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Achieving a balance between the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) development and teaching competences has become essential. The rapid evolution of the Web has presented universities with the challenge of preparing today's academic staff for the ICT of the future. The European Higher Education Area has adapted to ICT, proposing a conceptual and methodological change in teaching-learning processes in Spanish universities. In this new scenario, the education of students via the Web has become a key factor that requires higher education teachers to have new emotional competences. Although affections, feelings and emotions have been gaining relevance in society and scientific thought for more than a decade now, in the future, we will be dealing with a sensory emotive Web (Web 5.0) and, more than ever before, there will be a deep need for teachers to use and promote intra-and interpersonal emotional competences. In this respect, this paper suggests that the use of rationalistic methodology alone, in this era of sensory and emotional knowledge (present and future), is a mistake. Teaching staff need to develop emotional competences and transmit them to their students, in order to produce graduates who will be more adaptable to new socio-professional contexts.

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Purpose – The aim of this paper is to gain new insight on the determinants of economic growth. More precisely, it disentangles the contribution of an increase in the stock of ideas that exceeds the rate of growth in the steady state and the growth inherent to the steady state. Design/methodology/approach – Following Romer (1990) and Jones (2000, 2002) this paper uses an aggregate production function. The paper also models the evolution of the stock of ideas following the generalisation of Jones (1995). The analysis decomposes growth utilising the estimated parameters inherent to the ideas function. Findings – This article presents a growth accounting exercise that estimates total factor productivity for three Southern European economies. Systematic comparison of the countries illustrates the importance of innovation for economic growth. This exercise shows the main growth patterns over the last 50 years, and highlights the principal determinants by specifying an ideas function. Originality/value – This study yields recent timeframe for explaining per capita income variations within economies and observed differences across economies.

This study explores both the individual impact of geographical diversification and its effect combined with product diversification on small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) performance. Unlike most prior studies, this study distinguishes between related and unrelated product diversification. The research setting is a sample of manufacturing SMEs (1994–2014). By using dynamic panel data models, the results provide statistical support for the existence of a horizontal S-shaped relationship between geographical diversification and performance. The findings also indicate that while related product diversification positively enhances the performance of those SMEs engaged in geographical diversification (albeit not indefinitely), unrelated product diversification may significantly impair it, especially for SMEs opting for low and high levels of international diversification. Our study reveals that product and international diversification strategies in the case of SMEs are complementary or substitutive strategies depending on the specific type of product diversification strategy and the level of geographical diversification adopted. JEL CLASSIFICATION: F23; L25; M16

A firm's set of knowledge processes may be affected by the entrepreneurial culture of the country in which it is located. Total factor productivity, mainly associated with technical progress, accounts for most differences over time and across countries. In the present work we examine the determinants of total factor productivity growth in 26 OECD countries between 1965 and 2010, breaking them down into changes in technical efficiency and shifts in technology over time. Using the U.S. as the technology frontier, different patterns of productivity growth emerge between world technology leaders and countries with low initial levels of productivity. Whereas changes in efficiency seem to be the main result of the evolution in the stock of knowledge in technologically dependent economies, suggesting that less advanced economies can benefit from their relative backwardness, domestic research effort appears to be a relevant factor for technology leaders.

This study sheds additional light on the product diversification‐performance relationship for firms in a country having recently attained an advanced economy status in our period of analysis. We assume there will be an inverted U‐shaped relationship and use a sample of small, medium, and large Spanish manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2008. Our findings provide solid support for this assumption, and are identical when the sample consists of small, medium, and large firms and of large firms alone. Our results also suggest that the larger the firm, the higher the optimal level of diversification. Panel data models are used to control for unobservable heterogeneity and potential endogeneity problems. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.