This study contributes to a better understanding of performance induced by technological innovativeness by developing and testing a model. The model clarifies the nature of the influence of technological innovativeness and its organisational and inter-organisational antecedents (organisational support for innovativeness and technological alliances) on firm growth, profitability and wealth creation. Survey data were collected from firms in two countries: Slovenia and Romania; structural equation modelling was employed to test the model and the hypothesised relationships. Support for most of the model hypotheses was found. Among the control elements in the model, country, industry technological opportunities and firm age were found to be the most influential.

As other service industry, hoteliers are highly relying on their contact employees known as front liners to deliver services to customers. Therefore, the behaviors of front liners can influence customers' perceptions of a hotel service. Customer-orientation behavior of employees has become a prime variable of interest for organizations wishing to successfully market their products. However, previous researches on this area have stressed the need for a better understanding of the process relating to customer orientation behavior and its influencing factors. This paper investigates the influence of organizational commitment, self-efficacy and intrinsic job motivation of front liners on customer-orientation behavior.

No abstract

Space systems have become a key enabler for a wide variety of applications that are vital to the functioning of advanced societies. The trend is one of quantitative and qualitative increase of this dependence, so much so that space systems have been described as a new example of critical infrastructure. This article argues that the existence of critical space infrastructures implies the emergence of a new category of disasters related to disruption risks. We inventory those risks and make policy recommendations for what is, ultimately, a resilience governance issue.

No abstract

No abstract

The education is currently under the pressure of environmental forces that induce challenging and rapid changes; these changes are interlinked, and influence or are influenced by the education systems and processes -in all their dimensions: students, educators, teaching infrastructure and methods. The higher education has to answer to new challenges and most answers gravitate around getting the best compromise between traditional versus new education technologies. If the blended learning seems to be a common sense solution applicable in several instances, a question stands still: If the source of information/knowledge can be quasi-instantly accessed then how to deal with this tremendous amount of data which develops exponentially in time? What should be the educator's role in the next future? From the educator's standpoint, focused on the educator's role, observing the different progress rates of the available data, information and knowledge (on one side) and human capacity to process these available data, information and knowledge (on the other side), the author becomes aware of the higher pace of the first -in the midst of impetus of new communication and information technologies -and argues that, at this point in time, we are eye-witnessing a real education paradigm shift. The education system is at a critical point in time (call it critical point of education -CPE) when the educator's role must change from knowledge repository to skilled, expert knowledge explorer and identifier, switching from teaching the subject to teach students how to pick the right and relevant information related to the subject -from the ocean of available data. Besides all the above questions, this paper launches the thesis of the education paradigm shift -in that respect of the educator's role in the predictable future, to provoke a discussion, and to open a research path, for higher education strategists, policy makers, scholars and educators.

The current development of energy management services is stimulated by a series of factors that are both external and industry-specific. One important external factor is the pressure coming from legal provisions in favour of sustainable development. This qualitative, descriptive research is focused on an international group with a strategic orientation to sustainability. The aim is to analyse the strategic changes of several group members over a period of 15 years (2004–2019) in order to identify their entrepreneurial behaviour (EB), contributing to scarce literature on EB of sustainability-oriented SMEs—medium-sized enterprises, in particular. The methodological approach included both secondary and primary research (direct observation and in-house interviews). The results match the research objectives and research questions in that they are able to identify different types and degrees of enterprise EB (EEB). The findings demonstrated here support a proposed finer EEB typology: independent EEB and induced EEB. Besides the natural limitations of the research (only comprising companies of a group and single industry), the main limitation of the study is its pre-pandemic characteristic, which is also a challenging research opportunity for further post-pandemic studies on EEB. The promising results of this exploratory research on EEB and novel EEB typology proposed should also be tested in more industries. The research results are useful for scholars, company managers, and entrepreneurs as well as for strategists involved in designing sustainable development policies.