Conor O'Kane

University of Otago · Department of Management

Firm innovation is of vital importance to New Zealand’s economy, but we understand little about how different human resource (workforce) factors influence innovation approaches (product/services innovation, process innovation, and innovation speed). We explore three human resource (HR) factors: workforce knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), wor...

Science-based Open Innovation, Maori innovation, Vision mātauranga Overview For many years there have been questions as to the best way that research and science can contribute to New Zealand's prosperity. We know that our research and science is world-class, with praise for its high quality and quantity. But it is unclear how excellent research p...

Scientists and funding bodies are interdependent actors involved in an ongoing two-way signalling interaction; however, we lack insight on the social mechanisms underpinning this interaction. To address this issue, we examine how successfully funded scientists interpret and address criteria set by the funding body to maximise their chances of fundi...

Drawing on resource dependency theory and the resource-absorbing perspective of risk-taking, this article examines how political connections provide firms with opportunities to gain government funding support to enhance financial slack, which can in turn benefit their entrepreneurial risk-taking. We employ both symmetrical (partial least squares st...

Background and rationale Job burnout is an essential topic for researchers and a pressing issue for employers and employees. However, the most popular tool has become widely critiqued, and a new measure of burnout – the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) – is used here. The BAT is helpful because it provides a cut-off threshold score representing high b...

Previous studies have identified the importance of entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems, however, few have considered in an integrated multi-level way, the key influencing factors on technology transfer mechanisms within these ecosystems. In particular, none have considered such factors from a technology transfer office (TTO) perspective. To a...

Although we know it is researchers at the micro‐level of universities that are the critical actors in acquiring external grant funding, it remains unclear to what extent universities provide a funding environment that suitably supports their pursuit and management of this funding. We address this subject through interviews with 41 publicly funded p...

Knowledge hiding at the firm-level has received limited empirical attention. We address this gap by examining the antecedents and consequences of knowledge hiding climate using two studies. We explore the role that human resource (HR) practices play as an antecedent of firm knowledge hiding, and the influence knowledge hiding has on innovation and...

To navigate the uncertainty inherent in science driven innovation, academic science teams must often undertake search through engagement with external actors. While both broad and narrow external engagement are beneficial to team search during innovation, it remains unclear how science teams coordinate and utilise engagement across time. To address...

New Zealand top executives are seldom explored, and this paper examines the role of work-life balance (WLB) on top executives’ turnover intentions, with job burnout mediating this relationship. It is expected that top executives with strong WLB will be aided with stronger wellbeing (lower burnout) and stronger work behaviours (lower turnover). Beyo...

Purpose: High-performance work systems (HPWS) are linked to performance, but few studies explore creativity behaviours (CB). The present study includes job satisfaction as a mediator and firm size and competitive rivalry as moderators to better understand the context. Methodology: Data was collected using a sample of 310 New Zealand managers. Data...

The literature on academic entrepreneurship within business schools is limited and fragmented. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to address this deficit and to identify what business schools do to support academic entrepreneurship and to outline a future research agenda. Based on our systematic literature review we identified thre...

While the links between High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) and performance are established, we extend this literature by (1) focusing on new products/services innovation and (2) testing relationships on SMEs (up to 250 employees). Specifically, we test a path model whereby HPWS influences human capital and ultimately innovation. Furthermore, to b...

This paper examines the role identity of university based principal investigators (PIs), as well as the learning mechanisms that underpin this position. PIs have become the focus of increasing research attention which has argued that they, along with universities and funding bodies, form an increasingly crucial tripartite in public research environ...

There is increasing pressure on academic scientists to acquire research funding and to produce impactful research that stakeholders external to the research can capture value from. However, our understanding of the mechanisms by which funded scientists do this remain unclear. We conceptualize a two stage process of value capture in publicly funded...

This research examines the integrated effects of external network ties and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on innovation performance. It also investigates how environmental dynamism affects the network ties-EO-innovation performance relationship. Drawing on the dynamic capability perspective of EO and the contingency view of network ties, we posit...

Overview: Businesses can benefit from university–industry collaborations, yet they rarely take full advantage of them. Scientists who serve as principal investigators (PIs) act as the nucleus of university–industry collaborations and partner with industry to cocreate value. We conducted a case study of PIs at publicly funded research universities,...

Employees’ ability to explore and exploit is a micro-foundational component of organizational ambidexterity and hugely influential for organizational performance outcomes. However, little research has directly examined the relationship between exploration and exploitation with a performance at the individual-level. Building on the hierarchical dyna...

This article reports on research on energy eco‐innovation using case studies of firms. Positioning energy efficiency changes in an organization as “eco‐innovations,” the paper examines the firm‐level resources involved for these to be successful. To identify these resources, the energy cultures (EC) framework, an organizing tool to understand energ...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how ethnic migrant entrepreneurs (EMEs) utilise identity work to build legitimacy in a host country. According to optimal distinctiveness theory (ODT), legitimacy is achieved by balancing conformance and distinctiveness. This paper draws on ODT in the context of ethnic migrant entrepreneurship to exa...

