Recent interdisciplinary research suggests that customer and technological competencies have a direct, unconditional effect on firms' innovative performance. This study extends this stream of literature by considering the effect of organizational competencies. Results from a survey-research...

Global trade in agriculture and food products is increasingly governed by an array of standards. A survey conducted in 2010 covering all operational firms in the nascent floriculture industry in Ethiopia revealed that only 36 per cent have managed to acquire certification for international...

Conventionally, standards are considered as a governance tool in the production system in a one-directional and hierarchical relationship between foreign trans-national corporations (TNCs) or global buyers on one hand and subsidiaries and producers on the other. They were considered as...

The product lifecycle model can be understood as a three-stage model of technological development associated with a particular product technology. In the explorative stage many different designs are developed, in the development stage products become standardized into a dominant design, and in...

This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and economic growth in the European Union. We identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into economic growth. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions in the period 1990-2002,...

During the recent period, we observe that many countries compete with each other to attract foreign investment. When MNCs invest in a host country, it is assumed that a part of their technology spills to the host country firms. But the empirical studies on spillover effects of FDI have failed to...

This research investigates the role of social capital and government intervention in explaining the differences of innovation output and economic growth for regions of the European Union from 1990-2002. Using several measures of social capital and innovation, and the European Union’s Objective...

This paper uses firm-level survey data of Kenyan manufacturing industry to examine the significance of FDI and firm-level capabilities in human capital development. It undertakes a detailed descriptive comparison of human capital and other firm-level capabilities generated by both foreign and...

The Porter Hypothesis postulates that the costs of compliance with environmental standards may be offset by adoption of innovations they trigger. We model this hypothesis using a game of timing of technology adoption. We show that times of adoption are earlier the higher the non-adoption tax....

Although there has been considerable research on firm-level technological capability building in the context of developing economies, there is a scarcity of studies which examine this issue in multinational enterprises socially motivated businesses located in less developed economies.This paper...