O objetivo do presente estudo foi levantar o modelo de formação do ecossistema de inovação que orbita as incubadoras integrantes da rede alvo, AGROINNCUBA, identificando as variáveis que compõem o ecossistema e avaliando a resultante deste processo no desempenho de empresas inovadoras voltadas para o agronegócio. A fim de caracterizar o modelo de formação de cada ecossistema de inovação da rede, a metodologia utilizada foi baseada em pesquisa quantitativa (análise multivariada) com os Coordenadores e empreendedores das incubadoras filiadas à AGROINNCUBA, através de um questionário com respostas abertas e fechadas aplicado online via Google formulários, além de entrevistas com os gestores das incubadoras e parques participantes. Os atores dos ecossistemas de inovação da rede AGROINNCUBA, têm desenvolvido uma cultura direcionada a inovação, dedicando-se a pensar e agir de forma a gerir o conhecimento por meio da tecnologia da informação, da organização do trabalho, da gestão da inovação, gestão de pessoas e de recursos, possibilitando assim ambientes que estimulem a criatividade, a viabilização de talentos, contribuindo para o seu desenvolvimento e fortalecimento. Diante do levantamento realizado para a verificação da existência de um ecossistema de inovação estabelecido ao redor das incubadoras e parques científicos da rede AGROINNCUBA, pode-se afirmar que este conjunto de atores tem contribuído para a geração de novos negócios inovadores, assim, promovendo o desenvolvimento econômico e social. / The objective of the present study was to analyze the formation model of the innovation ecosystem that orbits the incubators of the target network, AGROINNCUBA, identifying the variables that compose the ecosystem and evaluating the resulting process in performance of innovative agribusiness companies. In order to characterize the formation model of each innovation ecosystem, the methodology used was based on quantitative (multivariate analysis) and qualitative (discourse analysis) research with coordinators and entrepreneurs from the incubators affiliated with the AGROINNCUBA, through a questionnaire with open and closed responses applied online via Google forms and interviews with the managers of the participating incubators. The actors of the innovation ecosystems of the AGROINNCUBA network, have developed a culture directed to innovation, dedicating themselves to thinking and acting in order to manage knowledge through information technology, work organization, Innovation management, Management of people and resources, thus enabling environments that stimulate creativity, the feasibility of talents, contributing to their development and strengthening. In view of the survey carried out to verify the existence of an innovation ecosystem established around the incubators and scientific parks of the AGROINNCUBA network, it can be affirmed that this set of actors has contributed to the generation of new Innovative business, thus promoting economic and social development.

Over the last two decades, extensive research has been undertaken to understand incumbent firms’ adaptation behavior to disruptive innovation, considering technological change as the most important focus of analysis. Recently, there is an emerging literature that views disruptive innovation as a business model problem in which a technological innovation is deployed. In this literature, disruptive innovation is understood to be primarily a function of conflict between an incumbent’s traditional and an entrant’s new business model. This raises two major questions. First, although the original theory of disruptive innovation evolved from technological studies, this theory persists to explain all types of disruptive innovation over time (Markides, 2006: 19). Furthermore, disruptive innovation has always been studied from an incumbent firm perspective. With the need to shift the research focus from a technology to a business model, we also need a new framework to understand disruptive innovation taking the business model as the unit of analysis taking both the entrant’s and incumbent’s perspectives. Building on business model innovation studies (Govindarajan and Gupta, 2001; Normann, 2001; Hamel, 2000) and the established technology based disruptive innovation theory (Christensen and Raynor, 2003; Christensen, 1997), this study offers a systematic business model framework to comprehend disruptive phenomenon from both an incumbent’s and an entrant’s perspectives. Second, disruptive innovation studies predominantly focus on high-tech industries. Increasingly many low-tech industries are being affected by disruptive non-technological market-driven business model innovations. Considering that disruptive innovation theory is principally iii technology based, a review of the literature suggests that we know little about the differences between high-tech and low-tech market-driven disruptive innovations in terms of their evolutions, competitive and disruptive effects. From the strategic management literature point of view, the contribution of this study becomes even more relevant when the two questions are examined across economic regions. Although there is ample evidence that shows disruptive innovations are not always restricted to developed economies, little is known about how incumbents in developing economies adapt their organizations to disruptive business model innovations. This study takes South Africa as a development economy case-study. The empirical setting of the current study includes four South African industries: the mobile and IT industry (high-tech), banking, insurance and airlines (lowtech) industries. In addressing the two key question of the study, the dissertation presents the empirical analysis at the first-order (firm-level study) and second-order (high-tech vs. low-etch study) levels. The first-order