In most sectors of the economy, competition is regarded as the way to improve quality and efficiency, lower costs, and increase innovations. Whether competition effectively achieves these improvements in health care, particularly with respect to hospital services, which remains the largest sector of spending for health care, is open to debate. Also debated, at least among some physicians, is whether functionally banning new physician-owned hospitals by prohibiting their participation in Medicare under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was too blunt an instrument to correct a problem that could have been fixed with a more nuanced regulatory solution, needlessly limiting a potential source of competition for hospital services.
Does practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR) bestow any benefits on how a firm is perceived by the public? Yes, says a study by Olga Hawn, assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship and faculty director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Catherine Shea, assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. Hawn and Shea point to a link between CSR and a company’s’ reputation for warmth and competence, how perceptions of firms’ exhibition of these characteristics affect CSR rewards and CSI (corporate social irresponsibility) penalties and how these effects vary from country to country.
As long-standing leaders in sustainability, the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise are proud to host the University of North Carolina Sustainability Awards. These awards recognize the leadership of North Carolina Business in protecting and promoting the state’s natural resources.
Corporations face constant pressure to respond to a wide range of social, environmental and governance issues, many of are outside the company’s core mission. Determining whether or how to respond to such pressures is a complex process, often requiring substantial time and resources on the part of senior management. In a new paper, “Willing and Able: A General Model of Organizational Responses to Normative Pressures,” Olga Hawn, University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School Assistant Professor for Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainability; Rodolphe Durand of HEC Paris; and Ioannis Ioannou from the London Business School provide a dynamic framework for understanding how companies analyze and respond – or don’t respond – to “normative pressures” on matters that include global warming, environmental stewardship, occupational health, executive compensation and corporate governance, among others. This pressure comes from a wide range of interest groups that may include activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other stakeholders.
Social media is a major part of our everyday lives. It's a way for us to communicate and share with those that follow along. But most will tell you, these connections are passive and surface-level. In this video, Isa Watson, founder and CEO of Squad, discusses why she made a career change, pursued an entrepreneurial path and created an app to help build authentic human connection on the internet.
Academics and innovators recently convened at the institute's wealth inequality conference to discuss the effects of income disparity and how education and research can create opportunities for more equitable access.
Do founders actually assimilate and leverage the knowledge from the seasoned executives who surround them? Or do they shrug it off and march to the beat of their own drum? To better understand whether founder CEOs incorporate or ignore advice from their leadership team, we collected and analyzed data on more than 2,000 companies that went public from 1997 to 2013, roughly half of which were led by founders and the other half by hired (nonfounder) CEOs.
Accelerators are entrepreneurial programs that attempt to help ventures learn, often utilizing extensive consultation with mentors, program directors, customers, guest speakers, alumni and peers. While accelerators have rapidly emerged as prominent players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and academics continue to raise questions about their efficacy.
We examine the impact of logistics performance metrics such as delivery time, and customer’s requested delivery speed on logistics service ratings and third-party sellers’ sales on an e-commerce platform.
Do founder-CEOs have an expiration date? In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s resignation from Twitter, some have begun asking whether the move could herald a new era, in which founders voluntarily step aside rather than sticking around for decades or waiting to be ousted. To explore the value added by a founder-CEO, the authors analyzed stock price and financial performance data from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies.
Collective action is critical for successful market formation. However, relatively little is known about how and under what conditions actors overcome collective action problems to successfully form new markets. Using the benefits of simulation methods, we uncover how collective action problems result from actor resource allocation decisions interacting with each other and how the severity of these problems depends on central market- and actor-related characteristics.
In this paper we argue that task design affects rule breaking in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that task variety activates deliberative (Type 2) processes as opposed to automatic/intuitive (Type 1) processes, which, in turn, helps prevent individuals from breaking rules in order to serve their own hedonic self-interest.
We examine the impact of four classes of workplace interruptions on short-term (working hours) and long-term (across-shifts) worker performance in an agribusiness setting. The interruptions are organized in a two-by-two framework where they result (or do not result) in a physical task requirement and lead to a varying degree of attention shift from the primary task.
Companies are turning to ideation contests to engage ideators outside company boundaries to solve their complex problems. Our research focuses on how articulating the problem, specifically the number and type of constraints described within the problem statement (brief), is related to the number of ideas submitted by participants in ideation contests.
A growing body of rigorous academic literature empirically demonstrates that high-skilled immigrants provide a range of long-lasting and material benefits to the U.S. economy through entrepreneurship and innovation. Recent research has quantified the impact of foreign-born founders on key economic indicators such as firm creation, job creation and overall business innovation. Likewise, a growing body of literature documents how skilled immigrants have more broadly facilitated technological innovation. Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown discusses the findings of he and his colleagues in this Institute Insights.
In this paper, we provide a theoretical and empirical framework that allows us to synthesize and assess the burgeoning literature on CEO overconfidence. We also provide novel empirical evidence that overconfidence matters for corporate investment decisions in a framework that explicitly addresses the endogeneity of firms' financing constraints.
Industry evolution scholars define industry inception as first instance of product commercialization, focusing on subsequent time periods of growth and maturity. Left understudied are the triggers, actors, and actions preceding industry inception.
Extant literature highlights the importance of specific choices such as pricing and particular strategieslike “get big fast” for strategy in two-sided markets. Yet it leaves open how executives form a viable strategy in entrepreneurial settings, particularly when buyers, sellers, and product may be uncertain. With an inductive case study of 8 two-sided marketplace ventures in multiple industries, we developa theoretical framework that describes how entrepreneurs address this challenge: by focusing on successive strategic domains, beginning with supply.
Common wisdom suggests that when it comes to launching a startup, you need co-founders. But a new study finds that solo founders can in fact be successful — if they have the support of co-creators. Co-creators are individuals or organizations that play a critical role in helping a founder build their business, but without receiving the control or equity of a formal co-founder.
Professional service executives who base their professional relationships on individual ties bring more value to the firm.