Search Results (14)

In South Africa, small enterprise development is at the top of the government agenda. However, a significant issue lies in the type of skills and support necessary to develop SMMEs through the various phases of the business cycle. This study addresses a knowledge gap regarding whether SMME support interventions comprehensively address all managerial functions as per the P-O-L-C model. Guided by the Resource-Based Theory (RBT), and the Human Capital Theory (HCT), data was collected from 350 SMMEs in the Eastern Cape province using a structured self-administered questionnaire. Multiple regression analyses revealed that non-financial support from both the public (R² = 0.089, p = 0.215) and private (R² = 0.161, p = 0.207) sectors was not significantly associated with SMME success. Furthermore, while private sector support explained 14.8% (R² = 0.148, p < 0.001) and public sector support 7.6% (R² = 0.076, p < 0.001) of the variation in meeting SMME needs, support in key functional areas remains fragmented and poorly targeted. These findings highlight a systemic disconnect between the supply and demand sides of the SMME support ecosystem. To address this, this study proposes an integrative support model that aligns RBT and HCT within the P-O-L-C managerial framework, ensuring phase-appropriate, function-specific support. This framework departs from prior applications by reconceptualizing managerial support not as a generic intervention, but as a strategically sequenced process aligned with the business lifecycle. The model contributes a new lens for theorizing support efficacy and offers practical guidance for more targeted intervention design. This framework offers both theoretical and practical contributions toward improving the design and implementation of business interventions in South Africa. Full article

Achieving organizational efficiency requires the selection of an appropriate operating model. To date, no objective indicators, methods of measuring, or criteria for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of forest management organizations have been developed. In the heterogeneous forest management of the European Union (EU), multiple objectives and functions—from production to social and ecological services—coexist at regional and national levels. This study provides an overview of the organizational and legal forms of EU forestry, taking into account environmental conditions, ownership structures, and the role of the forestry sector in national economies. The legal information of EU countries on forest management was verified. We examine the impact of the entity’s organizational and legal form on the implementation of sustainable forest management and the objectives of the New EU Forest Strategy 2030, particularly in terms of absorbing external capital for forest protection and climate-related activities. Joint stock companies, public institutions, and enterprises are the most relevant. The private sector is dominated by individual farms, associations, chambers of commerce, and federations. A clear trend toward transforming state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies and expanding their operational scope has been confirmed. Multifunctional forest management is practiced in both state and private forests. Economic efficiency, legal and property liability, and organizational goals depend on the chosen organizational and legal form. Full article

The technological development of oil companies in Mexico is essential for ensuring their economic sustainability. A mechanism for the effective management of the technological development of oil companies, and the industry as a whole, is to determine its priority areas. This article provides a calculation for the choice of planning directions for the development of the oil sector in Mexico and related studies. Currently, the most promising technologies are offshore drilling and production. To achieve the study goals, we analyzed the patent activity of the oil sector. The results showed an unfavorable trend: the number of private and public patents in Mexico is decreasing. For example, from 2017 to 2023, the number of patents for offshore technologies decreased by more than 10 times. This dynamic significantly hinders the development of the oil industry. Despite the general measures taken within the framework of energy policy, the volume of oil production is constantly declining. Thus, in order to ensure the continued reproduction potential of the oil sector, it is necessary to take into account the importance of research and development. The innovation rating of the Mexican Petroleum Institute, a state-funded research center for the hydrocarbon sector, has been declining, having fallen by more than 50% from 102 international patents in 2014 to 40 in 2024. Today, the Mexican Institute of Petroleum is in the 48th percentile in terms of research performance among research institutes. The present authors’ approach considers that the intensification of technological development, which is costly, should not be an end in itself but rather an important means of increasing the efficiency of the integrated activities of oil companies. To integrate the patent-technological component of the strategic planning of oil companies, the concept of sub-potentials is proposed. The potential for the functioning and development of an oil enterprise from the point of view of the systems approach is decomposed into the sub-potentials of reproduction, defense, management, and reserve, which, under adverse conditions, can transition to the sub-potentials of threat and containment. An important task is to determine these transition points. The patent-technological component is taken into account in the sub-potential of reproduction. The remaining components of company development are taken into account within the framework of other sub-potentials, which are not discussed in detail in this article. At the same time, due to the unified conceptual approach, the integration of goals and objectives for technological development into a single economic and socio-ecological strategy for oil enterprises is ensured, which is the most effective approach to ensure their sustainable development. The dynamics of patent generation are an important factor in assessing the technological component and, in general, the effectiveness of projects in the energy sector. Full article

