Strategic Management Policy Commons^™

Dual Agenda Innovation: How Firms Pursue Economic And Environmental Goals Simultaneously, Tianni Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the increasing prevalence of UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) and ESG movement, more and more companies have started to include environmental performance as part of their strategic goals. From both risk management and value creation perspectives, not only is the positive environmental performance socially desirable, but it also can affect the economic performance. Companies strive to achieve superior environmental and economic performance (i.e.E2 performance), but few have succeeded.

In this dissertation research, the author proposed that firms are more likely to achieve superior E2 performance by engaging in dual agenda innovation that integrates environmental goal and economic goal in …

A Foot In The Door: Field-Experiments On Entrepreneurs’ Network Activation Strategies For Investor Referrals, Jared Nai, Yimin Lin, Reddi Kotha, Vissa Balagopal

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate entrepreneurial network activation—the processes by which entrepreneurs select specific contacts from their existing personal network and persuade the selected contacts to provide referrals to access targeted early-stage investors (venture capitalists or angel-investors). We differentiate between selection of entrepreneur-centric contacts versus investor-centric contacts. We also distinguish between persuasion tactics that induce contacts' cooperation through promises of reciprocity versus offers of monetary incentives. We conducted two field-experiments in India and one in Singapore. Our primary field-experiment involved 42 Singapore-based entrepreneurs seeking referrals from 684 network contacts to reach a panel of four investors. Our evidence suggests that selecting investor-centric contacts …

Impact Measurement And Standards, Angeline Chua, Hao Liang, Wanyi Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite rapid economic growth and increasing interest in impact investment worldwide, less attention has been paid to the question of whether this growth is sustainable for people and the planet. In an ideal scenario, growth would happen within planetary and social boundaries. However, current financial value is often prioritised and achieved at cost to society and the environment. For example, small farmers in Indonesia have long practised slash-and-burn agriculture, and in recent decades large companies have industrialised the practice. The peatland blazes in Indonesia release smoke and large amounts of greenhouse gases, which impact both Indonesia itself, and neighbouring countries …

Conflicting Institutional Logics As A Safe Space For Collaboration: Action Research In A Reforestation Ngo, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Ryan K. Merrill

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Climate change is the defining issue of our time. Taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (Sustainable Development Goal 13) is one of the most wicked problems governments, companies, and civil society have ever had to solve (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016). The path to solving the climate crisis is reasonably well defined but the road ahead is treacherous. We need to decarbonize the economy so that we can decouple growth from carbon emissions. This requires massive investments in clean energy, a radical rethink of the food production system, and innovations in aviation and primary extractive industries to …

Smart Cities: A Review Of Managerial Challenges And A Framework For Future Research, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The term 'Smart City' (SC) is often defined in relation to how well a city uses digital technology to improve the efficiency of urban services and to create sustainable, liveable communities. Building such a city where people are co-creators of SC policies is a contested endeavour. Its successful management is enormously complex due to numerous challenges such as implementation problems that may arise at the governance and administration level when roles, responsibilities and success criteria are poorly defined; in terms of budgeting and funding constraints; and/or at the level of collaborative stakeholder management to get buy-in from citizens, private sector …

Applying Coleman’S Boat In Management Research: Opportunities And Challenges In Bridging Macro And Micro Theory, Amanda Cowen, Floor Rink, Ilya R. P. Cuypers, Denis Gregoire, Ingo Weller

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Over the years, ongoing conversations in Academy of Management Journal—and the broader management literature—have emphasized the value of research that bridges the macro and micro domains (Hitt, Beamish, Jackson, & Mathieu, 2007; Molloy, Ployhart, & Wright, 2011; Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999; Paruchuri, Perry-Smith, Chattopadhyay, & Shaw, 2018). Calls for cross-boundary work typically argue that bridging these two domains is required to understand and solve the complex management issues that societies face (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016; House, Rousseau, & Thomas-Hunt, 1995; Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). Responses to the organizational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, or to societal problems …

Delegated Gender Diversity, Hao Liang, Cara Vansteenkiste

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We revisit the value implications of female representation on boards by exploiting the board diversity campaign announcement by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM)—the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. In February 2021, NBIM required its portfolio firms to have at least 30% female directors. Using NBIM’s announcement as a shock to investor expectations about female board representation, we document significantly positive returns for firms with a female director shortfall, concentrated in firms with low institutional ownership. Consistent with an investor demand view of board gender diversity, we find that these firms experienced a greater increase in ownership by socially responsible institutional …

