Business and Economics

Phd defences Faculty of Business and Economics

Forthcoming PhD defences and past PhD defences in the archive

Phd defences Faculty of Business and Economics

Forthcoming PhD defences and past PhD defences in the archive

Forthcoming PhD defences

Essays on explicit and implicit motives, entrepreneurial orientation, and behavior

Online PhD defence Radityo Putro Handrito - Faculty of Business and Economics (Department of Management)

Date

21 jan

4 January 2021: PhD Defence Koen De Maere (Department of Management Information Systems)

Organizational Learning in the context of IT Governance. An exploration of the Theory-Practice gap

“Why is it that, despite the large amount of studies on IT governance, many professionals still fail to put these theories into practice?”

Nowadays, Information Technology (IT) has become crucial in the support, sustainability and growth of many contemporary organization. In addition, a growing number of these organizations is going through a Digital Transformation which requires them to invest in developing skills which are necessary to implement and exploit new technologies. This includes the skills required to realize highly efficient and effective IT governance.

The goal of IT governance is to establish appropriate control over an organization’s current and future use of IT. As such, it requires the implementation of practices which enable the creation of IT business value and appropriate management of IT related business risks. Unfortunately, many organizations still experience difficulties in their journey to implement IT governance. Therefore, disparities exist between the normative best practices related to IT governance and the actual state of practice in organizations. In the academic literature, this problem is known as the theory-practice gap. While organizational learning has been widely suggested as an approach to reduce a theory-practice gap in general, there is a lack of research about organizational learning in the context of IT governance. In response, this study examines the theory-practice gap through the lens of organizational learning and proposes a model that can be used to analyse and resolve the problem. Lastly, we also examine how some concepts of organizational learning apply to the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). This includes the conditions which enable the CIO to create a learning organization.

14 January 2021: PhD Defence Despoina Gkika (Department of Engineering Management)

Economic Feasibility and Influence of Nanotechnology in Health: Cost profile of Nanomaterials

Impressive progress has been achieved in recent years in the field of nanotechnology and specifically in nanomaterials. However, the ever-growing number of nanomaterials poses a challenge in terms of financial, ethical and time resources. While the drive for nanomaterials improvements is present, a technology orientation is only a part of the answer. I acknowledge that the other part of the answer lies in the inclusion of the cost factor. Indirect costs of nanomaterials have never been assessed and this gap in knowledge can be perceived as a research opportunity and serve as the point of departure for this thesis.

Against this backdrop, a stepwise process was developed to study a group of health-related nanomaterials at a lab scale. The group will be further used to form a cost profile for the synthesis and physicochemical characterization processes, along with the accorded opinion of experts covering major stakeholder groups (academics, laboratories and policy makers). The process offers a comprehensive view of the knowledge management approach that was adopted, and addresses prominent issues of both financial and risk-related concerns, in an effort to improve strategic management and create a competitive advantage.

Reflecting from a technology science perspective, the first step consisted of searching granted patents from EPO and USPTO offices. Three attributes (title, abstract and claims) were extracted from the raw dataset during a 5-year period. The quantitative results revealed 23 health related nanomaterials in order to serve as a basis for further analysis.

Reflecting from an economic science perspective, the second step adopted the total cost of ownership (TCO) methodology, in order to trace the costs and create the cost profile for the synthesis and physicochemical characterization process from the aforementioned generated dataset. The process of TCO is discussed through three synthesis case studies and a physicochemical characterization one to support decision making. The quantitative analysis revealed that the most influencing parameters for synthesis are accident and labor cost. In contrast for the physicochemical characterization process where the most important determinant is labour cost.

Reflecting from a safety perspective, a cost benefit analysis for a safety investment was used to estimate corresponding costs and hypothetical benefits of financial losses due to nanomaterial related accidents during the physicochemical characterization process. The findings of this study offer a better understanding of the role of safety training in accident prevention and provide the theoretical basis to support manager’s decisions to invest in safety.

21 January 2021: PhD Defence Radityo Putro Handrito (Department of Management)

Essays on explicit and implicit motives, entrepreneurial orientation, and behavior

This dissertation investigates the relationship between motive dispositions and entrepreneurial intentions, orientations, and behaviors in an emerging economy. To do so, we collected data from 176 SME owners and 410 students in Indonesia during 2018 and 2019 and conducted four empirical studies. In four empirical studies, we examine how the entrepreneurs’ implicit and explicit motive dispositions are related to the internationalization of SMEs, the sustainability orientation of the SMEs, and the Long Term Orientation of the SMEs. In addition, we also tested how implicit and explicit motives of students are related to their intentions to establish a social enterprise. We used advanced methods, both to assess implicit motives and to analyze the data, including Tobit regression models for curvelinear and polynomial effects, surface analysis and simple slope analyses. Our results show that implicit and explicit motives explain a unique portion of entrepreneurial outcomes. They also provide novel insights into how Western entrepreneurship theories are implemented in a developing country.

The first empirical study focuses on the internationalization of SMEs. The study shows that an entrepreneur’s implicit need for achievement, in combination with her/his risk perception, plays an essential role in SME internationalization. More specifically, we found a U-shaped moderation effect of risk perception on the relation between implicit need for achievement and internationalization. That is, for entrepreneurs with a high need for achievement, the level of internationalization of their SMEs is at the highest when risk perception is either very low or very high. In conclusion, an integrated and complex view of the entrepreneur’s motives and risk perception are indispensable to better understand firm internationalization.

The second empirical study showed that the environmental orientation of an SME is simultaneously affected by both the implicit and explicit motive dispositions, need for power in this case, of the owners. Different from our hypotheses, the results depict that divergent levels of implicit and explicit need for power motivate entrepreneurs to orient their company toward more sustainable business practices.

The third empirical study confirms that entrepreneurs with a high implicit need for achievement tend to focus on the long term consequences of the behavior of their SMEs. Yet, we find that this long-term orientation only takes place if the achievement motivated entrepreneur beliefs that the country’s institutions are well regulated and supportive for entrepreneurial activities.

The fourth empirical study shows that students with a strong internal locus of control (ILOC) have higher intentions to establish a social enterprise. We also find that this relationship is even stronger for students with a low-level of explicit need for power.

Finally, the last chapter concludes that the implicit and explicit motives of the entrepreneur are the essential factors for understanding various types of entrepreneurship.