No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
OS RECURSOS NA FAMÍLIA EMPRESÁRIA: UMA VANTAGEM COMPETITIVA PARA A SUSTENTABILIDADE
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This paper aims to hint at a theory of family business naming. Besides, it puts forward two kinds of practical proposals. The former intends to integrate the patronymic name as an intangible resource for corporate brand management, in addition to family branding and familiness. The latter proposals aim at including the patronymic company name in Spanish as a variable in research methods on family business identification.
En nuestro trabajo realizamos una revisión crítica de la literatura en torno al nombre de marca. Efectuamos una aproximación categorial a los criterios habituales para establecer nombres de marca y proponemos una taxonomía nueva en torno al criterio patronímico. Metodología: A partir de una muestra de nombres comerciales de empresas familiares españolas, con el planteamiento de variables y subvariables, referidas a criterios denominativos y a rasgos característicos de la empresa, formulamos nuevas categorías denominativas a partir de hibridar las comúnmente establecidas. Resultados: Una original taxonomía de patronímicos, a partir del análisis de los nombres comerciales de empresas familiares, lo cual representa un avance en los procesos de investigación, tanto académica como aplicada, en torno al naming corporativo.
The distinctiveness of family firms’ goals, structures, resources, strategies, and performance has been studied in terms of what family firms do or are able to achieve that are different from those of nonfamily firms. This dominant approach to studying family firm behavior has contributed significantly to our understanding of such organizations. Currently, however, we know little about how family firm decisions are made and the processes by which family firms plan and execute. We develop a conceptual framework and set out an agenda for future research on how the distinctive/unique interaction between the business and the family influences the management processes by which family firms implement their strategies.
Strategy has been defined as “the match an ovganization makes between its internal resources and skills … and the opportunities and risks created by its external environment.” 1 During the 1980s, the principal developments in strategy analysis focussed upon the link between strategy and the external environment. Prominent examples of this focus are Michael Porter's analysis of industry structure and competitive positioning and the empirical studies undertaken by the PIMS project. 2 By contrast, the link between strategy and the firm's resources and skills has suffered comparative neglect. Most research into the strategic implications of the firm's internal environment has been concerned with issues of strategy implementation and analysis of the organizational processes through which strategies emerge. 3
This paper presents a theoretical exploration of the construct of corporate entrepreneur-ship. Of the various dimensions of firm-level entrepreneurial orientation identified in the literature, it is argued that innovation, broadly defined, is the single common theme underlying all forms of corporate entrepreneurship. However, the presence of innovation per se is insufficient to label a firm entrepreneurial. Rather, it is suggested that this label be reserved for firms that use innovation as a mechanism to redefine or rejuvenate themselves, their positions within markets and industries, or the competitive arenas in which they compete. A typology is presented of the forms in which corporate entrepreneurship is often manifested , and the robustness of this typology is assessed using criteria that have been proposed for evaluating classificational schemata. Theoretical linkages are then drawn demonstrating how each of the generic forms of corporate entrepreneurship may be a path to competitive advantage. V-'orporate entrepreneurship has long been recognized as a potentially viable means for promoting and sustaining corporate competitiveness.
The article analyzed the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in its dimensions - innovative behavior, risk taking,
proactiveness, autonomy, competitive aggressiveness and networks of relationships - and its association with the performance of firms that have graduated from Brazilian incubators. Specifically, this study aimed to compare its results with those found by A. C. M. Z. Santos and Alves (2009), from Miller’s models (1983) and Lumpkin and Dess (1996). We used a quantitative approach and the technique of structural equation modeling for a sample of 128 Brazilian firms. The main results showed that EO is on a unidimensional model, which diverges from that found by A. C. M. Z. Santos and Alves (2009) in incubated firms. We found that the dimension which strongly contributed to the existence of EO was independence and that networks of relationships, a dimension heretofore unmentioned in previous studies, worked similarly to other dimensions for EO composition.
