Vlerick Repository
The Vlerick Repository is a searchable open-access publication database, containing the complete archive of research output written by Vlerick Business School faculty and researchers.
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Publication How to stand out in a company’s global manufacturing network(Harvard Business School Corporation, 2025)Global manufacturers are constantly revamping their network of plants. Surviving over the long term for a factory—especially one located in a high-cost country—can be extremely difficult. But an exception to the rule—a Pfizer plant in Belgium that ended up producing its mRNA Covid-19 vaccine—demonstrated that it can be done. An extensive study of the steps that the plant’s leaders took beginning in the mid-2000s—revealed how a plant can become indispensable. They took the facility through five stages: 1) improve operational excellence, 2) improve capabilities for making new products, 3) specialize, 4) increase responsiveness, and 5) build a knowledge network.Item Disruptive Trends in Entrepreneurial Finance Research(Academy of Management, 2023)Entrepreneurial finance scholars address the questions and themes related to which, how, when, and why ventures attract external funding and how it affects their future development (Bellavitis et al., 2017b; Block et al., 2018; Cumming et al., 2019a; Cumming & Groh, 2018; Cumming et al., 2022a). Most attention has been devoted to equity capital because of its pivotal role in the financing of high-growth entrepreneurship (Drover et al., 2017) and significant firm-level implications (Bonini et al., 2019; Eldridge et al., 2021; Manigart et al., 2002). While the entrepreneurial finance field is well-established, recent disruptive trends have attracted substantial scholarly attention. Specifically, radical financial market innovations such as digitization, invigorated research opportunities in traditional topics such as VC research, and novel statistical approaches and data sources have created a promising and exciting space to study entrepreneurial finance. This panel aims to inform researchers by discussing these disruptive trends and their implications for future research with prominent entrepreneurial finance scholars.Item Enhancing Independent Workers’ Thriving Through Disidentification(Academy of Management, 2023-08)Research on independent work has provided key insights into the identity challenges that gig workers face, and the identity processes they engage in to overcome those challenges. While understanding how gig workers develop a sense of identity is important, in this research we suggest it is just as important for gig workers to come to an understanding of who they are not, and that disidentification with targets are also a key dimension of the work-self. To better understand the disidentification processes that gig workers engage in, we develop a grounded model of how workers use disidentification to thrive in the gig economy. Using qualitative data from 69 independent workers, we find that workers cultivate a repertoire of “unwanted selves” (i.e., who and what they are not) based on their states of disidentification with targets. This repertoire helps workers to free their work-self by understanding who and what they are not; and protect their work-self through engaging in boundary work tactics. Together, this contributes to enhancing workers’ thriving in the gig economy. Our grounded model thus offers an initial exploration of the role of disidentification in cultivating positive identity outcomes, and complements the research that has predominantly explored the identification processes that gig workers engage in.Item Do Green Boards Create Green Incentives?(Academy of Management, 2022-08)Aligning CEO compensation with environmental sustainability is one of the primary channels through which firms which firms can improve their environmentally sustainability. In this study, we investigate the effect of board-level environmental expertise on the use of environmental criteria in CEO compensation. Using hand-collected data on environmental criteria from a European sample, we show that environmental expertise is positively associated with the use of environmental criteria. Moreover, we explore several mechanisms for the use of expertise, and find that in countries with lower environmental awareness, environmental expertise is more strongly associated with the likelihood of using environmental criteria.Item Divide and Conquer: Investor Type Diversity in Entrepreneurial Ventures(Academy of Management, 2024-08)Past studies show that dependence on partners for resources also exposes firms to possible problematic partner behavior, against which firms try to defend themselves. We extend our understanding of resource dependence in entrepreneurial ventures by developing and testing a novel framework on how and which ventures can defend themselves in their first interaction with equity investors when established defenses are usually unavailable. We theorize and show that ventures with greater resource stocks (i.e., higher ex-ante cash holdings and prior experience with multiple investor types) defend themselves by pursuing a "divide and conquer"-strategy in which they attract first-round investments from different types of equity investors. This strategy also facilitates follow-on fundraising. Overall, we extend resource dependence theory by focusing on a novel "divide and conquer"-defense strategy, which limits the power of any individual investor type, and by presenting a dynamic view on resource dependence in which entrepreneurs employ defense strategies from a position of strength because they still hold greater resource stocks.