On January 18-19, 2018, the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and its affiliated Center for Entrepreneurial Studies will convene a highly curated group of 100 thought leaders to discuss leading-edge research on private business ventures and explore ways to sustain and advance entrepreneurship.
This article examines the capability antecedents of firm entry into nascent industries. Because a firm's technological investments in nascent industries typically occur before market entry, this study makes a distinction between firm capabilities at the time of market entry and at the time of initial investment.
While policies encouraging diffusion of new technologies provide incentives for adopting the focal good, they typically ignore the ecosystem of complementary goods and services. Based on existing literature on indirect network effects, we argue that when there is less availability of complementary goods, policies have a smaller impact on diffusion.
We consider two competing supply chains, each consisting of supplier, a manufacturer, and a retailer. The suppliers exert effort to improve product quality, and the retailers sell products competitively. Each manufacturer chooses one of the three strategies: forward integration, backward integration, or no vertical integration.
Retail store associates are frontline employees of retail organizations and are responsible for delivering superior in-store experience to its customers. Store associates provide customer service through direct interaction with customers as well as through indirect means such as maintaining a clean store and ensuring that the shelves are fully stocked.
Previous research has used an ego depletion perspective to establish a self-regulatory model linking sleep deprivation to unethical behavior via depletion (Barnes, Schaubroeck, Huth, & Ghumman, 2011; Christian & Ellis, 2011; Welsh, Ellis, Christian, & Mai, 2014). We extend this research by moving beyond depletion to examine a more nuanced, process-based view of self-control.
We develop a theory of innovation waves, investor sentiment, and merger activity based on uncertainty aversion. Investors must typically decide whether to fund an innovative project with very limited knowledge of the odds of success, a situation best described as "Knightian uncertainty."
We examine the effects of mixed sampling frequencies and temporal aggregation on the size of commonly used tests for cointegration, and we find that these effects may be severe.
We consider a firm that can use one of several costly learning modes to dynamically reduce uncertainty about the unknown value of a project. Each learning mode incurs cost at a particular rate and provides information of a particular quality. In addition to dynamic decisions about its learning mode, the firm must decide when to stop learning and either invest or abandon the project.
In business-to-business markets, top marketing and sales executives (TMSEs) have considerable influence on their organizations’ customer strategies. When TMSEs switch firms, a pattern of informal organizational connections results; this pattern reflects the flow of information and knowledge among firms and creates managerial social capital in the process. To model this information flow, the current study considers information reach and richness, conceptualized according to the network position (i.e., centrality and brokerage) of the firm in the TMSE mobility network, which can be constructed by tracing executive movements through the work experience records of TMSEs in an industry.
From investigating ways to improve the customer experience at centers housing families of children undergoing cancer treatment to examining how socioeconomic status affects individuals’ ability to accurately predict the viability of their financial investments, students in the Kenan Scholars MBA program showcased a wide range of business interests during the presentation of their capstone research projects on Wednesday, Dec. 12, at the Kenan Center.
Little is known about how TMT members affect a founder-led firm’s performance later in a firm’s life. Using novel methods and a sample of over 2,000 firms, we find that although team structure has a significant impact on the performance of non-founder-led firms (consistent with past literature), it has little to no effect on the operating performance of founder-led firms, suggesting that founder CEOs may exert too much control.
Servicization is a business strategy to sell the functionality of a product rather than the product itself. It has been touted as an environmentally friendly strategy as it encourages manufacturers to take more responsibility for their products. We study when servicization results in a win-win outcome where it can simultaneously increase a firm’s profits and decrease its environmental impact compared with selling products.
Universities have become essential players in the generation of knowledge and innovation. Through the commercialization of technology, they have developed the ability to influence regional economic growth. By examining different commercialization models this book analyses technology transfer at universities as part of a national and regional system.
The local levels of economies have felt the impact of technological change and globalization. These forces have triggered the need to understand the dynamic mechanisms that enable locales to respond to such changes. For example, the downsizing of traditional employers because of a major loss in market share due to new competitors, acquisition by global firms, or off-shoring of production or services was traditionally thought to be beyond the scope of powers of local policymakers, thinkers, and business leaders.
On Sept. 9-11, 2019, the Kenan Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for African-American Research will co-host the second Black Communities Conference, an international gathering of scholars and community leaders from across the African diaspora. The conference's core mission is to connect academics from a variety of disciplines with black communities, with the goal of enhancing the life of those communities.
Recent health policy efforts have attempted to promote constructive conversations regarding cost-effectiveness by increasing transparency for both patients and physicians. Spurred by access and cost challenges resulting from increasing pharmaceutical prices, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule that would require direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements to include the list price for a typical 30-day course of therapy, according to their weighted average cost. This Viewpoint discusses implementing price transparency for health care products and services where physicians spend an increasing proportion of their time—in electronic health records (EHRs).
Researchers take a closer look at the impact of entrepreneurs, policymakers, scientists and others during the pre-commercial stage of industry formation
Research is a signature component of the Kenan Scholars program. It drives innovation and is critical to conducting business in today’s data-driven economy. Employers are looking for leaders who can...
For the first time since the tumult of the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by 25 basis points on July 31. The decision was controversial along a multitude of dimensions.