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This paper investigates the emerging potential of metaverse technology and the diverse opportunities it presents for companies across industries. Although the metaverse remains in its nascent stages, its swift evolution has introduced a broad spectrum of use cases that hold significant promise for businesses. However, despite the evident potential, there remains a limited understanding of how metaverse technology can be effectively applied to benefit business operations and strategy. To address this gap, this study employs a scoping review methodology, systematically collecting and analyzing data from academic literature, publicly available sources, and company websites. The comprehensive review identified 101 distinct use cases of metaverse technology, which were subsequently categorized into three primary application fields: developing new product and service offerings, enhancing customer experience, and optimizing internal business processes. These findings not only provide a compelling rationale for companies contemplating the adoption of metaverse technology but also represent the first extensive exploration of its applications across diverse fields and industries. The study offers valuable insights that are crucial for both academic researchers and business practitioners who are keen to understand and leverage the transformative potential of the metaverse. By mapping out the current landscape of metaverse applications, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how companies can harness this technology to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, and create new value propositions in an increasingly immersive and interconnected world.
From hype to impact
(2024)
This study explores the impact of metaverse technology on business models (BMs). Despite increasing academic and practical interest, the adoption and seamless integration of this technology poses substantial challenges for businesses. This study adopts a grounded-theory approach to explore how firms can incorporate this technological innovation within their existing BMs. Drawing upon insights from 20 interviews, the data were structured using the Gioia methodology, uncovering 5 dimensions that elucidate how companies can leverage metaverse technology to augment value creation, capture, and delivery, both internally and externally, within their BMs. These dimensions serve as a roadmap for firms seeking to embrace the metaverse, offering insights into potential adaptations to their existing BMs. This study contributes to the theoretical discourse surrounding the metaverse by delineating specific components within BMs that can be tailored to accommodate metaverse integration. Furthermore, our findings offer invaluable guidance and recommendations to firms and ventures, highlighting the diverse areas within the value creation process where metaverse integration can be strategically applied. This research lays the foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of metaverse technology's role in shaping the business landscape.
Purpose
When CEOs are publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, this is known as CEO activism. The steadily growing number of such statements made in recent years has been subject to a flourishing academic debate. This field offers first profound findings from observational studies. However, the discussion of CEO activism lacks a thorough theoretical grounding, such as a shared concept accounting for the heterogeneity of sociopolitical incidents. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide an archetypal framework for CEO activism.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a multiple case study approach on 145 activism cases stated by CEOs and found seven distinct statement archetypes.
Findings
The study identifies four main structural design elements accounting for the heterogeneity of activism, i.e. the addressed meta-category of the statement, the targeted outcome, the used tonality and the orientation of the CEOs’ positions. Further, the authors found seven distinguishable archetypes of CEO activism statements: “Climate Alerts”, “Economy Visions”, “Political Comments”, “Self-reflections and Social Concerns”, “Tech Designs”, “Unclouded Evaluations” and “Descriptive Explanations”.
Research limitations/implications
This typology classifies the heterogeneity of CEO activism. It will enable the analysis of interrelationships, mechanisms and motivations on a differentiated level and raise the comprehensibility of research-results.
Practical implications
The framework supports executives in understanding the heterogeneity of CEO activism and to analyse personality-fits.
Originality/value
To the authors’ knowledge, this marks the first conceptualisation of activism developed cross-thematically. The work supports further theory-building on CEO activism.
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to explore how multi-national corporations (MNCs) can effectively adopt artificial intelligence (AI) into their talent acquisition (TA) practices. While the potential of AI to address emerging challenges, such as talent shortages and applicant surges in specific regions, has been anecdotally highlighted, there is limited empirical evidence regarding its effective deployment and adoption in TA. As a result, this paper endeavors to develop a theoretical model that delineates the motives, barriers, procedural steps and critical factors that can aid in the effective adoption of AI in TA within MNCs.
Design/methodology/approach
Given the scant empirical literature on our research objective, we utilized a qualitative methodology, encompassing a multiple-case study (consisting of 19 cases across seven industries) and a grounded theory approach.
Findings
Our proposed framework, termed the Framework on Effective Adoption of AI in TA, contextualizes the motives, barriers, procedural steps and critical success factors essential for the effective adoption of AI in TA.
Research limitations/ implications
This paper contributes to literature on effective adoption of AI in TA and adoption theory.
Practical implications
Additionally, it provides guidance to TA managers seeking effective AI implementation and adoption strategies, especially in the face of emerging challenges.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is unparalleled, being both grounded in theory and based on an expansive dataset that spans firms from various regions and industries. The research delves deeply into corporations' underlying motives and processes concerning the effective adoption of AI in TA.
