Management

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Research Topic Summary.

This project aims to extend the notion of Reverse Innovation from its current product-centered limitation to a more encompassing general international business theory of knowledge and capability transfer. The research is at the intersection of innovation management (“TIM”) and international business theory (“IB”). Specifically, the ambitions in this project are: 1. Building and extending database of product, service, technology and organizational reverse innovations, incl. webscraping and AI-supported tool development. 2. Extending an existing typology of Reverse Innovation into a proper theory of bi-modal transnational innovation. 3. Developing in-depth case studies of reverse innovation from multiple countries in multiple companies at product modularity levels. 4. Analyzing global innovation strategies and practices of multinational firms. The project is carried out in collaboration with international partners in Denmark, France, and Brazil.

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Research Topic Summary.

Crises seem to have become regular events, which pose increasing challenges to the organizations (Chen et al., 2021). Recently, the number of studies has been growing while demonstrating that organizational survival and effectiveness depend on the ability of organizations and employees to withstand and adapt to significant challenges, that is, on their resilience (Naswall et l., 2019; Fisher et al., 2023). Generally, resilience is understood to be the capacity to rebound, ‘to come back’ from adversity, uncertainty, conflict, failure, or even positive change (Luthans, 2002). In a dynamic business environment, the concept of resilience is crucial to understanding how employees and organizations successfully handle adversity (Hartmann et al., 2021; Cani?ls and Hatak, 2022). Resilient employees can navigate in a turbulent society, deal with stress and cope with adverse conditions more effectively (Kakkar, 2019). Organizational resilience is the most direct factor explaining the longevity and competitive advantage of particular organization. Given the relevance of employee resilience and organizational resilience, the factors fostering resilience needs to be disclosed. Relying on the notion of Luthans (2002) that resilience can be developed through management practices, the proposed research argues that human resource management (HRM) could serve as an appropriate antecedent. However, the previous studies did not include the sustainability dimension in HRM while analyzing the way HRM promotes the resilience. The paper seeks to close the existing gap by introducing socially responsible HRM (Diaz?Carrion et al., 2019) as a driver for promoting resilience. Therefore, the scientific problem is formulated by the question: which and how socially responsible HRM practices strengthen the employee resilience and organizational resilience. The research aim is to reveal socially responsible HRM practices that strengthen the employee resilience and organizational resilience.

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Research Topic Summary.

Research questions: What are the characteristics of AI-based service innovations and how they affect consumer acceptance of innovations? What is the relation between consumer acceptance and their intention to used AI-based service innovations? What is the role of consumer trust in the studied relation? The aim of research is to determine the impact of AI-based innovations on consumer behaviour revealing the role of consumer trust. The objectives : 1. To conceptualize the phenomenon of AI-based service innovations and reveal the impact of AI on the development of service theory. 2. To define the outcomes of AI-based service innovation on consumer behaviour as the major dependent variables of research. 3. To design a conceptual framework of the impact of AI-based service innovations on consumer behaviour that reveals the role of consumer trust and its relation to other constructs. 4. To prepare and apply the methodology for research that integrates traditional and neuromarketing research approaches and techniques. 5. To provide empirical validation for conceptual framework of the impact of AI-based service innovations of consumer behaviour.

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Research Topic Summary.

Relevance. Access to finance for SME‘s, widely discussed in academic literature, still remains a substantial problem for small and medium enterprises. One part of the problem is low corporate finance literacy. The recent wave of digital business transformation depends on the problem of access to finance even more and digital financial inclusion is becoming central in the debate on how to ensure that SME‘s, who face access to finance problems and are at the lower levels of corporate finance, and digital literacy. Various initiatives to expand the financing of SMEs including partial guarantee schemes, building or improving financial infrastructure, commercial banking models, and other private sector initiatives have been developed to target SMEs directly. At the global level, the Global Partnership for financial inclusion (GPFI) enhances the integration of artificial intelligence solutions in SME’s financial management decisions aiming to help SME’s to become more financially active. Fintech companies are using AI and its various applications to ensure that the goal of digital financial inclusion is to ensure that small and medium businesses participate in the mainstream financial market.

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Research Topic Summary.

Adjustment studies after repatriation are not a new field of research. However, they mostly focus on the experience of assigned expatriates, and other groups of global employees are left not explored. Therefore, it continues to be important to explore the complexity of reintegration processes and post-return situations. Therefore we seek to answer: Do global returnees have difficulties adjusting when returning “home”? Is readjustment possible for global returnees without support? And how does this relate to their well-being? Research aims to reveal the adjustment and well-being of global returnees and to highlight the factors that influence them. As a research group, self-initiated repatriates and/ or re-emigrants could be considered. Different empirical research approaches (quantitative, qualitative, mixed) could be applied to reach the aim.

