3D printing technology is rapidly transforming supply chains across diverse manufacturing sectors, enabling personalisation of consumer goods ranging from car parts, medical devices, toys, houses, and even clothing. Food production is also included in the breadth of applications of this expanding technology. Increasing consumer awareness about sustainability, including the problem of food waste, as well as growing interest in customised nutrition have led to the emergence of food industry research focused on aspects, such as packaging, portion size, and healthy sustainable ingredients, to satisfy consumer demands. The growing market for personalised food options in particular, requires increased flexibility and agility to tailor ingredients to an individual’s specific requirements. Such specificity is not easily fulfilled using traditional mass production methods; however, the emerging technology of 3D food printing (3DFP) may be one solution. This paper evaluates the opportunities, risks, and challenges associated with 3DFP, with a focus on developing sustainable supply chains for future growth. Drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with 3DFP industry managers and current literature in the domain, we propose three supply chain models for 3DFP services, as well as an overview of the key business drivers.
12 November 2023 in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management
Purpose: This study empirically evaluates the effect of China’s 2016 Green Financial System (GFS) framework on corporate green development, focusing on the role of green investment in achieving sustainability.Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a quasinatural experiment design to combine difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods for analysis. It examines 799 polluting and 1,130 nonpolluting firms from 2013 to 2020, enabling a comprehensive assessment of the GFS framework’s influence.Findings: This study affirms a statistically significant positive influence of the GFS framework on escalating green investment levels in polluting firms. Robust sensitivity analyses, encompassing parallel trend assessment, entropy balancing test, and alternative proxies, corroborate these findings. A mediation analysis identifies the implementation of an environmental management system as the potential underlying mechanism. A cross-sectional analysis identifies high financial slack, high profitability, mandatory CSR regulations, and marketization level as the influencing factors.Research limitations/implications: The study’s findings have critical implications for policymakers, regulators, and companies. Demonstrating the effectiveness of the GFS framework in driving green investment underscores the importance of aligning financial systems with sustainability goals.Originality/value: This study contributes novel empirical evidence on the positive effect of China’s GFS framework on corporate green development. The quasinatural experiment design, coupled with comprehensive sensitivity analyses, strengthens the robustness of the findings.
An agency problem is defined as a conflict of interest arising due to a misalignment of interests among the managers and other stakeholders of the company. This article aims to review the articles addressing the agency problem and their impact on business performance. This article reviews the contributions of prominent theorists on agency problems and agency costs. Using bibliometric attributes of 740 articles from the Scopus database, this study highlights the publishing trend and outlets, along with leading contributors and collaborators in terms of authors, institutions, and countries. This study identifies the clusters through the bibliographic coupling technique and a trend topics analysis. Most researchers have focused on corporate governance and expressed the agency problem as one of the impact areas. This study is unique as no study to date specifically focuses solely on agency theory or the agency problem through the lens of bibliometric analysis. Future research directions on agency problems and their solutions conclude this study.
12 January 2021 in International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications
Despite the abundance of articles addressing global supply chain risks and their mitigation strategies, there are surprisingly few insights into how different industries manage global supply chain risks while internationalising abroad. There are conflicting results from previous researches that specific global supply chain risk management practices work in one industry but not in others. We believe that in each industry sector, the global supply chain risks and their mitigation strategies differ. We used profile deviation and ideal profile methodology to identify top performers in three industry sectors (Audit, Finance and Consulting, Automotive, and IT and Software) and evaluated their best practices towards managing global supply chain risks. This study used an online survey to gather information on how Indian executives across these industries manage global supply chain risks during their internationalisation process and found the ‘ideal’ risk mitigation profiles for all three industries. These findings provide new insights to practitioners as they will serve as a useful reference tool for Indian executives planning to internationalise.