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Despite a consensus view in the literature about the importance of cross-functional collaboration (CFC) for corporate environmental performance improvement, there is a dearth of studies that explain how exactly sustainability-oriented CFC can foster this objective. The purpose of this paper is to explain the role of CFC in corporate environmental performance improvement. We do this by undertaking two rounds of literature review, developing a proposition after the first round and by collecting illuminative real-life examples that illustrate our arguments in the second round. We propose and illustrate that CFC can effectively address two systemic properties of corporate environmental performance: trade-offs and interdependencies among different aspects of corporate environmental sustainability. If left unaddressed, these systemic specifics would result in organizational, managerial, and behavioral outcomes, such as inertia, opposition to change, lack of information, and so on, which would turn into effective barriers to corporate environmental performance improvement. put CFC addresses these barriers through information sharing, knowledge building, and interest reconciliation.

Drawing on interviews conducted at five Hungarian high-growth firms (HGFs), this paper discusses how dynamic capabilities shape the outcome of HGFs’ efforts to meet the managerial challenges posed by rapid growth. HGFs are investigated in the context of a relatively under-researched country: Hungary. The research demonstrates that dynamic capabilities have strong explanatory power for the surveyed companies’ achievements, in a similar manner to what is established in the literature on HGFs in advanced economies.

This paper argues that EU accession has brought about minimal changes in the patterns of innovation in Hungary. The reason why is not that the ‘EU factor’ is of minor importance; rather, it is Hungary's inability to use EU resources effectively, so as to fully benefit from EU membership. The Hungarian story also demonstrates that the EU cannot block member states from reversing reform or abusing the opportunities EU membership offers to them. We contend that globalization (global value chain integration) has more effectively contributed to Hungary's knowledge-based upgrading than Europeanization (in the sense of policy transfer; access to EU Structural & Cohesion Funds, and integration in the European Research Area). This argument is substantiated with a case study on innovation strategy design and implementation, which illustrates the ambiguous impact of Europeanization, which is contrasted with our investigation of integration in global value chains, conducted through interviews of foreign-owned manufacturing companies about their R&D-based upgrading experience.

Recent trends in corporate venture capital (CVC) activities have added to the size and complexity of the financial system. Intuition suggests that in a period marked by spectacularly increasing start-up valuations, the opportunity to earn large capital gains increases the importance of corporate investors' financial motivations. Drawing on interviews with 12 Silicon Valley-based CVC units of global industrial companies, we examine if new trends in CVC investment represent a diversion from incumbents' traditional focus on improving the competitive advantage of their core businesses. Building on the theory of the financialization of non-financial companies, we investigate the relationship between the strategic and financial motivations of CVC investing. We extend theory by distinguishing between developments at the extensive and intensive margins. We argue that the commonly applied quantitative measures capture financialization only at the extensive margin. Qualitative data indicate that the hypothesis of financialization does not hold at the intensive margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the strategic drivers of digital transformation (DT) at subsidiaries. Our research framework derives strategic drivers from a tripod model that integrates the resource-based, the institution-based, and the industry-based views. We use two longitudinal case studies at global automotive suppliers' Hungarian subsidiaries. We found that each view highlights a different set of strategic drivers. DT in the subsidiaries is boosted by proactive local management and mature process improvement routines (dynamic capabilities); parent–pull relation (internal institutions) and state support attracting manufacturing FDI (external institutions); as well as buyers' increasing expectations and supplier-related factors (industry-based view). By combining these views, we claim that drivers related to the external institutional context and the industrial competition are usually filtered by the global management before contributing to resource adjustments at subsidiaries in a coercive top-down manner. Despite this seemingly deterministic DT process, local managements can actively shape DT, even that of the MNE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper departs from the hypothesis that in the era of agriculture 4.0, start-ups specialised in digital agricultural technology (AT) have the potential not only to rapidly grow, but also to have a beneficial impact outside the core countries of agricultural innovation. To validate this assumption, we compiled data about a sample of Romanian and Hungarian AT start-ups entering the market with self-developed digital solutions. Based on extensive desk research, we identified the main distinctive features of the surveyed startups, compared to their peers in advanced economies, and answered the related key research question: how meaningful is the impact of these start-ups on the much-needed upgrading of agricultural production in these countries? Our analysis reveals that although local AT startups in these countries do develop innovative solutions in the field of precision farming, farm management software, applications, and e-marketplaces, their number is below a threshold where they could have an impact on the upgrading of local agriculture. More importantly, the reduced size of the local market for technology and other hard-to-overcome barriers make it barely possible for them to grow as rapidly as some AT start-ups do in advanced economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from Hungarian manufacturing companies, this paper aims to explore the ways in which digital technologies affect the nature and routineness of work. It concludes that digital technologies impinge on some defining features of occupations, such as workload and intensity of work; the degree to which the tasks can be explicitly defined, measured and codified; composition and amount of skills required for task execution; and the importance of experience or tacit knowledge for task execution. Non-technological factors, such as managerial approach to technology and work design moderate outcomes. Evidence indicates that a reduction in the routine content of job tasks applies only to relatively skilled employees. For low-skilled employees, certain digital assistance solutions increase routine and engender deskilling. We conclude that a qualitative enrichment of shopfloor work becomes apparent only if (1) employees are skilled enough to become upskilled – and thus engaged not only in digitally enabled but also in digitally augmented, high-value activities; (2) employees' work tasks are reorganised, work design and work practices modified, and employees upskilled. Without appropriate managerial interventions envisaging the augmentation of work, digital technology implementation entails deskilling and/or technological unemployment, rather than providing richer dimensions to shopfloor work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]