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This paper investigates how science parks (SPs) act as innovation intermediaries to facilitate university-industry research and development (U-I R&D) collaboration and how the SPs' roles influence the collaboration effectiveness. Data was collected from documents and interviews with 52 participants in 19 collaboration projects across four SPs in northern Thailand. This data is unique because it includes the perspectives of the SPs' project managers as well as those of the university researchers, firm owners and managers in a developing economy context. Our findings show that the SPs performed consulting, brokering, mediating, and providing resource roles and thereby enhanced the attributes of researchers, firms, relationships between partners and collaboration projects, to ultimately improve the success of the collaborations. The SPs in Thailand are not only property-based organisations that provide space and facilities for firms to locate in. It is the SPs' active involvement in the U-I R&D collaboration that contributes to its effectiveness. SPs in a developing economy thus evolve their roles to offer greater support to firms in low-tech industries. We also offer evidence of trade-off effects and show how the SPs' roles and attributes of firms, researchers and relationships can substitute for one another to create effective U-I R&D collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responsible management competences are the skills of managers to deal with the triple bottom line, stakeholder value and moral dilemmas. In this paper, we analyse how managers develop responsible management competences and how the competences interact with capabilities at the organisational level. The paper contributes to the responsible management literature by integrating research on absorptive capacity and organisational learning. By creating intersections between these disparate research streams, this study enables a better understanding of the development of responsible management competences. The paper is a systematic literature review on environmental competences, which are a type of responsible management competences referring to the managerial skills aimed at improving environmental sustainability. The findings demonstrate that managers who are able to recognize and acquire external knowledge develop environmental competences, and organisations capable of assimilating, transforming and exploiting knowledge develop environmental capabilities. The paper establishes that a dynamic and recursive relation exists between environmental competences and capabilities. Antecedents and contextual conditions specific to a sustainability context, such as eco-centric values and stakeholder pressures, influence the development of environmental competences. The study shows that environmental competences have a positive direct effect on environmental performance, and an indirect effect as a mediator between environmental capabilities and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on how network-based incubation influences the performance of technology-based start-ups has recently grown considerably and provided valuable insights. However, at the same time this literature has become quite fragmented, inconsistently conceptualised, and theoretically underdeveloped. Therefore, this article uses three management theories to structure the literature, improve the theoretical underpinning and develop an agenda for further research. The management theories are the resource-based view, knowledge-based view, organisational learning, and social capital theory. We find that the network-based incubation literature has convincingly shown that network-based incubation provides start-ups with resources, capabilities, knowledge, learning and social capital. However, the influence of these intermediary benefits on start-up performance is ambiguous. There is a considerable opportunity to advance the network-based incubation literature with contemporary insights from management theories. We propose an agenda for further research on network-based incubation that leads to a fine-grained model of the mechanisms and impact of network-based incubation that goes beyond taken for granted assumptions about the positive impact of network-based incubation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses solutions for contractual hazards in the formation and operation of collaborations with start-ups. We suggest that venture capitalists (VCs) may serve as a mechanism to mitigate contractual hazards and act as a substitute for equity sharing in joint ventures. This article is to our knowledge the first to address the impact of VC on governance decisions for start-ups. We analyse 5405 bilateral collaborations from the SDC database for the period 2009-2014 and find that VC-backed firms are less likely to share equity in collaborations. In a subset of 564 VC-backed firms, start-ups are less likely to choose a joint venture as a governance structure in comparison with established firms. When firms are backed by a larger number of VCs, they are also less likely to share equity in a collaboration. This article improves our understanding of the effect of VC on governance decisions in inter-firm relations and presents evidence of a trade-off between joint venture equity and VC equity in the formation of collaborations. It also shows that this trade-off becomes even more substantial when syndication of VCs is present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European directives for the electricity industry prescribe the creation of a market for balancing electricity supply and demand. In this paper, we demonstrate that a market for balancing has not emerged in the Dutch electricity industry, and that, instead, the balancing transactions are governed by regulated, long-term contracts and a bidding mechanism. We explain the absence of a balancing market by using the framework of transaction cost economics, in which the efficiency of a market decreases with increasing investments in specific assets. The results of a questionnaire among the energy firms that supply balancing power in the Dutch setting show that these firms have invested in specific physical, temporal and dedicated balancing assets. The need for these specific investments to balance supply and demand does not only explain the absence of a market, but also the lack of participation by small firms in the balancing mechanism. We recommend several policies, such as stimulating technological developments for the storage of electricity and demand side management, which reduce these specific investments in balancing assets, and thereby stimulate the creation of a market and the participation of small firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]