Search

The term “creativity” is quite often used around us, especially lately, as today most people strive to be creative. The main reason for this is that creativity seems to represent an advantage in front of others. Entrepreneurs are extremely proactive and it is this orientation towards action which leads to their success in business, but also in their personal lives. The “creative entrepreneurship” has become a term which refers to the business activity of entrepreneurs belonging to the creative industries. The creative entrepreneur is the type of entrepreneur concerned with the creation and exploitation of creative or intellectual capital. He or she is an investor in his or her talent, but also in that of others. The aim of this paper is twofold: to offer an overview on creativity and creative entrepreneurship, and to make a comparative literature review of the creative entrepreneurs’ characteristics.

Trends in the current literature emphasize the role of the organizational context in employee performance appraisal processes (e.g. Levy and Williams, 2004 , Armstrong and Ward, 2005 and Murphy & DeNisi, 2008 ). The current study aims to develop a comprehensive research framework in order to investigate the employee performance appraisal systems and processes based on main organizational contextual dimensions, in highlighting the relevance of customization according to a company's specific organizational context. In addition, focusing on a strategic approach on human resources management, the study offers insights on the role of organizational context in developing employee performance appraisal systems that could contribute to higher performance in overall organizational strategy implementation.

Motivation has a central role in achieving high performances within organizations. As the organizational climate can be closely correlated with employees’ motivation, providing a motivating environment in industrial firms depends on managers’ ability to create a supportive organizational climate. The main objective of this paper is to underline the most relevant dimensions of the organizational climate which increase employees’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, according to Herzberg's dual factors theory. In the light of this research, the investigation was based on quantitative research techniques, by means of a pilot questionnaire, using a non-probabilistic sample represented by employees and managers of industrial firms from Romania. By analyzing the relationships between organizational climate dimensions and motivation, the results will demonstrate the influence of organizational climate on the level of employees’ motivation. Considering the obtained results, there will be also proposed recommendations to create an organizational climate which could enhance employees’ motivation.

In global evolution, entrepreneurship has branched into various areas according to age, gender, social environment, natural environment, technology and more. A niche of entrepreneurship is technological entrepreneurship, which includes innovations in technology and their entire evolution from idea to “prototype”. This paper aims to narrow this niche, of technological entrepreneurship, into technological ecopreneurship. This term will be detailed and introduced into a conceptual research methodology based on a conceptual model.

There is growing interest in ecological footprint analysis in aiding our understanding of societal demands on the biosphere. Moreover, attention is focused on new potential applications of the technique. Recently, its application to enterprises has been proposed. In the present study, an apparel plant was analysed. The overall purpose of this study was to develop a tool useful for evaluating the environmental impact evolution due to the performance of the plant, as well as for comparing the environmental performance of different manufacturing processes. Data collected were divided in three main categories: energy, resources and waste. The main contributor to the ecological footprint is the resources category, meaning that the changes in fashion will probably affect in the future the results of the indicator. A smaller contribution was the energy used in the manufacturing process, the selection of renewable energy sources being another possibility to reduce the footprint. In the category of wastes, the main contribution was that of urban wastes, which unfortunately cannot be recycled at the moment.

This paper presents the concept of business ecosystems as a complex system, consisting of three levels of development. The analysis of business ecosystem reliability was done based on the probabilities of its elements to cooperate at suitable parameters. The analysis was based on Markov's Chains Theory and reflects the probability of crossing an item from one state to another in the business ecosystem. From this point of view a previously-developed conceptual model was used and a graph of functioning states of each element based on business ecosystems architecture will be provided. The main outcome of this research is to provide a framework for understanding the importance of actors’ involvement in business ecosystems processes.

Most companies are trying to improve their performance in any way possible. The winning card will be hold by those who are trying to innovate, to obtain and sustain performance. This paper aims to analyze the criteria from four of the most important performance measurement models that can be used to measure the performance of the innovation process: Balanced Scorecard, Malcolm Baldrige, Performance Prism and European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). The study will be a theoretical one and it will on one hand emphasize the innovation elements from every model, and on another hand it will suggest the most adequate model to measure the performance of the innovation processes.

In a continuous changing world, a company can achieve a competitive advantage by improving its talent to exploit intangible assets, focusing less on financial results. The most adequate performance measurement method used to identify and illustrate the main drivers of the business, and which offers also an important view on organization's strategy is the Balanced Scorecard model that aligns and focuses every part of the organisation on improving and implementing the strategy. This paper aims to identify the proper key indicators within the organisation that are used to measure the innovation processes. In order to obtain a clear view on the results after measuring the innovation process, the most appropriate research method will be an exploratory research based on case study. The main result of the paper is the analytical framework created by exploiting the key indicators of the organisation used to measure the performance of innovation processes.

The approach on the research of business ecosystems’ actors evolved as result of the analogy with the biological ecosystem. Based on this analogy, three major strategies were selected and defined, in following roles: keystones, dominators and niche players. However, the behavior of different actors was framed differently within already existing industries. From this point of view, this paper aims to emphasize the change of actor behaviors based on the main adopted strategy. Therefore, the role of niche players was chosen as analysis unit. A critical analysis of the literature was performed in order to classify the features of niche players. Hence, the competitive behaviors of actors were identified based on their visibility in relation to their impact on the business ecosystem. From this point of view, based on a case study approach, evidence of identified competitive behaviors in the automotive industry was provided. The result emphasized the dynamic change of actors’ behavior within their business ecosystem and the importance of the actors’ positioning in relation to the produced effect. Additionally, based on framed competitive behaviors, the linkage between the adopted strategy and the actors’ performance within the automotive business ecosystem was illustrated.

This paper aims to define the concept and to provide a comparative analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility, based on case study of reporting initiatives such as: Global Reporting Initiative, Resource Based View Initiative and Global Environmental Management Initiative. This comparative analysis will highlight the similarities and differences of reporting elements used in Corporate Social Responsibility reporting from the initiatives point of view. The proposed model of Balanced Scorecard provides a new structure of Corporate Social Responsibility indicators. This was done according to each perspective in order to analyze which reporting initiative is the most relevant. Also there are presented future directions for implementing the proposed model.

Developing an innovative business idea and implementing it, along with risk taking, generally defines the concept of entrepreneurship. Translating the idea into business reality is subject to the influence of factors from the internal and external environment of the business venture. Within this context, the paper aims to present the results of an analysis of influence which various environmental factors might have upon the success of a technological entrepreneurship business venture. Based on a model previously developed there will be analyzed the relationships between the personal and professional characteristics of the (potential) entrepreneur, the environmental factors and the resources involved in this context, aiming to develop a composite indicator that can be used to assess the potential of success for a technological entrepreneurial business venture. The proposed research methodology is based on a quantitative approach, namely a questionnaire based survey using a non- probabilistic sampling method due to current research limitations.