If you are interested in attending online, register HERE 48 hours before the event.

Advisors
Josep Maria Argilés Bosch

Thesis committee
Chair: Dr Josep García Blandón (IQS Business School – Universitat Ramon Llull)
Secretary: Dr Diego Ravenda (Toulouse Business School – Campus Barcelona)
Member: Dr Tobias Hahn (ESADE Business School – Universitat Ramon Llull)

Programme.

Abstract

Environmental sustainability strategies have gained traction in recent years in response to the growing awareness and demand from stakeholders to address contemporary challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet, the mechanisms through which environmental sustainability drives firm value are not sufficiently well-understood. Using a global firm-level dataset that covers 2228 firms between 2009 and 2019, this paper demonstrates that environmental sustainability drives firm value through three different mechanisms, namely building capabilities, signalling and eco-innovation. These strategies are found to exert different effects on firm value, especially across firms with low and high firm value. The findings indicate that signalling and innovation strategies have a positive and relatively homogeneous impact across all deciles of firm value, while building capabilities is only beneficial for firms with very low market value.

Advisors
Elio Shijaku
Nizar Abdelkafi

Thesis committee
Chair: Dr Victor Martin Sanchez (University of Southern Denmark)
Secretary: Dr Fariza Achcaoucaou (Universitat de Barcelona)
Member: Dr María Teresa Bolívar Ramos (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Before May 3rd. It is possible to sign up as a group, with people who already know each other, you just have to indicate it on the registration form.

This study extends research on the insurance-like protection offered by corporate social responsibility (CSR) against negative events by unpacking the concept of moral capital. We propose two pathways to generating this moral capital, depending on whether firms’ CSR is targeted at a foreseen or unforeseen negative event. Applying this distinction, we argue that the effectiveness of each pathway depends on the firm’s institutional context. Specifically, engaging in CSR once events can be foreseen provides the more effective insurance when stakeholders’ interests are protected by strong institutions. Conversely, in institutional contexts with weak protection of stakeholders’ interests, the firm may derive more such benefits when it engages with its stakeholders at the time the negative event cannot yet be foreseen. Using employee downsizing as our empirical setting, we find that our sample of 18,083 firm-year observations distributed across 59 countries provides support for our argument.

This study introduces a novel framework based on “alliance tensile strength” to understand strategic alliance failure, integrating insights from a resource-based view (RBV) and transaction cost economics (TCE). Our simulation model, analyzing factors like resource availability, innovation capability, relationship quality, partner preferences, and partner alternatives, identifies a critical stress threshold beyond which the alliance cannot recover and, therefore, is prone to failure. The findings highlight the importance of these factors in alliance understanding the transition from resilience to failure. We also present the Strategic Alliance Resilience Toolkit, a practical tool for alliance managers to enhance resilience strategies and mitigate failure risks. This research offers valuable theoretical and practical insights, bridging the gap between academic understanding and the management of strategic alliances.

Despite decades of research, the impact of internationalization level on performance still lacks consensus. Our objective is to show that this is partly due to the use of different methods of measuring variables. We conducted a first study on the global automotive sector over a 10-year period using various methods to measure internationalization on one hand, and performance on the other hand. Our results validate our hypotheses. We believe that by using different indicators, researchers measure very different dimensions of internationalization and performance. Our research indicates that it would be useful to return to more in-depth analyses of the link between different forms of internationalization and different facets of performance.

Whatever it takes – Antecedents and consequences of leader bottom-line mentality

An exclusive focus on organizational results helps leaders narrow down on what is essential, but when taken too far, it may lead to ignoring anything else along the way. This bottom-line mentality (BLM), a unidimensional frame of mind prioritizing bottom-line results at the expense of other important outcomes, has been exemplified globally in recent high-profile organizational scandals. It appears that leaders who approach their work with a BLM tend to pursue these outcomes by any means necessary – even if it meant engaging in ethically problematic behaviors for personal, environmental or organizational functioning. This seminar will give an overview of current understanding around the antecedents and consequences of leader BLM and present findings from a large multi-national study.

This study addresses the impact of evolving organizational dynamics on career paradigms, focusing on protean careers in the context of boundaryless trajectories. Framed within social cognitive career theory, we investigate how protean career orientation, perceived self-efficacy, and managerial competencies acquired at higher education influence subjective career success. Employing a two-wave research design over three consecutive years, we collected data through two online questionnaires, the second one 9-12 months after the first survey. We tested our research model via structural equation modelling (SEM) and path modelling techniques, applying AMOS and the PROCES macro tool. Our findings based on 217 participating management alumni reveal that early career conditions, particularly self-efficacy and protean career orientations, predict subjective career success. A moderated mediation analysis indicates that a high perception of managerial competencies enhances the effect of self-efficacy on career success through protean career orientation. This study builds on existing research by investigating how formal knowledge acquired at university contributes to future career success. It underscores the importance of proactive individuals with a protean orientation and heightened career self-efficacy, providing theoretical insights and practical implications for predictors of career success.

More information HERE.

Information session held online presenting the Summer School on Management of Creativity & Innovation programme organised by HEC Montréal and UB Business School.

Lucy Stojak, Executive Director of Mosaic, HEC Montréal’s Creativity & Innovation Hub, will answer questions from participants. Register HERE.

Programme. More information HERE.

