Search results for " firm"
showing 10 items of 291 documents
Digital Servitization: Strategies for Handling Customization and Customer Interaction
2021
This conceptual chapter utilizes extant servitization and digitalization theorization and discusses the impact of digital servitization on customization/standardization and customer interaction. The study argues that the transformation toward digital servitization is complex and goes far beyond the technological dimension. The study contributes to the digital servitization literature by demonstrating that industrial services shift from customized and co-created to mainly standardized-provided and informating when they are digitalized. These insights can assist managers of servitized manufacturing firms who wish to utilize digital technologies in their service provision.
Entrepreneurship Training and Self-Employment among University Graduates
2012
In economies characterized by low labor demand and high rates of youth unemployment, entrepreneurship training has the potential to enable youth to gain skills and create their own jobs. This paper presents experimental evidence on a new entrepreneurship track that provides business training and personalized coaching to university students in Tunisia. Undergraduates in the final year of licence appliquee were given the opportunity to graduate with a business plan instead of following the standard curriculum. This paper relies on randomized assignment of the entrepreneurship track to identify impacts on labor market outcomes one year after graduation. The analysis finds that the entrepreneur…
Fine slicing of the value chain and offshoring of essential activities: empirical evidence from European multinationals
2014
The offshoring of more advanced activities is increasing and a debate about the limits of offshoring has emerged. Companies are fine-slicing their value chains, and moving beyond the offshoring of peripheral and non-core activities to the offshoring of advanced and essential activities that are closer to their core (e.g. research, design and product development). The challenge is to understand the limits of offshoring and the most appropriate modes of offshoring. The purpose of this paper is to analyze what activities are offshorable and how best to govern offshored activities. We argue that companies are redefining their core activities and in this process, some essential activities previo…
A dynamic panel study on digitalization and firm's agility: What drives agility in advanced economies 2009–2018
2021
Abstract Firm agility today is not a factor of competitiveness or success but a survival instrument on the market. Disruptive innovations and technological advancement, together with digitalization, change the role of firm agility. We show that the link between the national/industry level of digitalization and firm agility is statistically robust and essential. We study the link on data from 2009 to 2018 in fifteen EU advanced economies using dynamic panel data modeling. The digitalization impact level differs across firms by ownership type (family to non-family firms). Agility in family firms is strongly influenced by the national/industry level of digitization and investments in intangibl…
STUDY ON THE TUNNEL PASTEURIZER ON TABLE OLIVES PROCESSING
2015
The application of heat treatment is particularly important in maintaining the organoleptic characteristics of fermented agro-food products, which potential consumers perceive as reflecting the quality of these foodstuffs. However, heat treatments can be cause of deterioration of many quality parameters of agro-food products, including texture, intended as the consistency of the pulp. In this study 'Nocellara del Belice' table olives produced in 2010 and packaged in glass jars were subjected to pasteurization at industrial scale using a tunnel pasteurizer with a core temperature of 75°C for 8 min. The aim of the study was to mechanically evaluate the pulp texture evolution that contributes …
Unbundling technology adoption and tfp at the firm level. Do intangibles matter?
2012
We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We distinguish between total factor productivity (tfp) and technology adoption, whereas standard estimations consider only a notion of productivity that conflates the two effects. Although we are unable to address simultaneity, we allow for the existence of multiple technologies within sectors through a mixture model approach. We find that intangible assets have nonnegligible effects that both push firms toward better technologies (technology adoption effects) and allow for more efficient exploitation of a given technology (tfp effects).
Complementarities in innovation strategy: do intangibles play a role in enhancing firm performance?
2017
This article assesses the role of investments in intangible capital and their potential complementarities as a way to improve firm productivity. We focus on the three intangible resources that, according to the literature, have the greatest strategic importance: research and development (R & D), advertising, and human capital. To test our hypotheses, we use a large sample of Spanish manufacturing firms and consider estimates of total factor productivity through a generalized method of moments approach. Our results show evidence of complementarities between R & D and advertising investments and between advertising and human capital. However, they are not conclusive in the case of R & D and h…
Founding-family-controlled firms, intergenerational succession, and firm value
2022
Using a unique, hand-collected data sample and panel-data econometric techniques, we analyse the impact of founding-family control and intergenerational succession on the value of Chilean listed companies. After controlling for firm- and ownership-specific characteristics, we find an inverse U-shaped relationship between a founding family’s degree of ownership and firm value. Hence, family ownership at first increases firm value. However, when family ownership exceeds a threshold of about 38 percent of outstanding shares, the family takes advantage of its power in the firm and extracts wealth from minority shareholders. Further, if the founder of the company is the CEO or chairman of the bo…
Do firms share the same functional form of their growth rate distribution? A statistical test
2014
We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we cannot rejected them at the subsector level, indicating that homogenous panels of firms could be described by a common functional form of growth rate distribution.
An international cohort comparison of size effects on job growth
2015
The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers’ attention, however, it has recently been recognized that conclusions about size were confounded with the effect of age. We probe the role of size, controlling for age, by comparing the cohorts of firms born in 1998 over their first decade of life, using variation across half a dozen northern European countries Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the UK to pin down size effects. We find that a very small proportion of the smallest firms play a crucial role in accounting for cross-country differences in job growth. A closer analysis reveals that the initial size distribution and surviv…