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Research Topic Summary.

Digital transformation driven by a cluster of digital technologies provides vast opportunities for reinventing organizations. Firm-level digitalization measures are closely observed by companies, business associations, and policy-making bodies. Firm-level digitalization provides insights into current and future competitiveness and productivity. Despite the importance of companies’ digitalization measures, they are generally lacking and inaccurate. To address some of these limitations, this study aims to predict digitalization based on website text data and to transfer this information into reliable firm-level digitalization indicators. This Ph.D. thesis is based on an already collected website data of a complete population of country (i.e., Lithuania) business companies. The website text and website structure data are further processed using supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to classify companies according to various digitalization dimensions and the extent of digitalization. Such an approach provides an alternative measure of firm-level digitalization which is characterized by higher coverage (all county population), granularity (firm, sector, and regions, country), and absence of survey-related measurement error sources. Finally, the data may successfully complement the survey-based results for shaping digital transformation efforts.

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Research Topic Summary.

Global warming has prompted countries and companies to make so-called net-zero commitments, aiming to reduce their net carbon emissions as much as possible. According to United Nations (2023), more 70 countries and have set net-zero targets, and several companies worldwide are taking actions to reduce emissions. Turning these commitments into action is one of the most critical challenges faced by companies in today’s business environment, and the boards and executives bear the ultimate responsibility for taking these actions. Gender diversity in decision-making and climate change are closely intertwined. The rationale for this PhD topic is rooted in the recognition that gender plays a significant role in shaping climate change. To effectively address the gender dimension of climate change, there is a need to specifically delve into how gender diversity in corporate leadership influences corporate environmental commitments. Research will focus on systematically documenting and analyzing the specific contributions of women in climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts. This includes identifying the roles they play, the knowledge they bring, and the impact of their involvement on the success of initiatives.

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Research Topic Summary.

The topic of this thesis is the assessment of the social and cultural impact of national capitals of culture at the municipal level. The aim of the work is to develop a model of preconditions for the positive socio-cultural impact of a National Capital of Culture on communities in municipalities, based on best practices in other countries, linking the retrospective experiences of individuals with visions for community development and the future of the municipality.

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Research Topic Summary.

This project aims to build the world’s largest database of the industrial R&D centers, and use this data to develop a new models for science and technology policy, corporate strategy, and international business theory. The research is at the intersection of innovation management (“TIM”) and international business theory (“IB”). Specifically, the ambitions in this project are: 1. Building and extending the GLORAD database, incl. webscraping and AI-supported tool development. 2. Analyzing the global R&D attractiveness of countries over time. 3. Proposing a global innovation trade balance indicator that measures global technology investments between net importing and net exporting countries. 4. Analyzing global innovation strategies of multinational firms. The project is carried out in collaboration with international partners in Denmark, France, and California.

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Research Topic Summary.

Mindfulness is gaining increasing attention in the project management community. Scientific research shows that awareness is an important factor that enables changes and innovations created by projects, increases flexibility, resilience, adaptability and effectiveness of teams. This leads to the successful involvement of project stakeholders in the creation of social value (Daniel et al., 2023; Stuart-Edwards et al., 2023). Scientific problem: How does the project manager's mindfulness strengthen the involvement of project stakeholders? How does the involvement of project stakeholders affect the creation of the project's social value? The goal is to theoretically substantiate and empirically verify the links between the mindfulness of the project manager and the involvement of project stakeholders from the point of view of creating the social value of the project. Objectives: 1.To perform an analysis of the social concept of project value and involvement of project stakeholders, to identify the factors determining involvement and connections with the creation of project value. 2.To define the concept of mindfulness in project management, identifying the components of awareness relevant to the project manager and their connections with the involvement of the project's stakeholders, creating the social value of the project. 3.After evaluating the role of the project manager's mindfulness of the involvement of interested parties in creating the social value of the project, a conceptual model for compiling the results of theoretical and empirical research, which includes the links between the project manager's mindfulness, the involvement of stakeholders and the created social value of the project. 4.To prepare the research methodology and to perform the substantiation of the conceptual model of the connections between the mindfulness of the project manager, the involvement of stakeholders and the created social value of the project.

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Research Topic Summary.