Introduction To The Business Of Sustainability: An Organizing Framework For Theory, Practice And Impact, Gerard George, Martine R. Haas, Havovi Heerjee Joshi, Anita M. Mcgahan, Paul Tracey

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Human activity needs to become sustainable, and businesses have a massive role to play in it. Important progress has occurred. The Coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the importance of sustainability and resilience. Businesses have become champions of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both by integrating them into their core activities and by developing strategies and metrics to achieve them. Despite this progress, more must be done to achieve sustainability targets on a timetable that is relevant. While the narratives of businesses are often exciting, their follow-through with implementation remains limited. So too is information on successful practices, conceptual knowledge …

To Buy Green Or Not To Buy Green: Do Structural Dependencies Block Ecological Responsiveness?, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Teemu Kautonen, Henri Hakata

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite the significant increase in interest in sustainable business practices, decisions on switching to more environmentally friendly input materials are understudied. In a conjoint experiment, we presented 267 Finnish manufacturing firms with an opportunity to acquire an alternative, more ecological input material and investigated their willingness to switch to that material. We find that in general, firms are willing to substitute their current principal input with a more ecological alternative under conditions of functional parity. However, such willingness is contingent on the firm’s value creation structures. Specifically, if the products and processes driving the firm’s value creation rely more on …

Impact Assessment And Measurement With Sustainable Development Goals, Hao Liang, David Fernandez, Mikkel Larsen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

With the rapid growth of sustainable and responsible investment and widespread adoption of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting and integration by organizations, how to assess and measure ESG impact has become a critical issue. Although the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a useful framework for investors and organizations globally to align their standards, the SDGs are vague on how to implement them at an organizational or activity level. Current practice relies heavily on third-party ESG rating providers, whose scores mostly apply to public equities only. They also suffer from biases, inconsistencies, and a lack of sufficient disclosure. …

Play, Not Pay. Learn Languages The Duolingo Way, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

A Carnegie Mellon University Professor, who is also the creator of CAPTCHA and RECAPTCHA, wants to give everyone equal access to education through free lessons on a mobile app. He is Luis von Ahn

A Research On The Innovative Performance Of Clustering Enterprises In Industrial Parks: Evidence From Shenzhen, China, Jiangong Bai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

How about the innovation performance of enterprises clustered in the industrial parks? This is the core question of this study. Based on the thinking and evolution of the question, this study will focus on the impact of industrial agglomeration on enterprise innovation performance with enterprise relations and informal institution as intermediate variables.

In this study, Shenzhen, as a city of innovation, is selected as the research area where sample parks and enterprises can be investigated to obtain data. This study constructs and measures the strength of informal institution and enterprise innovation performance through grounded theory and fuzzy matter-element method, evaluates …

Partnering For Value Perfection And Business Sustainability In The Cloud Services Brokerage Market, Richard Shang, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The cloud computing and services market has advanced in the past ten years. They now include most IT services from fundamental computing to cutting-edge AI capabilities. With the widespread adoption of cloud services, clients are facing the fact that they are utilizing cloud resources at a sub-optimal level. Cloud services brokers (CSBs) grew from the market to fill the needs for cloud resource management and risk mitigation. Based on analysis of the cloud market and the case of cloud services brokerage and related activities in North America, we offer theoretical analysis for how value creation works, its impacts on the …

How Does Firm Scope Depend On Customer Switching Costs? Evidence From Mobile Telecommunications Markets, Niloofar Abolfathi, Simone Santamaria, Charles Williams

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines the relative advantages of single-product and multiproduct firms following changes in customer switching costs. Whereas a single-product firm can closely tailor offerings to customers' needs, a multiproduct firm can create value for customers in the form of flexibility, allowing them to change between product varieties as preferences evolve without needing to switch providers. We argue that this value-creation mechanism is more effective when customers face high switching costs and explore this prediction in the mobile telecommunications sector, using an exogenous policy change (mobile number portability) that suddenly decreases customer switching costs. Our results reveal that when customer …

Ideological Boundaries Of Status Advantages: Legislative Effectiveness In The House Of Representatives In The United States Congress, Francois Collet, Gianluca Carnabuci, Gokhan Ertug, Tengjian Zou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Prior research assumes that high-status actors have greater organizational influence than lower-status ones, that is, it is easier for the former to get their ideas and initiatives adopted by the organization than it is for the latter. Drawing from the literature on ideology, we posit that the status-influence link is contingent on actors’ ideological position. Specifically, status confers organizational influence to the degree that the focal actor is ideologically mainstream. The more an actor’s ideology deviates from the mainstream the less will her status translate into increased organizational influence. We find support for this hypothesis using data on the work …