Although essential to all institutions, organizational change is a complex and high risk activity. In this paper, we examine how organizations develop and implement capabilities to facilitate organizational change. Drawing on the dynamic capability perspective and a ‘resourcing’ synergy view, we investigate how realized absorptive capacity in terms...

In this chapter, we make the case that capacity development initiatives aimed at generating greater entrepreneurial behaviours among academic scientists remain under-explored in the literature. We suggest that external government-funded programmes, in the form of macro-level grand challenges, that foster greater entrepreneurial engagement and comme...

This research explores how ethnic migrant entrepreneurs (EMEs) from countries with a range of cultural differences to the host country exploit entrepreneurial opportunities in a single host country. Specifically, this study investigates: (1) the types of opportunities exploited by EMEs, and (2) the way they exploit these entrepreneurial opportuniti...

Conceptual models of the quadruple helix have largely taken a macro perspective. While these macro perspectives have motivated debates and studies, they fall short in understanding value creation activities at the micro level of the quadruple helix. The purpose of this paper is to address this deficit by focussing on the fundamental research questi...

What are the key resources that farmers use to improve the impact of their operations on water resources? In what combinations are these resources applied to farms? This research adopted the natural resource-based view to interview nationally awarded New Zealand livestock farmers, and observe the operations on their farms, with the aim of finding o...

This paper examines what factors publicly funded principal investigators (PIs) perceive as inhibiting their involvement in commercialization activities. PIs are important knowledge brokers in public science but while the emerging literature on PIs has primarily focused on identifying their multitude of roles and responsibilities, much less is known...

This edited volume presents new means of quantifying the behavioral and consequential differences between technology-based and non-technology-based nascent entrepreneurs in varied economies. It explores the socioeconomic place of technology in developed and developing countries, and describes the implications of this research for policymakers' abil...

Ethnic migrant entrepreneurship, as a subset of international entrepreneurship offers an illustration of how entrepreneurs from different ethnic and national backgrounds operate in an international setting. This chapter examines nascent entrepreneurship for migrants, through a process-based view of entrepreneurship. The role of sociocultural fit is...

Within entrepreneurial ecosystems technology based nascent entrepreneurship are becoming influential actors contributing to economic wealth creation and technology and scientific advancement. This chapter briefly sets the context, introduces and provides a commentary on key issues and implications based on chapter contributions. The chapter contrib...

In this paper we explore the allocation of time of publicly funded principal investigators (PIs) for public sector entrepreneurship activities. We examine their allocation of time in general to research activities and specifically at a project level in relation to the type of research, knowledge transfer activity, project impact, deliberate technol...

This paper examines interactions between technology transfer office (TTO) executives and publicly funded principal investigators (PIs) within the university. Although both actors make important contributions to value creation at the base of the triple helix, their identities remain under development and their interactions have been the subject of l...

National governments consistently implement an array of public sector entrepreneurship policies and activities, seeking to generate further economic activity and create new networks and market opportunities that reduce market risks and uncertainties for market-based technology exploiters. This means that scientists taking on the role of being a pub...

This paper aims to unearth the factors that influence scientists in becoming and choosing to become publicly funded principal investigators (PIs). PIs are the linchpins of knowledge transformation and bridging triple helix actors, particularly academia- industry. At a micro level, PIs are at the nexus of engaging and interacting with other triple h...

Principal investigators (PI) are at the nexus of university business collaborations through their leadership of funded research grants. In fulfilling their multiple roles, PIs are involved in a range of different activities, from direct scientific supervision of junior scientists, the organisation of new scientific avenues to engaging with industri...

The prospect of increased revenue and spillovers has influenced the mission of the university to reflect an increasingly commercial orientation. This paper focuses on university commercialisation in three countries (Ireland, New Zealand and the USA), through 58 semi-structured interviews with technology transfer officers and a quantitative assessme...

How leaders turn around declining performance is a significant issue for companies, their employees, their customers, their shareholders and, more generally, society. Leadership influence during times of change is well recognised in the literature; however, leadership during a turnaround is more complex and less understood. In-depth examinations of...

This study examines the effect of leadership changes on (1) the initiation of organizational turnarounds, (2) turnaround performance, and (3) the leadership approaches adopted. Set in an Irish context, we use four in-depth case studies purposefully selected at different stages of the turnaround process. In our findings we describe under what circum...

Securing public funding to conduct research and leading it by being a principal investigator (PI) is seen as significant career development step. Such a role brings professional prestige but also new responsibilities beyond research leadership to research management. If public funding brings financial and infrastructure support, little is understoo...

Purpose This paper aims to illustrate how legacy airlines can reorientate to achieve sharp recoveries in performance following prolonged periods of stagnation, decline and eroding competitiveness. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a qualitative analysis of five longitudinal case studies of legacy airlines that embarked on strategic chang...

The principal investigators (PI) of publicly funded research projects are the key actors charged with direct responsibility for directing the research, reporting to the funding agency, and completing the project. Since the beginning of the 1990s the requirements for academic research and the management of academic research have undergone important...