Organizational identity usually is portrayed as that which is core, distinctive, and enduring about the character of an organization. We argue that because of the reciprocal interrelationships between identity and image, organizational identity, rather than enduring, is better viewed as a relatively fluid and unstable concept. We further argue that instead of destabilizing an organization, this instability in identity is actually adaptive in accomplishing change. The analysis leads to some provocative, but nonetheless constructive, implications for theory, research, and practice.
Most human beings have empathy, even those who are business owners. Some theories of the firm obviate the fact that the real gain is the increased satisfaction no matter how this satisfaction is achieved, either through a monetary amount or otherwise. The emotional dividend is generated by those actions undertaken by the company in order to increase the satisfaction of its owners, regardless of the monetary amounts that these actions will bring them. Thus, this way we proceed to reconcile the empathy of the human being in business and the private property system that allows a correct calculation of the decisions of economic agents.
The resource-based view (RBV) is one of the most influential perspectives in the organizational sciences. Although entrepreneurship researchers are increasingly leveraging the RBV’s tenets, it emerged in strategic management. Despite some important similarities between entrepreneurship and strategic management, there are also important differences, raising questions as to whether and to what extent the RBV needs to be adapted for the entrepreneurship field. As a first step towards answering these questions, this study focuses on resources as the fundamental building block of the RBV and presents a content-analytical comparison of researchers’ and practicing entrepreneurs’ resource conceptualizations to derive similarities and differences between established theory and entrepreneurial practice. We find that although the two conceptualizations exhibit some overlap, there are also important differences in the emphasis on different dimensions of resources and ownership requirements, as well as in the understanding of how those resources shape outcomes. These results suggest important contextual conditions when applying the RBV’s tenets within the field of entrepreneurship.
Introducing a new concept in family businesses Transgenerational Entrepreneurship addresses how these businesses achieve growth and longevity through entrepreneurial activities. It focuses on the resources, capabilities and mindsets that families develop and draw upon in order to be entrepreneurial across generations, and presents findings from an international research collaboration between family business researchers and practitioners. In addition to a comprehensive conceptual chapter, the editors include a unique set of empirical case-based research papers that investigates transgenerational entrepreneurship in different European contexts. They bring together and integrate frontier research on entrepreneurship and family business, as well as provide a basis for future research. Academics, teachers and students in business and management, entrepreneurship and family business will find this path-breaking book of value, as will libraries, policy makers and consultants.
While studies of entrepreneurship and family business have to a great extent developed independently, there are some indications that they are now moving closer to each other. The purpose of this special issue is to contribute to an increased scholarly interest in research that integrates the areas of entrepreneurship and family business. This introductory article elaborates upon the meaning of entrepreneurial families and family firms. Based on a review of a significant amount of previous literature and the articles in this special issue, we generate a guiding framework around three themes – actor, activity and attitude. We argue that research focusing on specific topics within these themes has great potential to contribute to our theoretical and empirical understanding of entrepreneurship and family firms. We also share a note on why we believe Entrepreneurship and Regional Development is a suitable arena for publishing research with this orientation. We then introduce the five papers that are included in this special issue using the framework developed to position the papers and thereby to reveal their respective contributions and their advancement of our knowledge. We conclude with reflections on some unexplored themes, which are still very relevant to examine in future research on entrepreneurship and family businesses.
What factors influence exit from the founder’s business and subsequent entrepreneurial renewal in a generational family firm? Guided by this research question, we trace the development of the Italian Falck Group from its inception as a steel company in 1906 - ascension as the largest privately owned steel producer in Italy - losses in the 1970s and 1980s leading to business exit from steel industry in the 1990s - followed by successful entry in the renewable energy business. A combination of insights from literature and triangulation of data from multiple primary and secondary sources leads to the development of a model describing how inhibitors of exit from the founder’s business can be transformed into facilitators of change. The critical role of far-sighted ‘family champion of continuity’ is found central in redirecting the family from its anchoring in past activities to focus on future entrepreneurial endeavors. While commitment to the founder’s business continues, the family champion aided by business savvy and astute non-family executives ably modifies its meaning of ‘continuity of the founder’s business’ from ‘steel production’ to ‘continuity of the entrepreneurial spirit of the family’, hence preserving institutional identity. Insights from this study can help generational family firms which plan to exit from a failing course of action to regenerate so as to create trans-generational value.