What Does Homophily Do? A Review Of The Consequences Of Homophily, Gokhan Ertug, Julia Brennecke, Balaza Kovacs, Tengjian Zou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Understanding the consequences of homophily, which is among the most widely observed social phenomena, is important, with implications for management theory and practice. Therefore, we review management research on the consequences of homophily. As the consequences of homophily have been studied at the individual, dyad, team, organizational, and macro levels, we structure our review accordingly. We highlight findings that are consistent and contradictory, as well as those that point to boundary conditions or moderators. In conducting our review, we also derive implications for management research from insights gained by research in other disciplines on this topic. We raise specific issues …

Outsourcing Climate Change, Rui Dai, Rui Duan, Hao Liang, Lilian Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether and how firms combat climate change. Our study provides robust evidence that firms outsource part of their carbon emissions to foreign suppliers and shows how internal and external stakeholders significantly shape firms' environmental policies. Furthermore, firms tend to seek a foreign supplier and decrease their emission abatement efforts as pressure to reduce domestic emissions intensifies. These firms are also less incentivized to develop green technologies. Finally, we find that outsourcing emissions has real and economic consequences, with investors demanding a higher carbon premium for their exposures to carbon risks associated with increased outsourced emissions.

Practical Studies Of Brand Management Based On The Factor Of Consumer Values, Ke Chen,

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

2021 will be the final year of the centenary goal of “building a moderately prosperous society in all respects”. Looking back over the past century, China has not only witnessed an increase in national income, but also ushered in abundant changes in social culture and people's spiritual world, and completed the transformation from a traditional single homogeneous cultural society to a flexible and diverse heterogeneous cultural society. In this process, brands become the product of values change and multicultural shock, and consumers shop not only to meet the needs of material functions, but also to express their personal values. To …

Research On The Impact Of Social Responsibility Of Chinese Real Estate Enterprises On Their Competitiveness, Yajiang Xing

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The real estate industry has become the pillar industry of China's national economy and should perform more social responsibilities. Then how to guide enterprises to perform relevant social responsibilities, how to make full use of social responsibilities to enhance enterprise competitiveness, and how to measure the aspects in which corporate social responsibility promotes the development of competitiveness have aroused the discussion and research of the government and relevant academic circles.Therefore, this paper first puts forward a series of assumptions from the perspective of stakeholders.Secondly, establish the evaluation index system of social responsibility and social competitiveness of real estate enterprises through …

Follow The Smoke: The Pollution Haven Effect On Global Sourcing, Heather Berry, Aseem Kaul, Narae Lee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research abstract: We examine whether and how foreign environmental standards influence global sourcing decisions. Taking a question-driven approach, we find a negative association between the stringency of a country's environmental standards and its share in US imports for 82 manufacturing industries across 77 countries between 2006 and 2016. This pollution haven effect holds not only for sourcing from owned foreign operations (offshore integration), but also for sourcing from unrelated third parties abroad (offshore outsourcing), and is stronger in industries with high toxic emissions and low technological intensity. These results are robust across alternative measures of environmental stringency and to using …

Mediate, Not Litigate, To Resolve Disputes, Aloysius Goh, Terence Quek

Asian Management Insights

Mediation is essentially a facilitated negotiation process. When businesses have a dispute they cannot resolve on their own, they seek a neutral third party to help confidentially. This mediator has no power to impose a binding outcome on the parties. Rather, his or her responsibility is to facilitate the negotiation and use problem-solving skills to guide the parties towards a mutually agreed solution through a face saving and pragmatic process. In many jurisdictions, including Singapore, parties are required to attempt mediation first before courts hear the matter. Refusing to engage in mediation without proper reason may lead to cost sanctions …

Artificial Intelligence As Augmenting Automation: Implications For Employment, F. Ted Tschang, Esteve Almirall

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There has been great concern in recent years that artificial intelligence (AI) may cause widespread unemployment, but proponents say that AI augments existing jobs. Both of these positions have substance, but there is a need is to articulate the mechanisms by which AI may actually do both, and in the process, transform work and business organizations alike. We use economic studies showing past transformations automation wrought on the structure of employment and skills (such as the favouring of nonroutine skills) to articulate a ground for discussion. We then use case evidence of AI and automation to show how AI is …

