Search results for "Information Systems"
showing 10 items of 1926 documents
Board of director attributes: effects on financial performance in SMEs
2021
This paper analyses the relationship between board of director (BoD) attributes and financial performance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Although SMEs are the backbone of world economies, most studies on this relationship focused on large companies and did not consider many typical or recommended processes and activities carried out by SME BoDs. We monitored a set of variables related to BoD attributes such as composition, characteristics, structure and processes for 184 Italian SMEs along with their financials over a 4-year period (2014–2017). We controlled for enterprise-specific characteristics such as annual sales growth, assets value, sales turnover, leverage, com pany s…
Green entrepreneurship and SME performance: the moderating effect of firm age
2021
AbstractGreen entrepreneurship has been increasing with growing attention to environment protection by a variety of stakeholders. Green innovation, as the essence of green entrepreneurship, has attracted a broad range of scholarly attention with yet inconclusive findings regarding its effect on firm performance. According to our analyses of 1667 firms listed on SME board and GEM in China during the period from 2010 to 2019, we find interesting results regarding the type of green innovation involved and the moderating effect of firm age on the link between green innovation and SME performance. More precisely, we find green utility-model innovation positively influences firm performance for S…
When intentions turn into action: pathways to successful firm performance
2021
Entrepreneurship brings wealth to nations and contributes to their economic growth. People can take many paths to become entrepreneurs. Some join the family business, whilst others are born entrepreneurs, letting their innate intuition lead them into firm creation. For many, though, being able to learn and acquire the right skills is critical for a successful career as an entrepreneur. Like other human capital factors, entrepreneurial skills can be acquired. In today’s fast-changing society, it is of utmost importance for entrepreneurs not only to gain these skills but also to be surrounded by a supportive environment that will (1) guide them in the creation of their business idea and (2) h…
Uso de indicadores bibliométricos para el análisis de temas emergentes y su evolución: spin-offs como caso de estudio
2018
[ES] Las spin-offs constituyen una de las áreas de investigación más atractivas, ya que están asociadas con fenómenos como el emprendimiento, la innovación y la transferencia del conocimiento. El presente estudio muestra que la selección y el uso de indicadores bibliométricos permite identificar y caracterizar el desarrollo y la difusión de temas de investigación emergentes como el analizado. Los principales aspectos observados en relación con el desarrollo de la investigación sobre las spin-offs son que se produce un auge en el número de publicaciones después de un largo período de latencia y la marcada naturaleza multidisciplinar del área. El presente enfoque ha analizado la evolución de …
CEO gender and SMEs innovativeness: evidence for Spanish businesses
2021
AbstractThis paper analyses the role of gender of the chief executive officer (CEO) on the propensity to introduce innovations using a sample of 1405 Spanish small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We examine whether there are significant differences between female- and male-led businesses in terms of their propensity to innovate, and whether these differences may be explained by factors related to the attributes of the CEO concerning risk tolerance, self-confidence, education level and cooperative behaviour. In particular, this study tests if the linkages between these managerial attributes and the propensity to innovate are influenced by the gender of the CEO. Using a multivariate pro…
Does the ideal entrepreneurial team exist?
2021
Up until now, studies on entrepreneurs and their relationship to business performance have focused primarily on analyzing the entrepreneur as an individual. While studies have been conducted on the entrepreneurial team, their focus has centered on team size and degree of diversity - cultural, age, gender - leaving a gap in the analysis of the effect of a team’s competencies on the outcome of the ventures. This research aims to help fill this gap by using the psychometric instrument DISC. This research analyzes entrepreneurship by opportunity, evaluating the performance of 109 Colombian companies and the composition of their entrepreneurial teams. The results obtained provide the basis for b…
Applications of alignment-free methods in epigenomics
2013
Epigenetic mechanisms play an important role in the regulation of cell type-specific gene activities, yet how epigenetic patterns are established and maintained remains poorly understood. Recent studies have supported a role of DNA sequences in recruitment of epigenetic regulators. Alignment-free methods have been applied to identify distinct sequence features that are associated with epigenetic patterns and to predict epigenomic profiles. Here, we review recent advances in such applications, including the methods to map DNA sequence to feature space, sequence comparison and prediction models. Computational studies using these methods have provided important insights into the epigenetic reg…
Fair Kernel Learning
2017
New social and economic activities massively exploit big data and machine learning algorithms to do inference on people’s lives. Applications include automatic curricula evaluation, wage determination, and risk assessment for credits and loans. Recently, many governments and institutions have raised concerns about the lack of fairness, equity and ethics in machine learning to treat these problems. It has been shown that not including sensitive features that bias fairness, such as gender or race, is not enough to mitigate the discrimination when other related features are included. Instead, including fairness in the objective function has been shown to be more efficient.
Scad-elastic net and the estimation of individual tourism expenditure determinants
2014
This paper introduces the use of scad-elastic net in the assessment of the determinants of individual tourist spending. This technique approaches two main estimation-related issues of primary importance. So far studies of tourism literature have made a wide use of classic regressions, whose results might be affected by multicollinearity. In addition, because of the absence of robust economic theory on tourism behavior, regressor selection is often left to researcher's choice when not driven by non-optimal automatic criteria. Scad-elastic net is an OLS model that accounts for both these problems by including two types of parameters constraints, namely the smoothly clipped absolute deviation …
The Fourth ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Location-Based Recommendations, Geosocial Networks and Geoadvertising
2021
The amount of publicly available geo-referenced data has seen a dramatic increase over the last years. Many user activities generate data that are annotated with location and contextual information. Moreover, it has become easier to collect and combine rich and diverse location information. In the context of geoadvertising, the use of geosocial data for targeted marketing is receiving significant attention from a wide spectrum of companies and organizations. With the advent of smartphones and online social networks, a multi-billion dollar industry that utilizes geosocial data for advertising and marketing has emerged. Geotagged social-media posts, GPS traces, data from cellular antennas and…