The present study contends that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between generational involvement – i.e. the number of family generations simultaneously involved in the family firm top management team (TMT) – and entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Drawing on the upper echelons theory, we conceive generational involvement as a proxy of knowledge diversity in multigenerational family TMTs. We argue that while moderate levels of generational involvement stimulate task-related constructive conflicts for EO, increased kinship distance and relationship conflicts led by high levels of generational involvement are likely to undermine this potential advantage by damaging the relational context for EO.
This article extends and elaborates the perspective on entrepreneurship articulated by Shane and Venkataraman (2000) and Venkataraman (1997) by explaining in more detail the role of opportunities in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the article explains the importance of examining entrepreneurship through a disequilibrium framework that focuses on the characteristics and existence of entrepreneurial opportunities. In addition, the article describes several typologies of opportunities and their implications for understanding entrepreneurship.
Family firm owners accumulate economic and noneconomic wealth that they may wish to transfer to the next generation. Their challenges in doing so include: what, to whom, when, and how to transfer this wealth. The decisions made and actions taken will impact behavior and performance as well as the type and amount of wealth eventually transferred. The articles and commentaries in this special issue address some of these challenges, specifically the what of family firm legacy, the who of willing intra-family successors, and the how of both family and business destabilization and re-stabilization after a major strategic move as illustrated by internationalization.
Scholars of entrepreneurship have focused mostly on founder entrepreneurs, new ventures, venture capital, and entrepreneurial initiatives in larger firms. However, family firms, which account for a majority of new ventures, have received far less prominent attention from the field. Although family businesses, often rightly, have been portrayed as being conservative and even stodgy, many of them are successful and enduring, and enjoy advantages in the business founding, growth, and maturity phases of the life cycle. We discuss the resources that may be responsible for these advantages in successful family firms, and the lessons that may be drawn from such firms for quintessential topics in entrepreneurship such as effectuation, new ventures, venture capital, opportunity platforms, and entrepreneurial orientation.
In entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial exploration and exploitation have been considered central activities for the survival, growth, and renewal of businesses. In this review we systematically examine research on these topics in family business. Our review comprises 59 publications examining exploration and/or exploitation in family firms published between 2001 and 2015 in 32 publications. The article highlights the contributions of family business in this area and reveals additional areas where a stronger connection between these concepts and the family business field could be developed. We suggest several new research directions that may enhance the understanding of these entrepreneurial activities in family business.
The primary purpose of this article is to clarify the nature of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct and to propose a contingency framework for investigating the relationship between EO and firm performance. We first explore and refine the dimensions of EO and discuss the usefulness of viewing a firm's EO as a multidimensional construct. Then, drawing on examples from the EO-related contingencies literature, we suggest alternative models (moderating effects, mediating effects, independent effects, interaction effects) for testing the EO-performance relationship.
Understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage has become a major area of research in strategic management. Building on the assumptions that strategic resources are heterogeneously distributed across firms and that these differences are stable over time, this article examines the link between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Four empirical indicators of the potential of firm resources to generate sustained competitive advantage-value, rareness, imitability, and substitutability are discussed. The model is applied by analyzing the potential of several firm resources for generating sustained competitive advantages. The article concludes by examining implications of this firm resource model of sustained competitive advantage for other business disciplines.
Family business socio-emotional preferences are often Janus-faced. Some strive to create a strong business they can pass on to offspring by building innovation-promoting resources such as human, relational, and financial capital. Other family firms cater to family desires for unqualified nepotism, altruism towards undeserving kin, and appropriation of firm assets to fulfill parochial desires that erode these resources. This article explores how such preferences, together with their impact on resources and the innovation demands of their markets, shape the approach to innovation.
