Lütfihak Alpkan

Organizational Support for Intrapreneurship and its Interaction with Human Capital To Enhance Innovative Performance

Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the direct and interactive effects of organizational support and human capital on the innovative performance of companies. Individual effects of the organizational support dimensions, namely: management support for generating and developing new business ideas, allocation of free time, convenient organizational structures concerning, in particular, decentralization level or decision-making autonomy, appropriate use of incentives and rewards, and tolerance for trial-and-errors or failures in cases of creative undertakings or risky project implementations, are also to be investigated.Design/Methodology/Approach – The study develops and tests a theoretical research model where the organizational support dimensions are the independent variables, innovative performance is the dependent variable, and the human capital has a moderating role in this relationship, via a questionnaire study covering 184 manufacturing firms in Turkey.Findings – Among the individual direct effects of the dimensions of organizational support, management support for idea development and tolerance for risk taking are found to exert positive effects on innovative performance. Availability of a performance based reward system and free time have no impact on innovativeness, while work discretion has a negative one. As for the role of human capital (HC), it is found to be an important driver of innovative performance especially when the OS is limited. However, when the levels of both HC and OS are high, innovative performance does not increase any further.Originality/Value – Two distinct research streams, namely organizational support literature and human capital literature, have already focused on their individual impacts on the innovative performance. However, a combination of these separate streams was not tried before. The paper discusses and investigates what will happen when both positive drivers interact with each other. Moreover, it also investigates how organizational support and human capital are complementary.

Market Orientation and Planning Flexibility in SMEs: Performance Implications and an Empirical Investigation

The study examines the joint effects of market orientation (an internal, cultural factor) and planning flexibility (an internal, process factor) on business performance in small and medium-sized firms. In addition, the conceptual model incorporates market dynamism (an external factor) as a moderator on business performance. A number of hypothesized relationships are tested with a sample of small and medium-sized manufacturing firms in Turkey.The results suggest that while, in general, both market orientation and planning flexibility positively influence firm performance, contrary to the authors hypothesis, planning flexibility exerts a negative effect on performance in highly dynamic markets.Theoretical and managerial implications of these and other findings are discussed.

Modeling innovation: Determinants of innovativeness and the impact of innovation on firm performance

The objective of this paper is to report on the method, analysis, and conclusions concerning two research questions formulated as: <i>What</i> <i>are</i> <i>the</i> <i>determinants</i> <i>of</i> <i>innovation</i> <i>at</i> <i>firm</i> <i>level?rdquo</i> <i>and</i> <i>ldquowhat</i> <i>is</i> <i>the</i> <i>impact</i> <i>of</i> <i>innovation</i> <i>on</i> <i>firm</i> <i>performance?rdquo</i> The results are based on an empirical study covering 184 manufacturing firms in the Northern Marmara region within Turkey. A comprehensive and integrated innovation model is presented composed of two sub-models proposed in line with the two research questions posed. Results and conclusions are presented.

Business Strategy and Innovativeness: Results from an Empirical Study

This study reports on the testing of the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between business strategy and innovativeness. Business strategy is defined here to include market focus strategy, technology development strategy, and operations priorities - including cost, quality, delivery / dependability, and flexibility. An empirical study is conducted based on data collected using a questionnaire developed. 184 manufacturing firms from different industries in the Northern Marmara region in Turkey participated in the study. Multivariate statistics techniques and structural equation modeling are employed. The results have been affirmative supporting the hypothesis. Market focus and technology development factors are found to mediate the effects of operations priorities on innovativeness. That market focus, technology development and cost efficiency have direct effects on innovativeness is another finding of managerial importance.

Drivers of firms’ debt ratios: evidence from Taiwanese and Turkish firms

This study investigates the drivers of debt ratios of the firms listed on the stock markets of two different countries, namely Turkey, a developing country and Taiwan, a newly developed country. The factors impacting short-term, long-term, and total debts are selected as EBIT (Earnings before Interest and Tax), ROE (Return on Equity), sales, total assets, fixed assets-total assets ratio, and depreciation-total assets ratio. The findings indicate that there are differences between Turkish and Taiwanese firms in terms of the drivers’ impacts on the debt structures of the firms. The proposed regression models work better on the data collected from Taiwan as compared to the data from Turkey. Possible reasons are discussed in the final section.

Effects of organizational innovations on firm’s production performance

In the literature, various papers investigate the effects of the technological (product and process) innovations on firms performance. However, research on the effects of organizational innovations is rare. Furthermore, the performance of the firms is usually measured in terms of financial criteria such as the return on assets or equity and the research on the effects of innovations on production performance is limited. The objective of this paper is to explore the role of different innovation types as well as the organizational innovations on the firms production performance based on an empirical study covering 184 manufacturing firms in the Northern Marmara region within Turkey. A significant positive relationship between organizational innovations and the firms production performance is determined.

The Relationships Among the Prominent Indices: HDI-GII-GCI

Several global indices have been used to classify and to analyze the states of countries. Comparison can be performed not only based on country but also annually for each country. In this study, three prominent indices, the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), the Global Innovation Index (GII) and the Human Development Index (HDI) were investigated to examine the relationships between them by employing the PLS-SEM method. According to the results, HDI has an influence on GII while GCI is affected by GII. The results also demonstrated that GII has a full mediating effect on the relationship between HDI and GCI. Moreover, findings indicated that countries should improve their innovativeness by taking human capital into consideration to gain competitive advantages.