study argues that an innovation creates and grows a niche market through radical product design, different core competencies and/or a different revenue model long before it becomes disruptive innovation. It proposes a framework that attempts to model the evolution of this trajectory from an entrant’s perspective. From the entrant’s perspective, a potentially disruptive business model innovation is a process that evolves over time in successive adaptations to endogenous and exogenous innovation drivers that shape the evolution and path of the new business model. An innovation becomes disruptive only when the new business model fully or partially affects an incumbent’s established business model and market. iv Taking the viewpoint of an incumbent firm, the first-order study further offers a framework that seeks to provide a causality model to comprehend the root cause of disruptive innovation and its impact on the incumbent’s traditional business model. One of the major causes of disruptive innovation is the incumbent’s entrepreneurial dilemma. This means that an incumbent’s success or failure is partly contingent on the senior corporate management’s entrepreneurship readiness that is manifested in terms of taking risk initiative, willingness and ability to take appropriate strategic approaches to enable disruptive innovation. By articulating the causes of disruptive innovation, it suggests four key strategic approaches an incumbent should follow to enable disruptive innovation. While the study finds common patterns for the causes and approaches among incumbents across the four industries at a firm-level, some of the hypotheses of this study could not be proven at an aggregated system level. Disruptive innovation is a relative phenomenon: Some innovations that are disruptive to some firms or industries may not be disruptive to other firms or industries. Therefore, the study further re-examines the aggregated firm-level outcomes by disaggregating the data into dichotomous technology versus marketdriven disruptive innovations. By conducting a second-order analysis at the innovation category level, this study adds considerably to extant innovation literature by establishing that a lowtechnology market-driven disruptive business model innovation entails different business model evolutionary processes, different disruptive effects and different managerial implications compared to high-tech disruptive innovation.

Kommersiellt entreprenörskap är den vanligaste formen av entreprenörskap, men under de senaste decennierna har samhällsentreprenörskap fått en mer betydande roll (Austin et al., 2006, s. 1). Mycket är ostuderat kring samhällsentreprenörskap, främst gällande processen att starta och utveckla samhällsorienterade företag (Martínez et al., 2018, s. 2). Drivkrafterna hos en samhällsentreprenör fokuserar på att bidra till samhällsnytta till skillnad från en kommersiell entreprenör där fokus ligger på ekonomisk tillväxt (Sastre-Castillo et al., 2015, s. 354). I och med detta fokus kan en del hinder och svårigheter för samhällsentreprenörer identifieras. Dessa är enligt Oganisjana et al.  (2017, s. 34) bristande kompetens, begränsade kontaktnät, höga risker, bristande finansieringsmöjligheter och brist på mätbarhet. För att underlätta dessa hinder finns möjligheten att få vägledning från en accelerator. En accelerator fokuserar på att effektivisera lärandet hos entreprenörer, förbättra deras innovativa förmåga och utbilda entreprenörer inom affärsutveckling (Levinsohn, 2014, s. 4).   Efter vår undersökning av tidigare forskning upplevde vi ett gap i forskningen kring kopplingen mellan en accelerator och samhällsentreprenörer. Med detta som grund är syftet med studien att berika den forskning som finns gällande samhällsentreprenörskap och undersöka hur en accelerator påverkar samhällsentreprenörer i processen från idé till hållbar verksamhet, vilket leder fram till vår frågeställning: Hur påverkar acceleratorer samhällsentreprenörer i processen från idé till hållbar verksamhet? För att svara på denna frågeställning utförde vi en kvalitativ studie med en grupp samhällsentreprenörer som alla är anslutna till en accelerator. Datainsamlingsmetoden som användes var semi-strukturerade intervju i fokusgrupp och därefter genomfördes en analys för att hitta mönster och återkommande teman i datan. Från våra respondenter kunde vi utläsa att det finns ett antal hinder och svårigheter som uppkommer under processen. De största svårigheterna som identifierades är kombinationen av samhällsnytta och lönsamhet, att legitimera verksamheten genom att formulera och förmedla ett värdeerbjudande, finansiering och en förlängd startfas. För att överkomma dessa hinder anser respondenterna att passion och empati är de viktigaste egenskaperna och därmed ses kompetenser som sekundärt.   Resultatet från denna studie påvisar att genom att bortse från vikten av kompetens i uppstarten av verksamheten synliggörs tecken på begränsad rationalitet och samhällsentreprenörerna löper därmed risken att förlänga uppstartsfasen då anskaffning av kompetenser inte får tillräckligt stort fokus. Detta i kombination med de hinder och svårigheter som identifierats leder till en förlängd startfas där samhällsentreprenörerna genomgår både en utvecklingsfas och även en etableringsfas. Etableringsfasen innefattar svårigheter som utveckling av en stabil kundbas och hållbar finansiering. Baserat på detta anser vi att samhällsacceleratorer i stor utsträckning påverkar samhällsentreprenörer i deras process då de kan vägleda och utbilda dem genom att uppmärksamma begränsad rationalitet och därmed även vikten av kompetens. Genom denna vägledning kan processen underlättas och förkortas vilket kan medföra reducerade svårigheter. Således kan denna studie bidra med kunskap kring acceleratorers påverkan på den samhällsentreprenöriella processen.