Compared to new companies or niche players, established companies find it difficult to innovate strategically - to reconceptualize what the business is ail about and, as a result, to play the game in an existing business in a dramatically different way. Drawing on examples of highly profitable companies in diverse industries, the author explains how long-time players can overcome the four chief obstacles to strategic innovation. 1. Inertia of success. Strategic innovators monitor their strategic health for early signals of trouble and are willing, if necessary, to abandon the status clue for the uncertainty of change. These companies also work to convince employees that current performance is good but not good enough. They develop a new challenge to galvanize the organization into active thinking, and they expend significant lime and effort selling the challenge to everyone. 2. Uncertainty about what to change into. Strategic innovators challenge their dominant way of thinking and shift emphasis away from determining Row they need to compete toward questioning who their customers are and what they really want. They institutionalize a questioning altitude and find ways io shake up the system every few years. 3. Uncertainty surrounding new strategic positions. Ar a given time, a company does not know which idea will succeed and which core competencies will be essential. Successful strategic innovators follow the model of capitalism: they create internal variety, even at the expense of efficiency, and allow the outside market to decide the winners and losers. 4. The challenges of implementation. Successful companies set UP a Separate organizational unit to support a new strategic innovation find create a context that supports integration between different units within the company. in managing the transition from the old to the new, they let the two systems coexist but gradually allocate resources to the new so that it grows at the expense of the old. For established companies, the challenge of strategic innovation is organizational: developing a culture that questions current success while promoting experimentation. mentation. Strong leadership is essential in creating that culture. Only those companies that: strive for self-renewal, the author argues, will succeed in the long term.
It is generally accepted that a family's involvement in the business makes the family business unique; but the literature continues to have difficulty defining the family business. We argue for a distinction between theoretical and operational definitions. A theoretical definition must identify the esence that distinguishes the family business from other businesses. It is the standard against which operational definitions must be measured. We propose a theoretical definition based on behavior as the essence of a family business. Our conceptual analysis shows that most of the operational definitions based on the components of family involvement overlap with our theoretical definition. Our empirical results suggest, however, that the components of family involvement typically used in operational definitions are weak predictors of intentions and, therefore, are not always reliable for distinguishing family businesses from non-family ones.
We use the articles and commentaries in this special issue to reinvigorate the theme of family business governance and extend its scope beyond the single business, single-family approach that has traditionally dominated the family business literature. Through a discussion of the implications of the articles and commentaries included in this special issue we begin to chart a new and expanded research program for governance that addresses the challenges of the large and complex multifamily and/or multibusiness family enterprise. We hope to encourage research in a direction that will add significantly to our understanding of business families’ contributions to the global economy.
This study focuses on a particular form of family businesses—businesses with at least two unrelated founding families—and how their organizational form of a multifamily business persists over several generations. Using an inductive approach to study five multifamily cases, we discovered that these firms did not meet complexity with complex structures and processes. Instead, four cases developed and utilized simple rules imprinted by the founders and pulled through to current generations, enabling effective mutual monitoring and persistence of the multifamily organizational form. The lack of simple rules development is associated with one multifamily business to abandon this organizational form.
Three concepts of competition, each reflecting different research traditions in microeconomics, are discussed: Industrial Organization competition, Chamberlinian competition, and Schumpeterian competition. The implications of each for normative theories of strategy are discussed, and a single framework which describes the types of competitive forces a firm is likely to face over time is suggested.
The amount of research conducted on the topic of international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) has grown exponentially in recent years, thus inviting an analysis of the scholarly conversations taking place. This paper is a review and commentary on how the construct of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been leveraged within the international entrepreneurship literature. The possible distinctiveness of the EO and IEO constructs are considered, and the major themes of IEO research are summarized. Several measurement‐related issues particularly pertinent to the assessment of EO as a generalizable/universalistic phenomenon are considered. The paper concludes with the identification of research foci whose pursuit promises to advance IEO knowledge along productive paths.
