Ensuring community based program sustainability is critical for the targeted communities. When such a program is no longer sustainable, its impact decreases, leading to unmet expectations, affecting the community as a whole. As such, scrutinizing sustainability factors for community based programs proves essential. This paper analyses those factors by reviewing the literature, questioning 188 individuals from community based organizations and other non-profits and providing a ranking for the most important of them. The factors were divided into 3 categories: related to program itself, related to host (implementing) organisation and related to the community where the program is operationalized. For data analysis several statistical tests were used, leading to a ranking of the most important 22 factors for community based programs sustainability.
This study examines the influence of eco-innovation capability on sustainability driven innovation practices in SMEs. In this study, eco-innovation capability is represented by four factors—internal setting, strategies, operations and structure—while sustainability driven innovation practices are represented by three types of practices—process, organizational and product. The direct relationship between eco-innovation capability and sustainability driven innovation practices is statistically tested by using a sample of 397 Romanian manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises using PLS–SEM and SmartPLS software. The results show that the development of eco-innovation capability has a direct and positive effect on sustainability driven innovation practices employed in manufacturing SMEs by encouraging them to get involved in cleaner production practices, waste handling and recycling on a regular basis or integrate eco-efficiency into their operations, develop new channels for sustainable products or integrate customers’ suggestions or complaints, implement environment management systems, use eco-friendly raw materials or focus on new product development, for instance. Therefore, the paper extends the literature dedicated to eco-innovation by shedding some light on what to focus on when building eco-innovation capability.
This paper analyses the influence of Sustainable Supply Chain Management strategies—Supplier Selection, Product Stewardship and Logistics Management—on Supply Chain Management functions—Planning, Execution, Coordination and Collaboration in the oil and gas distribution industry. Using multiple regression analyses, we performed the study on 79 companies from Romania and the Republic of Moldova operating in the oil and gas distribution industry. We concluded that Sustainable Supply Chain Management strategies have a positive and significant influence on Supply Chain Management functions, both overall and on each of the functions considered in the study. Overall, the findings of this study can be used by companies operating in oil and gas distribution to design Sustainable Supply Chain Management strategies to better address the requirements for more environmentally and socially responsible activities in their supply chains and to optimize their Supply Chain Management to better cope with Sustainable Supply Chain Management requirements and expectations.
Non-profit organizations (NPOs) have become increasingly important in the last decade for Romanian society since the state often failed to fulfill some of its social responsibilities. Romania’s economic and financial crisis several years ago hardly hit non-profit sector because it led to a significant drop in public spending at the government level and cuts of financing programs from companies, two main donors for NPOs while simultaneously has amplified society’s problems and gave rise to new target groups requiring support. This led to an acute need to address sustainability at organizational level since existing sustainability models in the literature are hardly adequate for Romanian context. We developed a model based on literature survey and Romanian experts’ interviews, which allow us to identify relevant factors for Romanian non-profit sustainability. Three determinants were considered: Cognitive competence (nine items analyzed), Social awareness (seven items analyzed) and Financial vulnerability (four items analyzed), as well as two types of results: economic and social. The model was tested through an empirical research on 103 Romanian NPOs and on two sub-samples (nongovernment organizations and community based organizations) and found, using univariate and bivariate analysis, that the three considered determinants are correlated and statistically influence Romanian NPOs sustainability.
21 April 2021 in Technology Analysis & Strategic Management
This study aims to examine the relation between innovation ambidexterity and organisational performance and the moderating effect of business experience on a sample of IT companies. Various authors pointed out the necessity to analyse not only explorative and exploitative innovation separately, but also their combined effects on organisational performance. These effects are assessed by using polynomial regressions in testing the research hypotheses. Business experience contributes to important differences in both the quantity and quality of resources available, which are critical for innovation. With only a handful of papers specifically addressing business experience in the context of innovation ambidexterity, this study fills a major research gap. The findings demonstrate the positive influence of innovation ambidexterity on organisational performance. In terms of business experience, the findings show that in new ventures it moderates the relation between innovation ambidexterity and organisational performance, while in established companies no relation was found. Business experience is rarely used to explain interactions between innovation and performance and, as such, we provide new insights on how both new ventures and established companies make use of business experience in their innovation approaches.
This paper investigates the effects of social media on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. Combining the internal and external approaches of opportunity recognition, the study analyzes how social media influences the entrepreneurs in discovering new entrepreneurial opportunities. Structural equation modeling was used in this study, using the variance-based partial least squares (PLS)–structural equation modeling (SEM), on a sample of 354 entrepreneurs. We concluded that social media directly and positively influences entrepreneurial opportunity recognition while entrepreneurial alertness (internal approach) and social networks (external approach) partially mediates its indirect effects on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. The study contributes to the existing literature by bringing new insights into the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition process by focusing on a poorly represented factor in the literature, social media.