Digitalization is the process of making digital everything that can be digitised to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. However, difficulties exist in evaluating the value created by digital technology investments in organisations, industry structures, economies and society, at large. My dissertation illustrates how the distinct characteristics of digital technologies are implicit in an evolution from stable to fragile product innovation; while highlighting the need for a dynamic approach to entrepreneurial innovation within national innovation systems. The foundations for my work are bound up in the digitalization of value networks, and the context for this research is digital cinema - a process that began in 2000. Digital cinema offered a new value proposition to distributors and significant cost reductions for the US studios. With a reliance on a highly developed value chain to protect intellectual property, these studios sought to learn from the disruption digitalization caused to the music industry, by cultivating digital technology as an, incremental innovation, in replacing celluloid with bytes to project content to cinema audiences. Global digital cinema penetration in 2014 stood at 90 per cent of the total screen footprint. The dissertation assesses features of this digital rollout that have been under-explored; including the role digital technology has assumed in process and product innovation; and, the behavioural responses of both incumbents and new entrants during the diffusion and adoption phase. My dissertation is supported by eight published papers, which highlight the need for domestic policymakers to focus their attention on emerging entrepreneurial innovations; the utilisation of current knowledge and strategies for novel solutions in order to strengthen their respective national innovation systems. Taken together they help explain the creation, diffusion and adoption of digital cinema, explore the new content creation opportunities they support, and explain how three nations in particular have sought to innovate and reorientate themselves in relation to these novel phenomena. The wider implications of the findings of the project build on the innovation literature in examining the diffusion, adoption and knowledge acquisition during the rollout of digital cinema technology. These findings suggest a radically different reading of both disruptive innovations and national innovation systems than has been offered in previous accounts, viewing the digital cinema rollout as a case study of an increasingly mobile sector, in which technological factors retreat in importance behind entrepreneurial innovation as a key driving force in reaching audiences. Finally, in exploring the phenomenon of the digitalization of value networks I have made a significant contribution to knowledge in the design of an innovative mixed method; specifically in the area of field research - a qualitative data collection method designed for considering, observing, and interacting with individuals in their natural environments. Over time, I have established that digital cinema was capable of delivering novel supply and demand solutions - starting with a few unrelated scraps of data, through the establishment of personal networks with communities of practice (in the UK, US & Norway) to building rich, and complex quantitative data sets capable of measuring the entire diffusion and adoption phase of the digital cinema rollout, right across Europe.

Cette thèse étudie différents aspects de la dynamique des firmes, à la fois de manière théoriqueet empirique. Tous les chapitres utilisent largement différentes bases de données microéconomiquespour tester les prédictions théoriques. Le premier chapitre s’intéresse au premiumde l’innovation, c’est à dire la réaction du salaire des employés d’une entreprise qui augmenteson intensité de R&D et qui devient ainsi plus proche de la frontière technologique. L’évaluationde cette réponse se fait en utilisant une base de donnée sur le salaire de 1% de des travailleursbasés au Royaume-Uni. Le second chapitre s’intéresse à la réponse de l’innovation et de laproductivité des firmes à un choc de demande à l’export, considérant les entreprises françaisesayant au moins un brevet, et utilisant pour cela des bases de données à la fois d’origine fiscaleou provenant des douanes. Enfin le troisième chapitre étudie le rôle des coûts d’ajustementdes facteurs de production, et en particulier de l’immobilier des entreprises, sur la dynamiquede l’emploi des entreprises à la suite d’un choc de productivité. Ce chapitre utilise un largeéchantillon d’entreprise mono établissement française.Pris tous les trois, ces chapitres étudient différentes dimensions de la réponse des firmes à unchoc de demande ou de productivité, que ce soit une réponse en termes d’emploi, de salaire,d’innovation ou de taille. / This thesis studies different aspects of firm dynamics both theoretically and empirically. All chapters extensively rely to large microeconomic dataset that are used to test theoretical predictions.First chapter looks at the innovation premium, that is the response to workers’ wage when their firm increases its R&D intensity and therefore becomes closer to the technological frontier. This response is evaluated using matched employers-employees data with information on the wage of 1% of all UK based workers. Second chapter focuses on the response to an export demand shock to a firm’s innovation and productivity looking at all French firms with at least one patent and using both fiscal and customs micro data. Finally, the third chapter considers the role of factor adjustment costs, especially on corporate real-estate, on firms employment dynamism following a productivity shock. This chapter uses a large sample of single-establishment French firms. Taken together, these three chapters explore different dimension of the response to firms to a demand and/or a productivity shock, either in terms of employment and wage, or in terms of innovation and size.

