Entrepreneurship is often understood as an individualistic endeavour. This article investigates how cultural communities shape entrepreneurial activity through the process of envisioning competing imagined futures. By deploying a microhistorical approach, it explores a public debate about the transition from sail to steam in a late nineteenth-century Danish maritime community. In the debate, local actors evaluated and negotiated future entrepreneurial actions as embedded in existing norms, interpretations of the past, and socio-technical systems rather than independent, non-conformist ventures. The article demonstrates the potential role of community when we attempt to understand better how entrepreneurs construct and dispute over imagined futures.
The term ‘innovation ecosystem’ has become popular among stakeholders involved in innovation. The core idea is that innovation does not thrive through isolated actions of individual companies, but rather depends on a broad array of interrelated actors, institutions and policies. In this paper, we apply the concept of innovation ecosystems to ports by first providing a theoretical overview of its components and then comparing the efforts to build such an ecosystem in the port cities of Rotterdam and Valencia. Our main findings are as follows. First, the importance of innovation for the ability of ports to continue to create ‘value for society’ is widely acknowledged. Second, research and development (R&D) activities in both Rotterdam and Valencia are relatively limited and the dominant innovation challenge is the early application of new technologies developed outside the ports industry. Third, a ‘systemic approach’ is required to understand the innovation ecosystem in ports, given the strong interrelations among companies in the port and the need for broad coalitions to implement new technologies. Fourth and fifth, human capital formation and research cooperation, respectively, play a central role in improving the port innovation ecosystem. Finally, the ecosystem in Rotterdam is ‘distributed and connected’ while Valencia is more centralised.
This study investigates how the recognition and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities influence small business performance via interactions with firm-level innovation capability and learning orientation. We frame the study within the maritime-sector context and seek to contribute to the understanding of how the interplay between opportunity recognition, exploitation, innovation capability and learning orientation affects the entrepreneurial performance of local businesses when there is a technological policy change. The study further frames its arguments from a dynamic capability perspective and tests its arguments with data from 284 local businesses operating in the Port of Tema. Findings reveal that opportunity exploitation and learning orientation as well as their interplay have a positive and significant effect on entrepreneurial performance. The study consequently presents local micro-entrepreneurial reactions to macro-level policy changes within the maritime sector – an issue that has largely remained uninvestigated in the African business literature due to maritime blindness.
Design
Our data set, collected via surveys from top managers and project managers involved in 86 NPD projects in 85 firms, is analyzed using PLS structural equation modeling.
Purpose
This study examines how technical drivers as well as social drivers influence organic communication and top management involvement (TMI) in new product development (NPD) projects. Technical drivers are strategic importance and product innovativeness and social drivers are intrinsic and extrinsic relevance. Organic communication is defined as continuous, bi-directional, and informal communication between top management and the NPD teams. Further, arguing that TMI must be studied as multi-faceted construct, TMI is conceptualized to occur as guidance, active motivation, providing resources, and creating a tolerant climate. Subsequently, the effect of TMI and organic communication on NPD performance is investigated.
Findings
We show that the strategic importance of the project has a positive influence on TMI through active motivation, providing resources, and creating a tolerant climate for innovation, but does not have an effect on guidance. Results also show that active motivation and organic communication improve budget and schedule adherence, whereas providing guidance and stimulating a tolerant climate have detrimental effects. In summary, our results show that only active motivation enhances all types of performance while stimulating a tolerant climate appears to have the opposite effect. The results revealed that organic communication between top management and the NPD team has a strong positive effect on all elements of TMI (providing guidance, actively motivating the NPD team, providing resources, and creating a tolerant climate). In other words, when top management communicates with the NPD team throughout the project in an informal way and listens to the team in addition to engaging in a one-way communication, they are more likely to be seen by the team as being deeply involved in the project.
This study exploits service modularity in front-end logistics services in e-fulfillment, from a customer-centric approach, particularly in order management, delivery, and return. Through an online survey of UK customers, the service priorities of 494 respondents via AHP (Analytic Hierarchical Process) were analyzed. Extracting customers' service priorities, ordering behavior, and demographic information as input data, the clustering algorithm KAMILA (KAy-means for MIxed LArge data sets) was further applied. The three identified customer clusters (multichannel shoppers, infrequent shoppers, and online fans) provide preliminary evidence on how commonality and variability aspects of service modularity in front-end logistics services can optimize the number of service options and their performance levels. Therefore, our study, building on value co-creation and modularity, proposes a systematic way of exploiting service modularity for the customer segmentation process that addresses heterogeneous customer preferences cost-efficiently and uncomplicatedly. Furthermore, we provide a framework for the governance of front-end logistics services, guiding outsourcing decisions. Accordingly, it reveals the implications of customer priorities and service decomposition logic choices on value creation. Finally, the propositions formulated aim to develop theoretical foundations for explaining how the heterogeneity in customer priorities for logistics services can be managed with modularity, creating value both for customers and retailers.