This study analyzes whether sex and wage perceived discrimination fit statistical measures of wage discrimination. That is, understanding how real and perceived discrimination are associated among European countries. Departing from original studies addressing statistical fit of measured and perceived discrimination, this study replicates that analysis in a multi-country, multi-industry set. For two samples of 24,917 employees in 2010 and 27,947 in 2015 (51.42% and 52.12% being female, respectively) in more than 30 countries we run cross-sectional Probit and ordered Probit regressions to assess the fit between perceptions and statistical measures. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition allows us to generate (1) a measure of sector-specific wage discrimination and (2) a measure of general, gender-based, discrimination. Preliminary results show that, first, sector-specific discrimination does not explain perceived sex discrimination but helps to increase wage discrimination perception. Second, gender-based discrimination increases the perception of sex discrimination but decreases the likelihood to perceive wage discrimination. This study contributes by expanding the analysis to more than one country, in more than one period. Future research will explore the impact of contextual factors on the discrimination perceptions. Furthermore, our study compares two measures of perceived discrimination with two measures of statistical discrimination.

Information session held online presenting the Summer School on Management of Creativity & Innovation programme organised by HEC Montréal and UB Business School.

Lucy Stojak, Executive Director of Mosaic, HEC Montréal’s Creativity & Innovation Hub, will answer questions from participants. Register HERE.

If you are interested in attending online, register HERE 48 hours before the event.

Advisor
Rubén Huertas García

Thesis committee
Chair: Dr Roberta Aguzzoli (Durham University)
Secretary: Dr Luis Jose Callarisa Fiol (Universitat Jaume I)
Member: Dr Jorge Matute (Universitat Ramon Llull)

Information session held online presenting the Summer School on Management of Creativity & Innovation programme organised by HEC Montréal and UB Business School.

Lucy Stojak, Executive Director of Mosaic, HEC Montréal’s Creativity & Innovation Hub, will answer questions from participants. Register HERE.

ABSTRACT

Promoting innovation through Quality-by-Design in the pharmaceutical sector

Two decades have passed since the quality expert Dr. Joseph Juran coined the term Quality-by-Design (QbD) to define the idea that quality is an intrinsic property of a product and therefore it shall be planned from early stages of process and product development. The concept has been embraced by the pharmaceutical sector as its main innovation paradigm, and its application is embedded in the sectorial regulatory frameworks, which are harmonized across most developed countries. This has led to a worldwide diffusion of the QbD literature, although from its start it seems almost exclusive for experimental scientists and technical practitioners. Thus, the literature on QbD from the lens of management is still missing. Based on a bibliometric and content analysis of the most influential papers amongst the identified topics, we develop the mechanisms that seem to promote the adoption of QbD, as well as its main innovation benefits. This paper has several implications both for practitioners and policy makers to promote the internalization and diffusion of QbD, shedding light on its potential application beyond the pharmaceutical sector.

Industrial Doctorates represent a very good option to continue your education, develop new knowledge, directly enter the job market, and integrate into an innovative environment within private sector companies or public institutions. That is why this information session could be very interesting for you to consider this option for your future.

The speakers at the event will be the Vice-Rector for Doctoral Studies, Research Staff in Training, and Talent Attraction at UB, Dr. Maria Feliu, and the Technical Director of the Industrial Doctorate Programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Mr. Jordi Alba.

Please feel free to contact the organiser directly if you have any doubts or questions (Antonio di Paolo: vd.economia.empresa.recerca@ub.edu)

Information session held online presenting the Summer School on Management of Creativity & Innovation programme organised by HEC Montréal and UB Business School.

Lucy Stojak, Executive Director of Mosaic, HEC Montréal’s Creativity & Innovation Hub, will answer questions from participants. Register HERE.

Understanding the Drivers of Eco-innovation Intensity in SMEs

June Dun (Aston Business School), Effie Kesidou (Leeds University Business School), Anastasia Ri (Aston Business School), Stephen Roper (Warwick Business School)

SMEs account for around a half of all business GHG emissions in the UK and are therefore critical to achieving the UK’s 2050 net zero target. Prior studies of eco-innovation focus primarily on large corporations and start-ups providing limited insights into SMEs’ journey towards net zero. Here, reflecting the multi-dimensional nature of eco-innovation, we examine the notion of eco-innovation intensity measured by the number of eco-innovation practices which are adopted by SMEs. Our econometric analysis, which is based on new survey data from around 1,000 UK SMEs, suggests that SMEs initial engagement in eco-innovation practices is driven by a range of strongly interrelated factors which reflect different aspects of the business eco-system. Aspects of the funding environment – government grant and subsidies and the availability of external finance – prove critical in helping firms build a business case and enable their initial engagement with eco-innovation. Other eco-system capabilities – most notably business owner-managers’ environmental attitudes and customer demands – then prove important in sustaining firms’ engagement with eco-innovation, as reflected in their eco-innovation intensity. Our results emphasise the complementary role of eco-system resources and firms’ environmental orientation in supporting sustained SME engagement with the net zero transition. The results have both managerial and policy implications.

Information session held online presenting the Summer School on Management of Creativity & Innovation programme organised by HEC Montréal and UB Business School.

Lucy Stojak, Executive Director of Mosaic, HEC Montréal’s Creativity & Innovation Hub, will answer questions from participants. Register HERE.

Programme.

Programme.