The paper examines the factors affecting entrepreneurial orientation as risk-taking for the internationalization of SMEs (micro, small and medium-sized enterprises). Specifically, this research extends the literature streams by empirically testing the relationships among entrepreneurial orientation as risk-taking to internationalization using resource based theory. Literature has shown that entrepreneurial behavior is positively related to firms and local resources in many contexts and has potential to offer contributions to internationalization performance. Quantitative survey on 71 Sicilian SMSs reached valuable conclusions for managers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, revealing the importance of local external and managerial internal resources on entrepreneurial orientation to internationalization as drivers of firm’s survival and competitiveness in actual markets crises.
The Resource-Based View (RBV) of competitive advantage provides a theoretical framework from the field of strategic management for assessing the competitive advantages of family firms. The RBV isolates idiosyncratic resources that are complex, intangible, and dynamic within a particular firm. The bundle of resources that are distinctive to a firm as a result of family involvement are identified as the “familiness” of the firm. This approach provides a research and practice method for assessing the specific behavioral and social phenomena within a firm that provide an advantage. Using a familiness model for assessing competitive advantage overcomes many of the problems associated with the generic claim that family companies have an advantage over nonfamily companies. It also provides a unified systems perspective of family firm performance.
This study uses data from a national survey of 673 business-owning households to assess factors associated with intermingling business and family finances. Logit analysis indicates that the use of family resources in the business is more likely in sole proprietorships; when the business owes money to financial institutions; and when the business owner is older, more experienced, and without children in the household. Family use of business resources is more likely if the business is incorporated, is located in a rural area or small town, and borrows money.
The field of family business studies has not explicitly identified the entrepreneurial potential of the family ownership group or adequately delineated the strategic requirements for sustaining wealth creation across generations. To address such issues, this paper presents the parameters for family-influenced transgenerational wealth creation. It identifies the family ownership group as the appropriate unit of entrepreneurial analysis and delineates the entrepreneurial strategy methods and family-as-investor mind-set that create the enterprising families domain. In so doing, the paper creates a true nexus between the fields of entrepreneurial strategy and family business studies.
Lumpkin and Dess [Lumpkin, G.T., and G.G. Dess. 1996. Clarifying the entrepreneurial orientation construct and linking it to performance. Academy of Management Review 21, no. 1: 135–72] established the basis of their research agenda on the relationship between Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) and company performance. A wide range of research has incorporated different moderating variables and dimensions of performance, such as profitability, growth, etc. Our work proposes the degree of family involvement comprising a moderating variable in the relationship between EO and company growth. This paper pursues to analyse the influence of family involvement on the relationship between EO and company growth. The empirical study was developed using a sample of 449 small- and medium-sized companies in Spain. The proposed hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear regression. The results obtained reveal the influence of innovativeness and proactiveness on the growth of a company. However, when family involvement is included as a moderating variable in the equation, a new influence on growth is born from the interaction between innovativeness and family involvement and the interaction between risk-taking and family involvement.
Previous literature on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) in family business (FB) focusses on the determinants of CE and presents conflicting results on its effects on firm-level performance. We argue that previous studies have overlooked the idea of FBs being complex social systems comprising three components, controlling families, business entities and individual family members; and any business activity in a FB should also be studied with respect to its effects on the family and individual family members, which ultimately impacts the performance. Moreover, previous FB literature addresses CE as a monolithic concept and does not separate its two primary types: corporate venturing (CV) and strategic renewal (SR). This article focusses solely on CV, investigating the impact of CV on FB. The research is based upon a set of longitudinal in-depth case studies of three FBs engaged in CV initiatives. The findings suggest that CV can have positive, negative or possibly both effects at the family and individual levels depending on four moderating factors. At the individual level, if a succession process is present, CV may increase the incumbent leader's capability to effectively direct the selection and development process of next generation family members (NGFMs) as well as the NGFMs’ human capital. However, CV could also reduce the affective commitment of NGFMs to the core business and such a risk appears to be higher when CV participation in the FB strategy is low. At the family level, development of CV initiatives may both enhance and reduce the family cohesion. The risk of its decrease grows with greater relevance of non-active family members’ ownership and the greater financial impact of the CV initiative itself.
