Antonio Jose Verdu Jover

Purpose: This study examines how strategic flexibility (SF) influences firm performance through the dimensions of speed and variety in turbulent business environments. The results advance the contingency theory by refining the understanding of the interplay between SF, environmental dynamism and complexity. Design/methodology/approach: After conducting a multi-informant survey of 399 computer manufacturing and service industry firms across 14 European countries, we perform hierarchical regression analysis of time-lagged financial data to test the moderating effects of environmental turbulence on financial performance. Findings: The results show that speed improves performance in dynamic but not in complex environments, whereas variety improves performance in complex environments but reduces it in highly dynamic ones. The results demonstrate the need to align the dimensions of SF with environmental conditions. Research limitations/implications: As the findings are limited to the technology sector, further research should explore other industries and long-term effects. Practical implications: Managers should tailor flexibility strategies to environmental conditions, prioritizing speed in dynamic markets and variety in complex ones. Originality/value: Distinguishing between speed and variety advances the contingency theory, providing a more precise framework for aligning SF with environmental turbulence.

Cultural small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and cultural tourism share a symbiotic relationship, with each depending on the vitality of the other. Yet the core cultural sector has traditionally struggled with digitalization and innovation. Because vibrant cultural tourism relies on active, innovative cultural enterprises as key stakeholders, understanding how to foster innovation within these firms is crucial. Although cultural tourism can empower such enterprises, the mechanisms linking managers’ empowerment to their innovative work behavior (IWB) remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates how psychological, social, political, and digital empowerment combine to shape IWB among managers of cultural SMEs. Data were collected from 202 Spanish managers through a survey and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The findings reveal complex configurational pathways leading to high IWB. Psychological, social, and digital empowerment consistently appeared in effective configurations, typically working in combination, suggesting that no single dimension alone is sufficient to drive IWB. By contrast, political empowerment was often absent or negatively related in pathways that produced high IWB, indicating potential constraining effects in this context. Overall, fostering IWB in cultural SMEs requires nuanced, multi-dimensional empowerment strategies that move beyond single-factor approaches and acknowledge the complex, interactive, and sometimes paradoxical roles that different forms of empowerment play in supporting managerial innovation.

This study investigates the influence of female empowerment on the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of business sustainability. Starting from the premise that women entrepreneurs are agents of change, it is hypothesized that their empowerment positively impacts the pillars of sustainability. Employing a quantitative design with a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach and a sample of women entrepreneurs, the results confirm that female empowerment is significantly associated with greater economic, social, and environmental sustainability. The implications suggest that women entrepreneurs, by integrating holistic values into their strategies, contribute to long-term viability, social well-being, and responsible environmental management. This finding underscores the need for policies that promote female empowerment as a key strategy for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Purpose: Prior research from transaction costs economics argued that central firms perform better because they have superior access to information to discipline their alliance partners. Central firms may also, however, face higher costs and risks of unintentional learning and weaken their competence through structural inertia. We propose that these costs and risks are influenced by the learning capacities of the firms in the network and can explain different outcomes for focal firm performance.Design/methodology/approach: To test our predictions, we use instrumental variable–generalized method of moments estimation techniques on 15,517 firm-year observations from equity alliance portfolios in the global food industry across a 21-year window.Findings: We find support for our predictions and show that the relationship between network degree centrality and firm performance is negatively influenced by partners’ learning capacity and positively influenced by focal firms’ learning capacity, while firms with low network degree centrality benefit less from their learning capacity.Research limitations/implications: Future developments in transaction cost economics may consider partner and focal firms’ learning capacity as moderators of the network degree centrality – firm performance relationship.Practical implications: In alliance decisions, managers must consider that the combination of high network degree centrality and partners’ learning capacity can lead to high costs, risks of unintentional learning, and structural inertia, all of which have negative consequences for performance. In concentrated industries where network positions are controlled by a few large firms, policymakers must acknowledge that firms may face substantial barriers to collaboration with learning-intensive firms.Originality/value: This study is the first to develop and test a comprehensive transaction cost analysis of the central firm’s unintended knowledge flows and structural inertia in alliance networks. It is also the first to incorporate theoretically and empirically the hazards of complex and unintended information flows on the relationship of network degree centrality to performance in equity alliance portfolios.

Although studies that analyze eco-innovation without differentiating among industries are proliferating, research has not yet identified the factors that lead to eco-innovation in tourism sector firms. Since innovation in general is nourished by access to knowledge sources and the intensity with which they are used, this study analyzes the effect of intensive use of knowledge sources on eco-innovation in the tourism sector. It also analyzes the possible mediating role of traditional orientation of the firm in product innovation and/or process innovation. We use two data sources: panel data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute on 199 tourism firms for 2011-2015 and primary data gathered from a set of 198 tourism firms collected separately via questionnaire in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The second dataset, which was collected independently of the first, aims to corroborate the results of the first in a different economic context and different firms. Our results indicate a significant distinction between product/service and process innovation. The findings show that that tourism firms rely on process innovation to implement eco-innovation, whereas product innovation has no influence in these firms in any of the years analyzed.

With intensifying competition in the financial system, new strategic applications are constantly being devised in the search for greater efficiency. In consequence, decisions are commonly based on locating and retaining market segments with high added value, and those which fail to supply the profitability required by the market are “excluded”. The aim of this study is to analyse the research advances made in the field of financial inclusion and the main lines of investigation currently being addressed by means of a bibliometric analysis. Among the scientific community, there is growing interest in this study area. The most assiduous in this respect are SA Asongu (the most productive author), Enterprise Development and Microfinance (the journal that has published the most articles in this field), Makerere University, Uganda (the most productive institution) and India (the country where most recent studies have taken place). Foreseeably inspiring future research, there is currently great interest in developing a more accessible financial system, especially through the use of digital money (Fintech) as an instrument to promote financial inclusion. For all this, a line of research is proposed that also includes the proposals from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is a key factor in the creation and development of companies. This study examines the CEO's personal background (personality, proactivity and resistance to change) and its influence on the EO of the organization to determine which factors enhance or weaken EO. We achieve this goal through quantitative research, developing a structural equations model with partial least squares to analyse a sample of 358 Spanish SMEs from different sectors. The results suggest that specific personality dimensions exert substantial influence on the organization's EO. We also analyse individual proactivity and resistance to change as conduits for the effect of personality dimensions on the company's EO.

Examining the knowledge transfer process in sustainable contexts, we identified various gaps, which we analyzed in this study. First, we compare the temporal context of firms with eco-innovation strategies before and after the financial crisis of the first decade of the 21st century. Second, we analyze the firms’ knowledge transfer, from the use of knowledge sources to innovation through intellectual property. Third, we consider the influence of firm age on firms with eco-innovation goals and the influence of size on intellectual property. We used data from a sample of 3004 firms prepared by the Spanish National Statistics Institute for two different time periods: 2009 and 2014. Our results suggest that firms that achieve sustainable innovations do not show large differences in behavior in the two economic periods. We found that knowledge in firms with eco-innovation goals is transferred through intellectual property. The results show that firm age and size influence these processes during the years analyzed and thus have various implications for theory and for small firms, which are generally family firms. Small and family firms should strengthen their registration of intellectual property so that their knowledge transfer process ends in innovations for both the firm and the market.