HHL als Innovationsmotor
(2024)
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to develop an integrative framework of accelerator design to answer the question of what activities accelerators perform and how they function within a structured framework. Research on the functioning of accelerators as a mechanism for startup engagement produced multiple empirical results. However, the comparability of relevant research is strongly limited, currently hindering theoretical developments. Existing accelerator design models often differ and only partially overlap, which leaves extant literature with a fragmented and discordant conceptual understanding.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a meta-synthesis method using qualitative analysis of 36 accelerator design articles, an integrative framework is developed. After identification of relevant literature, a renowned method for extracting, coding and synthesizing data on individual and cross-study level is applied to identify accelerator design constructs. Eventually, identified accelerator design constructs are integrated into a framework resting on the activity system lens of business model design.
Findings
The article reconciles fragmented knowledge on accelerator design and shows how accelerator design can be holistically conceptualized by 32 key activities clustered in eight design dimensions. The framework is complemented by an initial guideline for measurement. The findings further highlight formerly disregarded aspects of governance and community formation from a processual and structural perspective.
Originality/value
This article is the first to present a comprehensive picture of accelerator design integrating multiple empirical findings of prior research into a single coherent framework. This framework offers a shared foundation for future research exploring the delineations, functioning and impact of accelerators. From a practical perspective, the article provides managers of accelerators a guide to design, review and improve programs according to their value creation goals.
Entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) is gaining momentum as a viable alternative to starting a company on one’s own. However, despite its growing practical relevance, scholarly work about ETA is scarce and has not been comprehensively reviewed. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic review of entrepreneurship literature by identifying studies that examine ETA and its outcomes. Our review methodology was developed based on established guidelines for systematic reviews and protocols, which informed our scoping review process and analytical approach. Searches were conducted on three electronic databases, and inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied. For inclusion, studies must examine an entrepreneurial perspective in buying into a company. Quantitative and qualitative data were extracted for thematic analysis and descriptive statistics. ETA is an entrepreneurship model with growing appeal and relevance in practice but limited academic evidence. While there is extensive research on leveraged buyouts and family-external succession, evidence specifically on ETA is still lacking. In particular, knowledge about the entrepreneurial intent that makes ETA unique is absent from the evidence base. As ETA gains momentum, entrepreneurs need to understand the unique properties, the various approaches, and the upsides and eventual downsides of acquiring a business instead of starting one from scratch. The present work may serve as a starting point for future research as we scope existing evidence on the archetype of ETA and identify a definition, available models, and a process archetype.
Krise braucht Offenheit
(2022)
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted many entrepreneurs’ business outcomes and sometimes additionally influenced their psychological well-being. At the same time, some entrepreneurs hold personalities that warrant higher crisis resilience than others. This study investigates these differences in resilience to crisis based on personality. Specifically, the effects of entrepreneurs’ personalities on both their crisis-dependent business outcomes and psychological well-being were explored in a mixed-method approach. Results from a sample of 187 entrepreneurs revealed significant differences in personality traits between entrepreneurs with disparate COVID-19 impact on their businesses. Further, 18 in-depth interviews investigated what effects the COVID-19 pandemic had on the entrepreneurs’ psychological well-being. The interviews confirmed that entrepreneurs differed in the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their businesses. Similarly, differences between the entrepreneurs existed in the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their psychological well-being, highlighting individual differences in crisis resilience. Personality played a central role regarding the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic on their business outcomes and psychological well-being. The findings provide information about the specific crisis-resilient entrepreneurial profile. Further, they show that personality influences on businesses and psychological well-being are context-dependent, thereby recommending the integration of contextual factors in future entrepreneurial research.
Corporate accelerators have become integral actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems. They are heterogeneous and rapidly developing entities differing significantly in objectives and design. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive corporate accelerator taxonomy and present its evolution over time. We analyse the population of corporate accelerator programmes active in Germany in late 2019. Building on a unique dataset of 87 semi-structured interviews with managing directors of corporate accelerators, participating startups and corporate documents, we derive distinctive archetypes, differing in strategic objectives and defining characteristics. Based on this contemporary taxonomy, we discuss how corporate accelerators have evolved over recent years and delimit them to similar concepts such as incubators. Thereby, we contribute a holistic understanding of corporate accelerator commonalities and differences and provide the foundation for an evolutionary perspective to the field of corporate accelerator research. For entrepreneurial practice, we add novel insights on the experience-based learnings behind a considerable archetype evolution.