The dynamic capabilities framework analyzes the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by private enterprise firms operating in environments of rapid technological change. The competitive advantage of firms is seen as resting on distinctive processes (ways of coordinating and combining), shaped by the firm's (specific) asset positions (such as the firm's portfolio of difftcult-to- trade knowledge assets and complementary assets), and the evolution path(s) it has aflopted or inherited. The importance of path dependencies is amplified where conditions of increasing retums exist. Whether and how a firm's competitive advantage is eroded depends on the stability of market demand, and the ease of replicability (expanding intemally) and imitatability (replication by competitors). If correct, the framework suggests that private wealth creation in regimes of rapid technological change depends in large measure on honing intemal technological, organizational, and managerial processes inside the firm. In short, identifying new opportunities and organizing effectively and efficiently to embrace them are generally more fundamental to private wealth creation than is strategizing, if by strategizing one means engaging in business conduct that keeps competitors off balance, raises rival's costs, and excludes new entrants. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Now nearing its 60th printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment.
More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors,, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing.
Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter's rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.
Book Description
Publication Date: June 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0684841487 | ISBN-13: 978-0684841489 | Edition: 1
Clique Aqui
Using Miller (1983) as a starting point, this article reviews the literature on entrepreneurial orientation or “EO.” It summarizes Miller's major points before recapping some of the subsequent literature and assessing why EO has become such a prominent topic. It identifies weaknesses in the literature, some of which, paradoxically, Miller wrote his article to guard against. It then makes recommendations for extending conceptually, and improving methodologically, future research on EO, arguing the importance of linking EO to current theories in strategy, organization theory, and economics. Methodological reorientations are also suggested to arrive at more cumulative and practical findings.
We provide an overview of the articles and commentaries devoted to theories of family enterprise in this special issue and link them to the concept of trust. Trust is a governance mechanism and theoretical construct of particular relevance for family firms, encapsulating some of their advantages and disadvantages. Trust is also linked to theoretical frameworks such as agency theory, stewardship theory, social capital theory, and transaction cost economics that are often used in family business studies, including those found in this special issue. Consequently, we advance trust as a bridging concept to reconcile and enhance our understanding of family firms as a unique organizational form.
This article focuses on risk taking as one important dimension of entrepreneurial orientation and its impact in family firms. Drawing on a sample of Swedish SMEs, we find that risk taking is a distinct dimension of entrepreneurial orientation in family firms and that it is positively associated with proactiveness and innovation. We also find that even if family firms do take risks while engaged in entrepreneurial activities, they take risk to a lesser extent than nonfamily firms. Moreover, and most importantly for our understanding of entrepreneurial orientation in family firms, we find that risk taking in family firms is negatively related to performance. Both theoretical and practical implications of our findings are provided.
The purpose of this article is to provide an explanation for the contradictory evidence in the literature regarding the performance of family-owned firms. The article suggests that most of the research fails to clearly describe the "family effect" on organizational performance. The "family effect", based on agency theory and the resource-based view of the firm, is described and propositions are generated that examine the relationship between families and organizational performance. Implications for theory and research are also discussed.
Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) involves simultaneous opportunity-seeking and advantage seeking behaviors and results in superior firm performance. On a relative basis, small,entrepreneurial ventures are effective in identifying opportunities but are less successful in developing competitive advantages needed to appropriate value from those opportunities. In contrast, large, established firms often are relatively more effective in establishing competitive advantages but are less able to identify new opportunities. We argue that SE is a unique, distinctive construct through which firms are able to create wealth. An entrepreneurial mindset, an entrepreneurial culture and entrepreneurial leadership, the strategic management of resources and applying creativity to develop innovations are important dimensions of SE. Herein we develop a model of SE that explains how these dimensions are integrated to create wealth.