat/ca/inici).

You can find the press notes here and here

The abstract of the paper articulates:

Innovation capacity is on the focus of policy makers in emerging economies. Although some studies show the antecedents of innovation capacity for developed economies and high technological industries, scant research outcomes exist for different settings. This study tries to shed some light on the drivers of innovation capacity for low technological companies in emerging economies. Using the absorptive capacity as a driver of technological and non-technological innovation capacity, this study proposes a SEM model to contribute to the literature of innovation capacity including technological and non-technological innovation, and the relationship between them, in low-techonology industries in an emerging economy. A sample of 706 manufacturing companies from Peru is used. The academic contribution of this study states that absorptive capacity favors technological and non-technological innovation capacity and that non-technological innovation affects technological one. Accordingly, managerial contribution suggests improving absorptive capacity levels to internal R&D activities but also to organizational and marketing innovation activities.

Click here to access to the full version of the paper

El trabajo de investigación será supervisado por el Prof. Francesc Miralles, Director de Innova Institute, y estará en coordinación con Josep M. Pique, Presidente ejecutivo de La Salle Technova Barcelona, en el marco de las actividades de Open Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship de La Salle Technova Barcelona.

Prof. Perin es doctor en Administración, master en informática y en Marketing por la Universidad Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, graduado en Informática por la Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina y en Administración por la Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado. Catedrático de la Escola de Negócios de la Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, su investigación se centra en orientaciones estratégicas de Marketing, gestión de la innovación, relaciones universidad-industria, y transferencia de tecnología.

Surf looks cool and easy to do when you sit on the beach and observe the advanced ones. They literally glide over and through beautiful blue giants and rarely lose control. But whoever tried wave surfing knows how tough it is even to keep the balance on the board. And the only way to proficiency is just to keep on doing it.

Somehow similar to the NIR-VANA project (Networking Innovation Room for Value Added Networking Alliances) co- creation and implementation process.

Learn more here

Have a look in twitter to: Denisa Gibovic and NIR-VANA

TIM & IOM Paper Development Workshop on Digital Innovation is ponsored by the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the Academy of Management, Innovation: Organization and Management (IOM) journal, and LaSalle URL.

This workshop offers an opportunity for scholars to develop their ongoing work in a friendly and collegial environment. The call for papers is open

You can find full information on the call here

Confirmed mentors include Markus Perkmann (Imperial College London); Nelson Phillips (Imperial College London), Marcel Bogers (University of Copenhagen); Elena Novelli (Cass Business School); Hans Berends (VU Amsterdam); Lars Fredriksen (Aarhus University); Philipp Tuertscher (VU Amsterdam); Llewellyn Thomas (LaSalle URL).

“Social media receives growing interest from sports executives. Yet, very little is known about how to make use of such user-generated, unstructured data. By exploring tweets generated during Turkish Airlines Euroleague’s Final Four event, which broadcasted the four tournaments of championship among four finalist teams, we studied how fans respond to gains and losses, and how engaged they were during games through the course of the event. We found that favorable reactions were received when teams won, but the magnitude of unfavorable reaction was larger when teams lost. When it came to the organizer rather than the teams, the organizer of the event received most of the positive feedbacks. We also found that main source of tweets was smartphones while tablets were not among real time feedback devices”.

You can find more details and information about the specialized conference on Big Data and Managing in a Digital Economy of the Academy of Management here.

The picture is from a tweet of from Professor Christopher Tucci, Professor at EPFL College of Management of Technology, who attended Burçin´s session. What a nice surprise!

The paper title is “When do early adopters share or scare? A conceptual model” and its authors are Carla Riverola, Roland Ortt, Francesc Miralles and Ozgur Dedehayir.

Abstract: An important mechanism of diffusion of an innovation (new product or process), is the communication about that innovation by earlier adopters to subsequent groups of customers. In some cases, these earlier adopters are opinion leaders in their respective population and hence share the idea of the innovation and thereby stimulate other potential customers to adopt it. Conversely, these earlier adopters sometimes scare away subsequent groups of customers. The article explores how innovators and early adopters can scare away subsequent customers. To explore the phenomenon of “share or scare” we based our theoretical perspective in two subdomains of sociology: diffusion of innovations and communication research. We analysed three cases illustrating “share or scare”, and by following an iterative process between the literature and the ideas emerging from the cases we proposed a conceptual model with the intervening elements governing this phenomenon. Our model forms a basis for further, more empirically-based, research.

Marcela Garza, PhD candidate, shared the advances in her dissertation with working title: “An analysis of sport event sponsorship activation in the digital environment: a case study approach”. This dissertation is supervised by Chris Kennett, PhD.

The following lines summarizes Marcela´s work:

Over the years, sports events have been adopting new technologies to add value to their commercial partners and together bring their audience and customers better experiences when participating in these events. The purpose of this study is to find how sport event organizers and sponsors can take advantage of digital technologies to maximize the value of their sponsorship deals.

A case study strategy is proposed to analyze digital activations within sponsorship deals’ life-cycle in sport events aiming to contribute with sports organizations and sponsors to be more effective when managing activations in a digital context, due to the need of being more responsive because of continuous technological changes, also to contribute to relevant areas of theory like sponsorship theory in sports marketing and stakeholder theory in digital context.