Research focusing on service innovation has seen a significant growth in the last two decades, yet the research on KIBS innovation - and especially on innovation in the creative industries, like advertising - remains rather limited. Due to the increasingly competitive business environment, how KIBS firms co-create with their clients to develop more innovative products or services is becoming more important. Therefore, this research uses the UK advertising industry as a basis to explore the nature of advertising innovation, the service innovation process and the co-creation within it, and how KIBS project innovativeness influences new service development. The literature on service innovation, co-creation and innovativeness involved in developing services or products provides the theoretical foundation for this research. It uses multiple case studies methodology and is based on 45 interviews with advertising managers. The findings of this thesis can be divided into three key areas. First, this study conceptualises the advertising innovation and advertising innovation dimensions and identifies the importance of content innovation and two-sided interface in advertising innovation. Second, the innovation process in the advertising industry can be divided into five phases: the problem diagnosis phase, the creative process, the production phase, the commercialisation phase, and the evaluation and learning phase. (In more detail, the innovation process can be divided into fourteen development stages: client brief, understanding client business, problem diagnosis, strategy planning, creative briefing, idea generation, idea testing, idea selection, idea amplification, production, testing, launch, evaluation, and learning.) This research examines what is meant by co-creation, and identifies how co-creation changes over the course of the service innovation process - where co-creation activities and tasks, and the roles of service firms and their clients, vary across stages of service production. It finds that co-creation between advertising companies and their clients follows a 'W-shaped' curve pattern, with the most intense co-creation in the problem diagnosis phase and the least in the production phase. (The practitioners in these KIBS assert that having too much co-creation activities in the idea generation stage tends to develop uncreative ideas.) Third, as the tasks of KIBS are to fuse generic knowledge with local and special knowledge related to specific problems, to develop problem solutions for their clients, this study conceptualises KIBS project innovativeness as involving two parameters: (1) the knowledge and experience of the problem itself (which relates to problem novelty); (2) the knowledge and experience of developing innovative solutions (solution innovativeness), and explores how KIBS project innovativeness influences new service development. Based on the analysis of KIBS project innovativeness, this study develops a typology of project development in KIBS firms, which includes four types of projects: routine project, new project, solution-led project, and innovative project. This research contributes to understanding the nature of service innovation and co-creation by providing a more thorough understanding of the role of co-creation in the overall new service development process. It also shapes our understanding of KIBS project innovativeness and how it influences new service development.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key characteristics of successful innovation, analyse the innovation process in Unilever and provide set of recommendations for the company. This paper addresses a key question of current business -- how to achieve growth of a company via innovation. The thesis is based on the already published research for identifying the best practices in dealing with innovation, survey with strategic innovation leaders in HHC Unilever, interviews with employees of Unilever, published articles and researches on Unilever and internal documents of the company. Findings indicate that the key characteristics of successful innovators are the corporate culture, innovation strategy, human resources management, structures, evaluation of ideas, processes and metrics. Several improvements were suggested for HHC Unilever. The value of this paper is in the development of an action framework for the delivery of accelerated growth of the company when using innovation. The analysis conducted on Unilever may be replicated to other companies in order to analyse status of their innovative activities.

