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To survive competition, it is vital for firms to be innovative. As a firm’s cultural predisposition, organisational innovativeness provides an environment that fosters innovations and thus actively supports new product or service development. The purpose of this study is to measure organisational innovativeness and its multiple dimensions from a cultural-strategic perspective on a multifaceted formative scale which we develop theoretically and by means of qualitative interviews. Furthermore, we empirically validate the newly developed construct by investigating how innovativeness and its dimensions translate into innovation success by examining the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance in depth. Our findings suggest that a strategic focus on innovations, an extrinsic motivation system, openness in communication, as well as management encouragement are all dimensions of organisational innovativeness. Further, our results support the need for a proficient innovation process as a mechanism to systematically and continuously translate innovativeness into successful innovations. Innovation process proficiency fully mediates the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance, while the contingency factor competitive intensity enhances this performance impact.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the concept and state of the art of stakeholder management. The objectives include the coverage of the key aspects of stakeholder management from the perspective of the literature, the synthesis of some problems of implementing stakeholder management in developing countries and formulation of solutions to these problems, and guidance on implementation of stakeholder management in developing countries. Twelve semi-structured virtual interviews with practitioners in some developing countries informed most of the contents of the chapter: the problems and solutions concerning stakeholder management in developing countries where the traditional type of procurement is still commonly used for project delivery. The content analysis of the interview data showed that, apart from the internal stakeholders of clients, design consultants, contractors and their teams of professionals, and other workers, another set of project stakeholders would include community organizations, trade unions, non-government organizations and sundry individuals, or groups. These many stakeholders present high chances of conflicting stakes. Power influences the prioritization of stakes in developing countries, i.e., the interests of more powerful stake-holders are accorded higher priority. Government and public establishments are often considered to be powerful; hence, there is often a general reluctance to challenge their stakes and those of the stakeholders associated with them. Moreover, some traditions and cultures are strong in communities, regions, or nations, and stakeholder engagements follow these norms. Some details of traditional protocols that are observed while negotiating conflicting stakes are often not documented, and the knowledge needed is sometimes deployed tacitly. Meanwhile, some socio-cultural protocols and government bureaucracy may slow down project procedures, but claiming for time extensions and other reliefs by project participants is virtually never done on these grounds. Another major influence in some developing countries is land ownership, which tends to be a leveraging factor on which some external stakeholders either bargain for compensation and concessions or attempt to disrupt a project. As “knowledge is power,” there is scope for increasing the awareness and thus power of especially external stakeholders in developing countries.

This chapter examines abstract concepts of innovators' competences and innovation culture. For people to be innovative, both concepts need to be considered. Ontologies provide a way to specify these abstract concepts into such a format that practical applications can be applied in organizations. Self-evaluation of innovation competence and innovation culture in organizations can be conducted by utilizing a fuzzy logic application platform called Evolute. The approach described in this chapter has management implications. The abstract concepts of innovation culture and innovation competence become manageable, which suggests that organizations should be able to get better innovation results.

Cultural variations across countries are considered a major factor affecting customers' readiness to adopt, use, and evaluate technology. Relevant contributions from marketing studies, computer science, and international business are integrated into the literature of cross-cultural management and technology acceptance, and a conceptual model is developed. Drawing on a broader research project on radio frequency identification (RFID) aimed at supporting intelligent business networking and innovative customer services, the development of the framework is informed by the authors' work in the preparation of an RFID-based application at several established grocery retailers for short-life products in Ireland and in Greece. From the findings of our exploratory study, it emerges that low uncertainty avoidance, low institutional collectivism, high in-group collectivism, high gender egalitarianism, and low humane orientation are conducive to greater customers' acceptance of new service technologies. Managerial implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Contracting Global Virtual Teams as part of global IT outsourcing is currently en vogue. As might be expected when virtual team members are from different countries, cultural factors play an important role in the success of outsourcing. However, there have been very few studies that assess the effect of culture on IT outsourcing and virtual teams. This conceptual chapter addresses this oversight by looking at the effect of cultural differences on IT outsourcing and virtual teams’ performance. The applicable literature on outsourcing, virtual teams, and culture is analyzed and a framework of offshore outsourcing success is developed. This framework includes the concept of psychic distance to better understand the phenomenon of virtual teams and outsourcing success. Adding this as a key research component provides a more realistic way of researching global virtual teams. Future directions for research based on the developed framework are also provided. By assessing the cultural differences of virtual teams in IT outsourcing, our research framework will help academics pursue this growing business phenomenon.