Anne-Laure Le Nadant

Ce numéro propose des définitions et donnent des exemples pertinents du lien qui peut naître entre les espaces de coworking et le milieu entrepreneurial. Nous avons conçu ce numéro avant et pendant la pandémie. Le contexte a donc enrichi en partie son contenu.

Mot des rédacteurs invités : Les espaces de coworking, une forme nouvelle d’entrepreneuriat collectif ou socialisé ?. Un article de la revue Management international / International Management / Gestiòn Internacional (Les espaces de coworking, une forme nouvelle d’entrepreneuriat collectif ou socialisé ?) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

We study leveraged buyouts (LBOs) to understand how actual and potential organizational slack affect exploitative and exploratory innovation expenditures. LBO companies are characterized by limited actual and high potential organizational slack and, based on theories of organizational search, we predict that both exploitative and explorative innovation expenditures be higher in LBO companies than in non-LBOs. These differences also depend on the technology intensity of the sector in which the target firm operates. The empirical analysis of 882 LBO companies in the UK community innovation survey broadly supports this argument.

This paper investigates the mediating role of innovation in the relationship between franchisors’ entrepreneurial orientation and performance within franchise networks. Franchising is an entrepreneurial partnership between franchisors who have responsibility for developing the system, and franchisees who execute standardized practices and procedures set out by their franchisors whilst seeking to improve their unit performance through local adaptations. We employed a questionnaire survey to collect data from a sample of franchisors operating in France. Using path analysis, a sub-part of structural equation modelling, we provide evidence that franchisors’ entrepreneurial orientation is positively related to franchise network performance. In addition, we show that this relationship is mediated by innovation outputs. These relationships are moderated by the network’s experience in franchising, which suggests that being new is a liability for young networks. These relationships also depend on the type of innovation introduced—“front-office” versus “back-office” innovations. In particular, our results show that the positive relationship between front-office innovations and franchise network performance is negatively moderated by the franchising rate. Overall, these results suggest that franchisors should achieve a strategic alignment between entrepreneurial orientation and organisation structure in order to manage entrepreneurial tensions and enhance network performance. JEL classifications: L25, L26, O31

The aim of this paper is to analyse one paradox of creativity that involves balancing novelty and conformity. Using a social identity perspective, we differentiate between organizational and expertise identities to understand how different types of identities impact the creative process in terms of novelty generation as well as conformity in the context of franchising. Franchise systems are a specific organizational context in which tensions between different identities may arise and ideas are selected by multiple audiences. Furthermore, because franchising is based on standardization, franchisors need to find a balance between maintaining the uniformity of the system through conformity and enhancing new idea deployment in the network for the purpose of adaptation. We conduct a comparative case study analysis of 17 franchise systems based on 20 narrations. The findings from our qualitative empirical study show that identification plays a major role in the creative process. Social control, which may be exerted by manipulating the group identity, is an efficient lever to increase both the diffusion of an idea and its variation from existing standards, which leads to important managerial implications. Networks of individuals can promote both idea generation and a uniform diffusion of those ideas by enhancing organizational identity with a strong entrepreneurship orientation or expertise identity based on occupation‐specific knowledge acquired through experience.

This study sheds new light on the industry specialization of private equity (PE) firms as a source of buy-outs’ performance and on the conditions under which these firms can add value to the buy-outs in which they invest. Advantages to specialization are based on specific resources and capabilities that confer the PE funds advantages both in the pre- and post-transaction phases. We argue that the magnitude of the advantages to industry specialization will depend on the criticality of these specific resources for buy-outs’ performance improvements. Industry specialization will confer advantages when the target company is weakly or strongly performing before the buy-out because, in that context, performance improvements are more difficult to reach. The analysis is based on a sample of 217 PE-backed buy-outs completed in France between 2001 and 2007. The results show that relative specialization in the industry of the buy-out company results in profit increases of 7.5% greater than buy-outs backed by non-industry-specialized PE firms. Industry specialization also contributes to target company growth, especially when performance improvements are difficult to reach. Besides, the magnitude of the positive industry specialization effect varies between PE firms. This result emphasizes industry specialization as a strategic variable by illustrating heterogeneity in the ability to construct a competitive advantage.