The adoption of AI across various industries is widespread, and the global AI market size is expected to grow by 37.3% from 2023 to 2030 (Forber, 2023). Research indicates that, in the long term, four out of five companies plan to use AI in their daily activities (IMB, 2022). However, not all industries show equal rates of adoption. A recent study by Korst and Puntoni (2023), published in the Harvard Business Review and based on a survey of 600 business leaders from large U.S.-based companies, showed that marketing leaders have been slow in adopting generative AI technologies. This hesitancy includes low familiarity with these technologies and a degree of scepticism. The above scepticism and caution in adopting AI technologies within marketing domains may have a reasonable explanation. Marketers' willingness to utilize, for example, AI-based agents in interactions with consumers depends on consumer reactions and whether these interactions result in positive consumer experiences. Research on consumer-AI interaction is increasing. However, it provides inconclusive results regarding which interaction agent, AI or human, would be more acceptable for consumers in various business settings. Moreover, there are contradictory results on how consumers interact with AI versus human agents in various touchpoints and settings, especially in emotionally charged situations requiring handling consumer complaints or sensitive issues and to various degrees of AI humanization (anthropomorphism). Technological advances in AI have enabled the creation of highly anthropomorphized (humanized) robots capable of displaying emotions and using 'artificial empathy' (Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, & Li, 2022). However, there is no consensus on the impact of AI anthropomorphization on consumer experience. For example, humanized AI recommenders have shown greater efficacy than non-humanized AI recommenders in the case of hedonic products (Wien and Peluso, 2021). Other studies, however, indicate that the anthropomorphization of chatbots negatively affects customer satisfaction and future purchase intentions when an interaction is with consumers experiencing anger (Crolic, Thomaz, Hadi, and Stephen, 2022). In highly competitive industries, businesses may lean towards accepting even outbursts of consumer anger if it ultimately leads to conflict resolution, customer satisfaction, and positive performance outcomes. For example, Antonetti (2016) suggested that consumer problem-focused anger (as opposed to vengeful anger) may lead to positive consequences, while vengeful anger damages marketing relationships. However, consumers' reactions when facing conflicting situations may also depend on the object of interaction, whether it is a human or an AI agent. The tendency to use emotional venting may depend not only on dispositional traits but also on the object of interaction. The rapid introduction of AI-based solutions in businesses to deal with consumer inquiries raises the question of whether consumers are more prone to vent their emotions to AI versus human beings. Do emotional venting patterns differ between interactions with AI and humans? Moreover, what role does emotional expression by AI agents (a form of AI anthropomorphism) play in eliciting different consumer reactions in such interactions? This research aims to explore how and why the agency (human versus AI) affects consumer propensity for emotional venting in emotionally charged situations and, subsequently, consumer satisfaction and behavioural outcomes (attitudes, intentions). It also seeks to understand the role of AI anthropomorphism in influencing consumer emotion regulation strategies. A deeper understanding of the AI-consumer interaction phenomenon during states of negative emotions could yield valuable practical implications for enhancing consumer experiences.

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Research Topic Summary.

Public Governance research group invites candidates to conduct methodologically cross-cutting research on public service provision, customer satisfaction, public administration, smart governance, algorithmic governance, EU governance and policies, generic policies, comparative public administration, pandemic management strategies, decision-making, public sector resilience, public sector ethics, tax evasion, tax moral, public trust, public participation, local, regional development and other topics in public governance or public management by applying agent-based modelling (Bonabeau 2002) to simulate the interactions among various stakeholders/entities and the emergent properties of such systems. The candidate will have at least some experience with agent-based modelling or has Python or R skills.

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Research Topic Summary.

Digital platforms, driven by interconnected technologies and governed by defined rules, serve as powerful catalysts across various business sectors, transforming industries such as automotive, hospitality, and healthcare. Despite contributing 7% to the GDP in EU28 from 2015 to 2020, digital platform businesses still trail behind the US, which boasts a 9% GDP from the platform economy. The emergence of advanced digital technologies, such as Chat GPT and Web 3, introduces uncertainty, particularly in the realm of digital health platforms. The research identifies a knowledge gap, highlighting two research questions: 1) How does the human agent enact affordances in digital healthcare platforms? 2) What role does the human agent play in establishing a deep competitive advantage for digital healthcare platforms? The study aims to explore the human agent's role in constructing a profound competitive advantage for digital healthcare platforms by leveraging advanced affordances. An embedded experimental design will be employed, gathering qualitative and quantitative data from selected countries and involving various stakeholders in the digital healthcare platform ecosystem. The research aspires to achieve three main outcomes: 1) Understanding how human agency addresses value impedance in digital healthcare platforms and facilitates value capture; 2) Contributing to the comprehension of competitive advantage in digital healthcare platforms; 3) Expanding knowledge of the affordances offered by advanced digital healthcare platforms.