This study adopts a configurational perspective to examine how business model designs and contextual factors in transforming economies combine to create value. We investigate configurations of efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model designs, corporate ownership, development stage, and external regulatory volatility associated with high growth in a transforming economy. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of Chinese firms, we find five solutions associated with superior growth, suggesting that the effective configurations of business model designs vary in different contexts. Our study offers a holistic understanding of the relationship between business model designs and firm growth, and yields useful insights for business model designs for practitioners.

Effective knowledge change and reorganisation are important factors in the success of business model (BM) design. However, the existing literature has rarely focused on investigating the suitable match between the existing knowledge base and BM design. Building on the knowledge-based view (KBV), this research analyzes the effects of efficiency- and novelty-centered BM designs on firm growth, which will be differently moderated by the knowledge factors of breadth and depth. With the empirical examination of 290 Chinese enterprises, we found that to foster firm growth, efficiency-centered BM design benefits more from a deep knowledge base than from a broad knowledge base, whereas novelty-centered BM design benefits from both. The above results provide new empirical evidence for understanding the contingency effects of knowledge base on the effectiveness of BM design for firm growth.

Entrepreneurial intention is a necessary prerequisite for prospective entrepreneurs to start a new business, and today’s college students are the potential entrepreneurs of the future. How to improve students’ willingness to start a business is an important topic that a large number of scholars continue to pay attention to. The purpose of this work is to disentangle how college students’ previous innovative behavior affects their entrepreneurial intention from the view of social psychology. Survey data from a vocational college in China indicate that college students’ previous innovative behavior facilitates flow, which in turn affects their entrepreneurial intention. Our empirical findings flourish the research on antecedents of college students’ entrepreneurial intention, make contributions to the research on flow in entrepreneurship, and provide useful recommendations and suggestions in entrepreneurship teaching.

Although a number of studies have examined the effects of abusive supervision variability, which refers to leaders engaging in differential abuse toward different subordinates within the team on work-related outcomes, scant research has investigated whether and how abusive supervision variability affects non-work outcomes. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, the current study explores how abusive supervision variability affects work–family conflict through psychological detachment, as well as the moderating role of optimism. Results based on a survey of 260 employees from nine companies show that abusive supervision variability is significantly and positively related to work–family conflict. Psychological detachment mediates the effect of abusive supervision variability on work–family conflict. Optimism moderates the relationship between abusive supervision variability and psychological detachment and the indirect effects of abusive supervision variability on work–family conflict through psychological detachment. This study extends the literature on the effects of abusive supervision variability and provides several important practical implications.

Creative role identity is an important antecedent of innovative behaviors. Both the mechanism of how external factors and individual factors affect the formation of creative role identity and details of this process have yet to be discovered. Based on data collected from 226 students in 6 classes at a university in Guangdong during the development of innovative projects, the influence of innovation climate on the students’ creative role identity, especially the mediating effect of flow, was investigated. The results show that the innovation climate has a positive impact on creative role identity and that flow plays a partial mediating role in this relationship.

Social progress is driven by innovation; especially, in the context of “Internet +” innovation and entrepreneurship, college students serve as a frontier group that brings new ideas and new technologies into society, and as such college students’ creativity and innovation behavior are important for their country’s future social and economic development. Therefore, China vigorously advocates the cultivation of college students’ innovative ability to meet the needs of the development of the times. Determining the key factors currently influencing innovation behavior by college students is an area of current research interest. Building on the literature, this study uses the questionnaire survey method to analyze data from 226 college students relating to creativity, innovation behavior, and creative self-efficacy, exploring the mechanisms by which the students’ creativity affects their innovation behavior in the context of “Internet +” innovation and entrepreneurship. The results show that creativity has a significant positive effect on innovation behavior among college students and that creative self-efficacy plays a mediating role in this relationship.