Rainer Harms

Purpose: This study examines how entrepreneurial team resilience develops amid persistent adversity, focusing on mechanisms through which teams move between resilience states as the novelty, disruption and criticality of adversity change over time. Design/methodology/approach: Guided by event system theory (EST), we conducted a qualitative study based on 62 retrospective interviews with members of 39 entrepreneurial teams in China. Respondents reconstructed their experiences across multiple phases of the three-year COVID-19 pandemic, enabling us to examine how resilience changed over time. Findings: We find that resilience develops through a sequence of state transitions as the attributes of adversity change, with each transition linked to a distinct mechanism. From a latent state, high novelty and disruption prompt improvisational adaptation, leading to foundational resilience. Sustained disruption and rising criticality trigger relational and cognitive integration, which consolidates resilience. When adversity becomes highly critical, teams rely on shared vision to sustain commitment and redirect collective action (meaning-based adaptation). As adversity subsides, teams embed and recalibrate these capacities into a stronger latent resilience capacity than before the crisis. Originality/value: This study explains how changes in the attributes of adversity prompt mechanisms that drive teams through successive resilience states. The process model highlights the transformed latent state, through which teams rebuild latent capacity at a higher level. We reframe team resilience as a cumulative, path-dependent process.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) are embedded in a global network of resource exchange relationships. To explain how EEs develop, one must consider the dynamics of resource exchanges. To do this, we combine a social capital perspective with the concept of strategic action fields in an abductive study of six cases of EEs. We find three dynamics of resource exchange, each drawing on a specific type of social capital and fostering either optimization or innovation of EEs’ offer to entrepreneurs. These findings contribute to the EE field by highlighting the relevance of inter-EE resource exchanges for developing competitive EEs. EE practitioners find that strategically managing the exchange of resources across the boundaries of their ecosystem is vital to balancing optimization of the established offer and innovating for enriched offers to entrepreneurs in their location.

New venture teams (NVTs) face challenges caused by adversity, making team resilience crucial for venture survival. While team resilience factors have been identified, we do not yet understand how they combine. We examine their combinations from a configurational approach. Based on a fsQCA analysis of team resilience factors in thirty-eight NVTs and five follow-up in-depth case interviews, we explore how team resilience factors combine to form particular team resilience pathways for survival in adversity. Our analysis reveals three pathways: relaxed team improvisers, validated team visionaries, and relational team connectors. The theoretical implications include enhancing the framework regarding the resilience of NVTs and introducing a new causal mechanism based on the causal complexity of team resilience factors.

In this paper we propose a methodology for assessing the efficiency of technology transfer through merger and acquisition (M&A) and empirically estimate the effect of key factors impacting it. We implement data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate an efficiency score of the technology transfer process. The DEA efficiency score integrates a set of outputs (post-merger characteristics of an acquirer) and inputs (pre-merger technological parameters of a target); thus, it provides a multidimensional estimate of efficiency adjusted for the value of the acquired technology base.In the empirical part of this research, we collect data from 434 M&As to study a channel for transferring a technology base across organizational boundaries. Overall, empirical results suggest the adverse outcomes of accumulation of capability to value external technology: the higher the acquirer’s R&D intensity, the lower the efficiency of interorganizational technology transfer. The size of acquirer and relative size of the deal also affect the post-merger outcomes significantly and negatively. At the same time, the estimated effect of such technological characteristics of acquirer as capital expenditure intensity and number of patents is insignificant.

The topics of ethical conduct and governance in academic research in the business field have attracted scientific and public attention. The concern is that research misconduct in organizations such as business schools and universities might result in practitioners, policymakers, and researchers grounding their decisions on biased research results. This study addresses ethical research misconduct by investigating whether the ethical orientation of business researchers is related to the likelihood of research misconduct, such as selective reporting of research findings. We distinguish between deontological and consequentialist ethical orientations and the competition between researchers and investigate the moderating role of their perceived autonomy. Based on global data collected from 1031 business scholars, we find that researchers with a strong deontological ethical orientation are less prone to misconduct. This effect is robust against different levels of perceived autonomy and competition. In contrast, researchers having a consequentialist ethical orientation is positively associated with misconduct in business research. High levels of competition in the research environment reinforce this effect. Our results reveal a potentially toxic combination comprising researchers with a strong consequentialist orientation who are embedded in highly competitive research environments. Our research calls for the development of ethical orientations grounded on maxims rather than anticipated consequences among researchers. We conclude that measures for ethical governance in business schools should consider the ethical orientation that underlies researchers’ decision-making and the organizational and institutional environment in which business researchers are embedded.

The Internet of Things (IoT), a worldwide network of interconnected objects uniquely addressable, based on standard communication protocols, has become a disruptive technology, even for decision-makers who develop products based on them. It was reported in 2015 and 2018 that decision-makers associated with the Fortune 1000 firms stated that they were hesitant to use IoT-based value propositions, primarily due to privacy and security concerns. In this article, we view decision-maker willingness to develop IoT-based products through the lens of the social construction of technology (SCOT) theory. We utilize SCOT-based generational cohorts of firm decision-makers to investigate whether generational cohorts of decision-makers are relevant in a firm's decision to launch an IoT value proposition. We argue that it is pertinent to consider age-based generations as stakeholders for IoT, which currently constitutes a gap in the literature on IoT and SCOT. We employ an exploratory survey analysis that supports the relevance of generational decision-making cohorts. We focus on age to the exclusion of other potential decision-maker cohort possibilities and discuss this as a limitation in our conclusion.