The gross domestic product (GDP), as a basic measure of a country's domestic economic output is a product of the size of the labour force and its efficiency. Its result is a combination of two immediate factors: utilization of labour and productivity of labour. Productivity is the most relevant in the long run and the key to sustainable economic growth, while innovation is the central factor of productivity growth. Assessing the innovative performance of a country, as well as explaining it, goes a long way in understanding the dynamics of its productivity, hence its prospects for long term economic growth. The aim of this dissertation thesis is to confirm the importance of innovations' influence on the GDP growth in the chosen developed countries. Another aim of this thesis is to point at innovation as a source of competitive advantages for companies that allows further market share gains and thus revenue and margin increase as well as other strategic advantages. The main aim of this thesis is to provide a complete picture of a successful innovation launch in the market and its management during its life cycle, while considering various influences impacting the success of innovation strategies. The focus will be mainly on high-tech product innovations.

Syfte: I takt med att hållbarhet blivit en alltmer viktig fråga har forskare försökt finna medlande variabler mellan Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) och den finansiella prestationen (FP), då lönsamhet är en av de mest betydelsefulla faktorerna för företag. Som ett led i forskningen har innovation uppdagats vara en medlande variabel eftersom CSR och innovation antyds uppnå maximalt värde för företag när de slås ihop. Vidare ses innovation förekomma i störst grad hos industriföretag. Med grund för detta är föreliggande studiens syfte att undersöka hur stark CSR och innovations kausala samband är genom att se till både CSRs påverkan på innovation, samt innovations påverkan på CSR hos industriföretag. Det vill säga om det existerar ett dubbelriktat kausalt samband som visar på en positiv spiral.  Metod: Studien tar avstamp från positivismen med en hypotetisk-deduktiv ansats. Vidare baseras studien på en kvantitativ metod och har utifrån en longitudinell design inhämtat data från Thomson Reuters. Datan representerar ett urval av 569 publika och globala bolag för tio år, vilka sedan har analyserats i statistikprogrammet SPSS.  Resultat och slutsats: Studien visar ett existerande dubbelriktat kausalt samband hos industriföretag, där vi dels kan se att bolagsstyrning- och miljödimensionen inom CSR utgör den främsta påverkan på företagens investeringar i innovation, som i sin tur utgör störst effekt på miljödimensionen inom CSR.  Förslag till fortsatt forskning:Några förslag på vidare forskning är att inkludera andra mått av CSR eftersom det existerar flertalet olika mätningar. Vi ser även att vidare forskning kan studera sambandet mellan CSR och innovation hos icke börsnoterade bolag för att möjliggöra ett ännu mer generaliserbart resultat, samt studera hur lönsamheten påverkas i det dubbelriktade sambandet mellan CSR och innovation. Uppsatsens bidrag:Studien bidrar främst med att fylla det forskningsgap som finns gällande CSRs samband med innovation genom att se till CSRs dimensioner, samt till industribranschen. Studien kan ge bevis för att företag som ser variablerna som två separata aktiviteter drar större fördel att istället förena strategierna till en.

This thesis examines innovation structures and processes in rural poultry industry in Tanzania. In 2005, FAO categorised the rural poultry production system in Tanzania under the lowest sector IV with very minimal biosecurity measures and with no commercial orientation. By 2012, a DFID-funded Research into Use (RIU) programme transformed the industry to Sector III which represents a significant commercial orientation and relatively higher bio-security measures. This thesis explains how RIU achieved that. This analysis is presented from three perspectives. First, the path dependence framework is used to present the observed dominance of the traditional poultry production system as a 'lock-in'. The study makes it clear that before RIU, mental frames, resource allocations and how dominant powers behaved reinforced low innovation tendencies. Second, using the agricultural innovation system (AIS) framework and the concepts of 'organisational thinness' and 'fragmentation' (also from path dependency theory), it explains that by making rural producers feel self-sufficient in inputs and knowledge, practices in the traditional system disconnect producers from engaging with other actors. Third, the concepts of 'innovation broker' and of 'exogenous shock' are used to present RIU as an external force or facilitator which instigated a transformation process. RIU facilitated a large number of rural producers to produce for the market, and which was sufficient enough to create a significant demand for inputs and services. This demand triggered new investment and re-organisation in the supply chains. Then, RIU supported actors to solve capacity problems that emerged from the shock. RIU is therefore presented as a flexible 'innovation broker' who played different roles and allocated resources based on circumstances on the ground. The thesis makes several contributions. It presents a case of how a public action can promote innovation in industries dominated by subsistence producers by playing the role of an innovation broker to support a significant number of producers to change routines and interact with other actors. It also shows that rural growth can be achieved through linking rural enterprises with those in the urban instead of supporting rural actors in isolation. It basically makes it clear that African agriculture needs re-organization, so that technological changes can follow as a consequence.