Department of Economics, Management, Institution

The special issue on Corporate Social Responsibility Papers: The potential to contribute to the implementation and integration of EU strategies (CORE) collects a selection of papers presented at the Marie Curie Conference CORE organised by FEEM. The CORE conferences Series addresses the question of the goals achievement of the EU strategies. The main EU strategies (Lisbon, Sustainability, Integration) can be successful if their implementation involves adequately and effectively the business sector, non-profit partnerships and networks, local communities and civil society. In this setting CSR holds the potential to stimulate corporate contributions to the implementation and integration of the mentioned EU strategies and can be tested as a policy tool.

Non-financial disclosure has become increasingly popular, as it can satisfy the information needs of a growing range of stakeholders. Because traditional financial reports cannot provide comprehensive accountability, several frameworks and guidelines for facilitating non-financial information disclosure have been developed. Recently, the European Union issued Directive 2014/95/EU (EU Directive) and subsequent guidelines (EU Guidelines 2017/C215/01 [EUG]) to mandate European entities of public interest to convey non-financial information to improve such organizations' accountability toward their stakeholders. This paper studies the European stage of non-financial reporting from a regulatory and practical point of view. To this end, the first research objective is to analyze the elements that the EUG have in common with the IIRF and the GRI 4 guidelines. Second, the paper proposes a first analysis to assess the compliance to the EUG by performing a content analysis on a sample of annual reports and integrated reports (IR) drafted by the 50 biggest European companies. The results highlight that the content elements required by the Directive exceed the requirements of the two frameworks and that there is already a high level of compliance by European big companies with the EUG. More specifically, particular attention is devoted to Social, Employee and Environmental Matters. Accordingly, the companies demonstrated a common awareness of the necessity to provide an exhaustive amount of social and environmental disclosure in order to maintain legitimacy. Also the disclosure on Principal Risks and Their Management is widespread to meet investors' and stakeholders' requirements in recent years with respect to the general level of risk disclosure provided by companies.

This paper employs comparative longitudinal case study research to investigate why and how strong dyadic interfirm ties and two alternative network architectures (a ‘strong ties network’ and a ‘dual network’) impact the innovative capability of the lead firm in an alliance network. I answer these intrinsically cross-level research questions by examining how three design-intensive furnishings manufacturers managed their networks of joint-design alliances with consulting industrial design firms over more than 30 years. Initially, in order to explore the sample lead firms’ alliance behavior, I advance an operationalization of interorganizational tie strength. Next, I unveil the strengths of strong ties and the weaknesses of a strong ties network. Finally, I show that the ability to integrate a large periphery of heterogeneous weak ties and a core of strong ties is a distinctive lead firm’s relational capability, one that provides fertile ground for leading firms in knowledge-intensive alliance networks to gain competitive advantages whose sustainability is primarily based on the dynamic innovative capability resulting from leveraging a dual network architecture.

Drawing on case study research of eight dyadic joint-design alliances and 14 collaborative ventures within them, this paper sheds light on the processes by which interorganizational relationships generate knowledge benefits and performance outcomes for partner firms. Specifically, the paper is aimed at offering a more systematic and comprehensive account of the processes of ‘network governance’, encompassing the following elements: the social mechanisms that characterize network governance and the mechanisms’ antecedents; the relationships among the mechanisms; how the social mechanisms influence the partners’ propensity to engage in knowledge-intensive initiatives within the relationships; the resulting knowledge benefits for partner firms; and how these benefits affect performance outcomes. The dynamics of the linkages among social mechanisms (and their antecedents), knowledge benefits, and performance, and in particular the feedback effects that reinforce over time these linkages, are also integrated into the above account.

In order to advance our knowledge of alliance-level relational capabilities, this paper investigates how searching across different knowledge domains affects both innovation value creation and appropriability in R&D alliances. Focusing on the alliance level of analysis, we advance that, in R&D strategic alliances, search span has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) relationship with value creation and a positive relationship with value appropriability. Our analysis on a sample of 1,515 interfirm dyadic R&D alliances confirms these hypotheses. We find that, after a threshold level of search span, joint value creation decreases. Conversely, the allied firms’ ability to appropriate the value of their jointly developed inventions grows exponentially as the alliance search span increases. Thus, value creation and appropriability may have conflicting exigencies. We argue that firms involved in R&D strategic alliances should develop the interorganizational relational capability to jointly manage the process of search that occurs at the interorganizational level, and specifically the span of their search, in ways that balance the needs of value creation and appropriability.