Omar Maluk: “Beyond the entrepreneurial intentions. Does decision help for university graduates?”

Marcela Garza: “An analysis of sport event sponsorship activation in the digital environment: a case study approach”.

And Josep M. Piqué: “How do Ecosystems of Innovation evolve?

Thus, today, we share Omar Maluk´s dissertation project. The title of his research work is “Beyond the entrepreneurial intentions. Does decision help for university graduates?”. This thesis is supervised by Francesc Miralles, PhD.

Motivation

The motivation of the study is introduced by asking and discussing: Why is entrepreneurial behavior interesting to study upon?

The factors that explain how individuals evolve towards becoming an entrepreneur have been of interest in many different works. These factors can help to design more efficient entrepreneurial promotion policies and consequently to obtain a better return from these policies.

The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been used to understand better those factors that help to explain entrepreneurial behavior. For a sake of feasibility, most of these studies use entrepreneurial intention as a dependent variable. Entrepreneurial intention has been found to be a good proxy of entrepreneurial behavior. However, the evolution of an individual from some level of entrepreneurial intention to an actual entrepreneurial behavior requires some additional light in this research area.

Problem Statement

Moreover, the problem statement that includes the contribution area says: This work proposes to progress in this path and suggests to use a new dependent variable, decision of entrepreneurial behavior, that has been defined as an evolution from the entrepreneurial intention towards the actual entrepreneurial behavior. What this work suggests is that the level of entrepreneurial decision should be a better proxy towards entrepreneurial behavior than the level of entrepreneurial intention.

The entrepreneurial decision is introduced taking as a reference the behavioral work of the planned behavior model (TPB) and some of the researchers that have used them. Also, some psychological theories provide support to study this variable as a proxy of entrepreneurial behavior.

By adapting some previous research instruments to include the new dependent variable, a convenience sample of graduate students was used to analyze the research model. With this sample, this research allowed to understand if the new variable could make sense in a TPB model.

Focus of the work

The cited document gathers the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) by Ajzen (1991), and induces to think that by achieving a higher degree of explanation about entrepreneurial intention, a higher proportion of entrepreneurial action and self-employment is explained.

Therefore, this study aims to explain the variables and factors that are related to the business graduated students’ entrepreneurial intentions, using Liñán’s (2008) model, and (Maluk O & Maluk S, ,2016) exploratory analysis, tries to validate the reliability of the constructs and quantify the relationship of its’ regressions.

Results overview

The relevance is academic and business, and is taking an academic step not yet done by delivering a measuring instrument to know the moment when the entrepreneur made his or her final decision to start an entrepreneurial venture.

The use is to measure the decision and also that this work serves to continue research into entrepreneurial action extending the model to the final behavior.

The results obtained show that the entrepreneurial intention of the graduates persists during their professional career, but that the decision to be an entrepreneur is highly correlated with this, although it is a different variable that reveals a certain degree of will to achieve its objective. Through the SEM model it was determined that the entrepreneurial intention has a positive effect on the decision to be an entrepreneur

Implications for academia and industry

Finally, the academic implications of this work allow to understand better the evolution towards the entrepreneurial behavior. Although intention has been proposed as a good proxy of this behavior, our work allows to refine the path to the actual behavior of entrepreneurship by those students that have been involved in entrepreneurial training.

The practical implications of this work, assure that with the measurement of the variable decision to be entrepreneur in a university graduated, it is possible to get better insights on their entrepreneurial behavior then using entrepreneurial intention.

The paper “Digital affordances, spatial affordances, and the genesis of entrepreneurial ecosystems” has been published in the Strategic and Entrepreneurial Journal.

The Research Summary enunciates: Entrepreneurial ecosystems command increasing attention from policy makers, academics, and practitioners, yet the phenomenon itself remains under-theorized. Specifically, the conceptual similarities and differences of entrepreneurial ecosystems relative to, for instance, clusters, “knowledge clusters,” regional systems of innovation, and “innovative milieus” remain unclear. Drawing on research on industrial districts and agglomerations, clusters, and systems of innovation, we suggest that entrepreneurial ecosystems differ from traditional clusters by their emphasis on the exploitation of digital affordances; by their organization around entrepreneurial opportunity discovery and pursuit; by their emphasis on business model innovation; by voluntary horizontal knowledge spillovers; and by cluster-external locus of entrepreneurial opportunities. We highlight how these distinctive characteristics set entrepreneurial ecosystems apart from other cluster types, propose a structural model of entrepreneurial ecosystems, summarize the articles in this special issue, and suggest promising avenues for future research.

And the Managerial Summary says: Entrepreneurial ecosystems command increasing attention from policy makers, academics, and practitioners. We suggest that entrepreneurial ecosystems differ from traditional clusters by their emphasis on the exploitation of digital affordances; by their organization around entrepreneurial opportunity discovery and pursuit; by their emphasis on business model innovation; by voluntary horizontal knowledge spillovers; and by cluster-external locus of entrepreneurial opportunities. We highlight how these distinctive characteristics set entrepreneurial ecosystems apart from regional cluster phenomena discussed in received economic geography and innovation literatures. We suggest policy makers need to adopt novel approaches to stimulate entrepreneurial ecosystems that differ from those in place to develop industrial clusters or support already established small and medium-sized companies.