Regulation (EU) 2020/852 of the European Parliament, also known as the Taxonomy Regulation, facilitates environmentally sustainable investments. It is part of the concept of the European Green Deal and a ‘tool’ for financial institutions, enterprises, and investors, facilitating the assessment of the environmental impact of a particular project. The Regulation contains the criteria an activity must meet to be considered environmentally sustainable. The role of the Taxonomy Regulation is to enable the flow of public and private capital towards ecological and sustainable activities. The document does not need to be implemented into the legal order of individual EU member-states, which results in its direct application. The main financial instruments enabling the achievement of the goals of the Taxonomy Regulation may be green bonds and other forms of capital raising by entrepreneurs and forest ownership structures. The assumption of the Regulation is to achieve the principles of sustainable environmental activity when spending funds obtained from private investors. It is an issue of key significance to identify the areas of management and financial accounting in the operational activities of forest enterprises that can be qualified for the Taxonomy Regulation. Forestry activities, including the processes mentioned therein, the objectives of the New EU Forest Strategy, and the LULUCF Regulation, are to play an essential role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The role of forestry in the supply chain in its broad sense is also considered. Forestry and forest management can receive capital for sustainable development due to the threat resulting from exclusions that strengthen the protective function of the forest (the protection of biodiversity). These processes will occur at the expense of production and numerous social functions. Full article

This paper presents an original wireless DYU Air Box of an environment-monitoring IoT (EMIoT) system on a campus to offer information on environmental conditions through the public ThingSpeak IoT platform for stakeholders including all the students and employees on the Da-Yeh University (DYU) campus in Taiwan. Firstly, the proposed wireless heterogeneous multi-sensor module aggregates BME680, SCD30, PMS7003, and BH1750 sensors with a TTGO ESP32 Wi-Fi device based on the I²C and UART interface standards of series communication. Through the DYU-802.1X Wi-Fi network with the WPA2 Enterprise security directly, the wireless multi-sensor monitoring module further forwards the observation data of environmental conditions on campus via the DYU-802.1X Wi-Fi network to the public ThingSpeak IoT platform, which is a cloud service platform to aggregate, visualize, and analyze live sensing data of air quality index (AQI), concentrations of PM_1.0/2.5 and CO₂, brightness, ambient temperature, and relative humidity (RH). The results illustrate the proposed DYU Air Box for monitoring the indoor environmental conditions on campus and validate them with sufficient accuracy and confidence with commercialized measurement instruments. In this work, the wireless smart environment-monitoring IoT system features monitoring and automatic alarm functions for monitoring AQI, CO₂, and PM concentrations, as well as ambient illumination, temperature, and RH parameters and collaboration and interoperability through the Enterprise Intranet. All the organizational stakeholders interested in the environmental conditions of the DYU campus can openly access the information according to their interests. In the upcoming future, the information of the environmental conditions in the DYU campus will be developed to be simultaneously accessed by all the stakeholders through both the public ThingSpeak IoT platform and the private EMIoT system. Full article

Industrial ecology addresses newer business models that improve flows of energy, water, and materials, mimicking interconnections found in natural systems. Businesses can function interdependently to extend the life cycle of resources by setting up systems to repurpose waste or transfer a byproduct of manufacturing as an input for creating another product. Although the extant literature focuses on the role of businesses in closed-loop processes, governments can catalyse sustainable entrepreneurship to transition to a circular economy. There is a limited understanding of how public–private partnerships can facilitate this shift in small and medium enterprises. Multiple case studies were conducted to examine industrial ecology projects that were spearheaded by a state grant scheme in Australia. The long-term progress in establishing initiatives across commercial and industrial projects was monitored. The findings show government incentives to start up projects facilitate conditions to develop technology and other capabilities for responsible production and consumption. This study extends the theory of innovation ecosystems into practice. The model demonstrates that sustainable value for business and society can be realized through financial support and collaboration that enables entrepreneurship and drives circularity across cities and regions. Full article