Innovation is a fundamental source of competitive advantage, and a large literature has struggled to understand the drivers of innovation and how they should be managed to increase innovative performance. Based on this stylized picture of the innovation process, we argue that, in order to better understand what drives innovative performance, we need to focus both on how economic actors search for new knowledge (i.e., explore), and on the characteristics of the existing knowledge that is combined to generate innovation. In this paper we make a first step towards using the above framework for empirical research. Specifically, we focus on dyadic interfirm R&D alliances (R&D alliances hereinafter), which have been shown to be a tremendous source of innovation in previous literature. However, while the drivers of innovation performance at the firm level have been examined extensively, little is known about the factors that influence innovative performance at the dyad level. In an attempt to fill this gap, we focus on two relevant such factors, namely the scope of the search performed by the allied firms and the geographical and organizational origins of the knowledge resources that the participating organizations contribute to the alliance and integrate across their boundaries for the benefit of the relationship. We develop testable hypotheses about the (both separate and joint) impact of these factors on the innovative performance of R&D alliances, and we test them on a sample of 1912 R&D alliances established by ten multinationals operating in the Electric and Electronic Equipment (EEE) industry.

ABSTRACT Trust is a major governance mechanism in industrial district supply chains and has been credited of every sort of advantage in previous literature. However, extant research has focused on trust as a dyadic construct and has rarely addressed the issue of quantifying its benefits. To fill this gap, we focus on network-level trust in industrial district supply chains and advance a computational methodology based on NK simulation to quantify the impact of the existence of supply chain trust on performance.

This paper focuses on the positive relationship between trust and performance in the supply chain and investigates whether and how the interdependence structure of the supply chain moderates this relationship. Interdependence occurs in supply chains because supply chain partners depend upon one another for product and process accomplishments and for the tangible and intangible resources owned by their partners. Framing the supply chain as a complex adaptive system, we argue that, in supply chain contexts, both the degree of interdependence (i.e., the average number of interactions among the supply chain firms) and the overall interdependence pattern (which maps with who each supply chain firm interacts) moderate the relationship between trust and supply chain performance. The proposed conceptual framework is operationalized through the NK fitness landscape model and tested using simulation and Tobit regression analyses. Results confirm that the specific interdependence pattern that characterizes the supply chain has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between trust and supply chain performance, while the moderating effect exerted by the degree of interdependence is not statistically significant.

We investigate the impact of the supply chain interdependence structure on network-level trust in the supply chain (i.e., supply chain trust). We adopt an opportunism-based definition of trust, according to which trust and opportunism are the opposite of one another, and conceptualize the supply chain as a complex adaptive system (CAS). We thus employ the NK framework to model the supply chain network as a set of interdependent partners (and their decisions) interacting among each other according to a specific pattern reflecting the overall supply chain interdependence structure. In particular, we argue that supply chain networks can reveal in practice the 10 patterns identified by Rivkin and Siggelkow (2007) in a recent study on patterned interactions in complex systems. Thus, we perform computational analysis to evaluate, for each considered interdependence pattern, the risk of opportunism by the participating firms, which allows us to compare the patterns on the level of supply chain trust. We show that supply chain trust is a positive (negative) function of the number of uninfluenced (uninfluential) partners, that are, partner firms whose decisions are not influenced by (do not influence) the decisions made by the remaining partners. We also find that, for each examined pattern, the higher the degree of interdependence in the supply chain, the lower supply chain trust.

We adopt a knowledge-based perspective to investigate the individual and interaction effects of partner geographic and organizational proximity on the innovative performance of knowledge-creating alliances. Our econometric analysis on a sample of 1,515 interfirm dyadic knowledge-creating R&D alliances shows that both geographic distance between allied firms and their affiliation with the same business group negatively affect the alliance innovative performance. However, when jointly considered, the two examined partner characteristics positively moderate each other's effect on alliance innovative performance, so revealing a complementary effect on it. We argue that, while the existence of group ties between geographically distant organizations reduces the negative influence of geographic distance on the partners' ability to integrate their knowledge within the alliance, collaborating with remote partners weakens the negative influence of the existence of group ties between partners on knowledge diversity in alliances. We conclude that geographic distance and organizational proximity are contingent upon one another in their effect on the innovative performance of knowledge-creating alliances and that distance (proximity) in one dimension can be bridged (overcome) by proximity (distance) in another dimension.

The ST Seminars provide a locus for discussion on intriguing, high-quality, frontier research papers dealing with manage-ment issues broadly defined. Received submissions are carefully scrutinized based on these criteria. This book features selected papers from ST Seminars, aimed at advancing our under-standing of major management issues from a strategic and/or organizational perspective.