How Do The Ceo Political Leanings Affect Reit Business Decisions?, Xiaoying Deng, Paul M. Anglin, Yanmin Gao, Hua Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Business decisions made by the real estate industry have a profound effect on the well-being of people who live, work, or shop in these buildings. While these decisions may be informed by evidence, the available evidence is often incomplete or imperfect. Therefore, the personal opinions or judgments of senior executives can have an effect. In this paper, we study these effects in two parts: risk-taking and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities. Since a person’s political learning is a relatively stable measure, and is associated with preferences for risk and ESG activities, we examine how the political leanings of the …

Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurs: Participants In An Expanding Universe Of Platforms?, F. Ted Tschang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The article Platform-dependent entrepreneurs: Power asymmetries, risks, and strategies in the platform economy drew on the intermediary business model to review the damaging actions that platform firms may employ with entrepreneurs. This exchange argues that platform firms may treat entrepreneurs differently on other platform types-particularly ones where complex relationships may cause participants and platforms to become mutually dependent, or where the platform's position depends less on extracting revenue directly from participants. I suggest that particular business models might facilitate the use of alternative strategic actions that are more benign toward entrepreneurs. These situations can determine additional boundary conditions for this …

Corporate Sustainability Has Failed: Digitizing Regeneration May Still Save Us, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The author proposes a focus on regeneration as a way for small carbon footprint firms (e.g., consulting, financial services firms) to make a positive sustainability impact. He highlights that service industry firms can proactively contribute to the regeneration of common pool resources, such as forests and lakes, which often become neglected or overused. What makes regeneration different compared to more traditional donations to a conservation nonprofit is the use of digital technology that enables an organization to lay claim to the eco­system benefits it generates through its support. The digitization of benefits claims provides a transparent accounting system for environmental …

The Impact Of Digitalization On International Expansion: A Study On Market Entry Strategy Based On The Integration-Responsiveness Framework, Thian Kiang Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Digitalization has accelerated the growth and creation of new business models. There are more unicorn companies (a non-public company valued at more than US$1B) in the last 10 years than the decades before it. The use of digital technologies presents new opportunities for digitally active firms to capture growth in a new market. This paper studies how digitalization influences the internationalization process of the firm and its mode of entry into a foreign market. Drawing on existing literature on digitalization, this paper creates a novel approach to study the effect of digitalization by classifying firms based on their market business …

Bettr Barista: A Shot At Better Lives, Heli Wang, Sheetal Mittal, Adeline Natalia Sue Yi Lai

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This chapter presents a case study in which Pamela Chng, the founder of Singapore-based Bettr Barista (BB), believes that a workplace cannot exist aloof from society's challenges and that companies need to be accountable for their contribution to society. The enterprise offers a four-month-long holistic programme, equipping them with job skills as a barista. The chapter highlights the challenge in maintaining the balance between financial and social goals, as this drives most of the decisions taken by the company, be it its value chain or the key stakeholders. The social programme was a comprehensive training course for the marginalised section …

Communicating Business, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Communications heads should have a seat in boardrooms to facilitate strategic communication. But they need to demonstrate how communications drive business

How Xiaomi Redefined What It Means To Be A Platform, Tony W. Wong, Yanting Guo, Liang Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Traditional platform businesses generally fall into one of two categories: Ecosystems, such as Apple’s App Store, which offer limited resources to a wide array of independently-run firms; and Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) companies, such as Intel Capital, which invest heavily into a small number of ventures that promise either financial or strategic returns. However, new research into Xiaomi’s growth strategy suggests that the Beijing-based electronics giant has developed a blended approach, borrowing elements of both traditional ecosystem and CVC firms to create a broad ecosystem of strongly-supported partner ventures. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with executives from both …

Habitual Entrepreneurship In Digital Platform Ecosystems: A Time-Contingent Model Of Learning From Prior Software Project Experiences, Terence Fan, Andreas Schwab, Xuesong Geng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The emergence of large-scale digital platforms such as Facebook, Google Play and Apple App Store around 2008 has created opportunities for independent entrepreneurs to offer their self-developed software applications (“apps”) to large groups of platform users. The development and release of tens of thousands of apps by thousands of independent developers has created dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems. This paper investigates whether and how learning by independent habitual entrepreneurs unfolds in substantively different ways in such dynamic platform-based environments. We argue that in these entrepreneurial ecosystems, the timing of learning efforts becomes essential. For Facebook app developers, we find that learning from …