Onboarding handbooks constitute a very important and powerful tool in the socialization and integration processes of recruits implemented by Human Resources. As companies compete to thrive in global markets, the attraction and retention of employees have been given much attention in recent years. One of the strategies developed by companies to achieve this goal are the so-called Onboarding Handbooks given to newcomers, serving as a means of facilitating workers’ integration into the everyday processes of the company. As a consolidated research area, many HR studies have been developed around these subjects, as these manuals have been proven to be important tools in the socialization process of the former candidate, now entering the organisational culture of a given enterprise. A literature review was developed according to the main variables of the study of Organisational Socialization processes, strategies, and methods, with special emphasis on the onboarding book. To find out if these manuals correspond to the relevant literature of HR, eight of the onboarding handbooks from several public and private organizations have been analysed following the proposed structure of onboarding handbooks presented in the literature review. In addition, purposeful sampling was followed and content analysis on the handbooks was developed. The paper’s contributions are twofold: (a) the authors suggest a complete and up-to-date structure for the contents of onboarding books to be applied by HR managers and (b) compare its structure to several manuals of different enterprises from various sectors of the Portuguese economy. Findings show that the onboarding book remains an important tool and facilitator of organisational integration. Although, the onboarding processes are changing, and even the format of the onboarding books can become different (digital or not), their contents are essential for the socialization of newcomers and a means to organisational culture dissemination as well as containing functional contents such as internal norms and regulations. Full article

This paper addresses the management of digital–informational transformation of industrial enterprises. Any transformation requires the coordinated action of several independent actors. Similarly, the digital–informational transformation required for the fourth industrial revolution (i.e., Industry 4.0) requires the involvement of multiple actors from the public and private sectors. This applies to an individual company as well as to the entire sector, regardless of the desired level of transformation. The increasing dissolution of boundaries between industrial and non-industrial actors is therefore essential for Industry 4.0. This paper addresses the above dissolution activities, focusing on cross-company networks and management issues. The management aspects of the following factors are examined: culture change, strategies, degree of digitalization, degree of networking, Internet of Things, digital ecosystems, human resources, organizational development, hierarchies, cross-functional collaboration, cost drivers, innovation pressures, supply chains, enterprise resource planning systems and corporate acquisitions/mergers. Based on the findings on the above factors, a management-driven model of the “transformation to Industry 4.0” for manufacturing companies is presented and discussed. This work thus complements the existing literature on Industry 4.0, as the majority of the literature on Industry 4.0 deals with technical problem solving at the field level. Full article

This paper examines communication processes between state institutions and migrants under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to determine where migrants obtain their information on specific legal regulations and restrictions on rules of conduct in the public space and professional environment. This issue is examined through the example of Ukrainian labour immigration in Poland. Referring to the results of our survey research, it is established that in a crisis, when the importance of information in the public sphere increases and, at the same time, direct social contacts are restricted, the special role of the employer is revealed. The employer is perceived not only as an entity offering work, but also as an important channel of information about state policy, regulations and rules of conduct applicable in a crisis. These findings are an indication, on the one hand, for state institutions to take this role of employers into account in migration policy and, on the other hand, for employers themselves to be aware of their social role towards migrants and play it responsibly. We believe that the study, conducted in the first two months of the pandemic, has become very timely with the outbreak of the Ukrainian–Russian war. Full article

Engineering human-centric urban transport systems should be carried out using information technology in forecasting traffic and passenger flows. One of the most important objects of urban transport systems’ progress is modeling patterns of transport flows and their distribution on the road network. These patterns are determined by the subjective choice of city residents of traffic routes using public and private transport. This study aimed to form a sequence of stages of modeling transport and passenger flows in human-centric urban transport systems and passenger flows in the human-centric urban intelligent transport systems and to determine the patterns of change to the gravity function of employees of municipal services. It was revealed that the trip distribution function of workers of urban service enterprises can be described by the attributes of the structure of the city, socio-economic data, and attributes characterizing the zones and its residents. Full article