This paper advances the conceptual understanding of strategies of port development companies (PDCs) through applying the business ecosystem perspective. This leads to a distinction between four stylized strategies for PDCs and associated types of services: minimalist (six services), integrator (six services) and ecosystem services (six services). An analysis of the services provided by a PDC reveals which strategy they follow. This approach is tested through a case study of Port of Rotterdam Authority (PoR for short) the state-owned PDC in charge of developing Rotterdam's port complex. This case study yields three important conclusions: first the relevance of the identified service types is confirmed, as PoR is or has been active in providing 15 of the 18 identified service types, more specifically all six ‘minimalist services’, all six ‘ecosystem services’ and three of the six ‘integrator services’. Second, PoR follows a ‘platform provider’ strategy. Third, the provision of ‘ecosystem services’ seems to become a more important part of PoRs activities. The number of provided ecosystem services has grown between 2006 and 2021 and investments in ecosystem services account for an increasing share of PoRs total investments. These results provide a basis for further research, amongst others to better understand factors that may influence the strategies of PDCs.
Rumor has it that all technologies needed to build energy islands are ready. Wind turbines are spinning in many large offshore parks, while combinations of sand and concrete have given birth to several entirely new islands. However, not all rumors are true. Not only has the Danish parliament mandated the largest ever infrastructure project in the history of our country. The first Danish artificial island built for energy production will also become the world’s largest renewable energy project. On top of the technical and logistical challenges associated with building something of an unprecedented scale and nature come new concerns. The energy islands are an extreme version of the power system we know today, and therefore represent a Mars mission for the energy system. More than once have large infrastructure projects been plagued by delays and significant additional costs. Often such problems have been rooted in overly optimistic planning, limited knowledge regarding the complexity and interdependencies involved, and not giving enough attention to the development phase relative to the construction phase. For many reasons, it is highly desirable for the energy island projects to perform well. Therefore, we have teamed up to map the key challenges and suggest R&D initiatives to address them. Importantly, these initiatives are not intended as an inserted step before construction. Given the urgency in green transition and ending the reliance on fossil fuels, research and construction must be conducted in parallel. A solid foundation for energy islands On the following pages we invite you to delve into the complexity of constructing and operating offshore hubs for renewable energy. As you will hopefully agree, we are by no means saying that it cannot be done. It can. But only if decisions are based on a solid foundation of knowledge.
Ecosystems are viewed as important sources of innovation. While contracts, rules, policies, and industrial standards have been identified as important for coordinating and aligning inter-firm relationships, tools for the collective, collaborative orchestration of ecosystems have yet to be fully identified and articulated by scholars. The core contribution of this paper, the authors contend, is that corporate foresight tools, as applied at the level of the ecosystem, have the potential to orchestrate ecosystems. To this end, the authors examine the practical use of corporate foresight tools, in this case, roadmapping and scenario planning, as employed by ECOPRODIGI, an Interreg Baltic Sea project designed to advance the EU's strategy for eco-efficient Sustainable Blue Economy in the Roll-on/Roll-off (Ro-Ro) shipping ecosystem. Results demonstrate how ecosystem-level foresight significantly differs from traditional foresight centered around a focal firm. Corporate foresight tools, as applied to an ecosystem: 1) Target a diverse set of ecosystem actors beyond the segment's focal firm, including complementary firms, investors, and non-market actors; 2) Engage ecosystem actors, rather than only the focal firm, in shared strategy development based on a diverse mix of foresight tools; and 3) serve to orient and reify the ecosystem by charting the collective anticipation of innovations, policies, etc., in a shared set of future options. In the end, the authors find that corporate foresight tools operate as constitutive elements of ecosystems, that is, the tools help enact the ecosystem not as an abstract concept but as a shared, lived reality.
The shipping sector's rising greenhouse gas emissions are often considered “hard-to-abate”. Some ship-owners have recently adopted or started to consider the adoption of alternative fuels, but systematic studies of this are still lacking. We address this gap by studying how ship-owners differ in both actual and intended adoption of alternative fuels. We analyze data from a unique survey with 281 ship-owners in Norway, a major ship-owning country and center for maritime technology development, with descriptive statistics and analysis of variance. We find early adopters among large and established ship-owners in offshore, international cargo and domestic passenger shipping segments, which are often subjected to specific contractual demands for alternative fuel adoption. Laggards were typically small and young ship-owners operating in shipping segments where demands for alternative fuel adoption are weak. Our findings also suggest that firms' business strategy and financial and knowledge resources may have relevance for ship-owner's adoption of alternative fuels. Our study has implications for national and international policymaking, highlighting for example how contracting mechanisms can be an effective tool in incentivizing the adoption of alternative fuels.