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could greatly facilitate the exchange of data and functionalities between software applications in a flexible, controlled and secure way, especially on the web. Private companies, from startups to enterprises, have been using APIs for several years now, but it is only recently that APIs have seen increased interest in the public sector. API adoption in the public sector faces organisational, technical, legal and economic obstacles, and to overcome these barriers, proposed methods from the private sector and early adopters in the public sector provide a way forward. The available documentation is often sparse, difficult to find and to reuse for new contexts. No past efforts to collect and analyse these resources have been made. To address this shortcoming, this paper describes a landscape analysis in four areas: the main European Commission policy instruments on the adoption of APIs, the available web API standards, a set of European government API strategies and cases, and a list of government proposed methods distilled from more than 3900 documents. Our results reveal that European policy legislation and associated instruments promote, and in some cases mandate, the use of APIs, and that governments’ API strategies in the European Union are rather young but also that there are well known web APIs standards and proposed methods ready to support the digital transformation of governments through rapid, harmonised and successful adoption of APIs. Full article

Every large or small enterprise needs to have financial liquidity and to be able to generate profits to develop. It is not important in which sector it operates, whether it is a private or public one, but profits and safety are two elements every enterprise is not able to function without. The low performance of these two measures can cause a number of difficulties for managers. To avoid this, leading companies, especially the smallest ones, should optimize the trade credit management policy. Most often, SMEs’ (small and medium-sized enterprises) owners try to work together as part of a group purchasing organization, which positively affects trade credit management. The aim of the paper is to present the trade credit management strategy in Polish group purchasing organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study uses data on the construction sector because it is one of the most important segments of the Polish economy, which is financed to a large extent with trade credit. The paper indicates the mechanisms whose applications allowed SMEs operating in purchasing groups to change trade credit management strategies in such a way that these units could operate calmly and safely in the market. These changes could be observed in purchasing goods with a large reserve, strictly controlling all receivables, switching to cash sales or limiting sales on long-term trade credit. The analysis showed that enterprises changed trade credit management strategies from moderately conservative to highly conservative. Full article

With the rapid development of society and the economy, most cities have to face a serious problem of “Garbage Siege”. The garbage classification is imperative because the traditional disposal method for household solid waste is not suitable for this situation. The Chinese government proposed a public private partnership (PPP) style to increase the efficiency of garbage disposal in 2013. An effective method to evaluate the waste disposal enterprises is essential to choose suitable ones. A reasonable evaluation method should consider enterprises’ performance not only now but also in the future. This paper aims to propose a dynamic decision making method to evaluate the enterprises’ performance based on a GM(1,1) model and regret theory with Pythagorean fuzzy numbers (PFNs). First, we proposed a GM(1,1) model for predicting score function of PFNs. Then, we put forward a method to obtain the prediction of grey degree using OWA operator. Based on the prediction of score function and grey degree, we established a novel GM(1,1) model of PFNs. Furthermore, we utilized the grey incidence method to obtain the criteria weights with Pythagorean fuzzy information. We used the regret theory to aggregate information and rank the alternatives. Finally, we applied our proposed method to solve the selecting waste disposal enterprises problem in Shanghai. By the case study we can obtain that our method is effective to solve this problem. Full article

Mobile government (m-Government) is highly valued by many countries and governments worldwide for its important technical, economic, and political benefits. A development trend worthy of attention in China is that various public mobile services are provided through the cooperation between governments and Internet enterprises. The m-Government cooperation, as component of the public service system, has both a benefit safeguard function by mitigating transaction hazards and a value creation function by sharing advantageous resources. Previous studies have not explained both functions for m-Government cooperation. This study addresses this research gap. We establish a theoretical model by developing hypotheses from integrating model of Transaction Costs Theory (TCT) and Resource-based Theory (RBT). The OLS and Poisson regression method are used to test the proposed model by using cross-sectional data collected from 284 cities in China. Results show that strategy alliance, technology-specific knowhow, and financial security positively influence m-Government cooperation, asset specificity negatively influences the m-Government cooperation, and environmental certainty has no significant impact on m-Government cooperation. From the perspectives of technology, policy, and culture, the article puts forward suggestions on how to better promote m-Government cooperation in China, including promoting the government’s digital capabilities, improving the citizen’ privacy protection system and cultivating a public-private cooperative culture of mutual trust. Full article