Determinants of the Firm’s Export Performance
Firm’s survival and expansion, and the consequent economic growth of many countries, is strongly dependent on a better understanding of the determinants that influence their export performance. Projects associated with this topic investigate the impact of external and internal factors to help firms succeed in the export market.
Exit and Re-entry Foreign Markets
Projects associated with this research theme focus on investigating the firm’s exit decision from foreign markets and re-entry decisions. As markets become more globalized and competition intensifies, many firms are pushed to the verge of exiting from the foreign market. As learning from unsuccessful ventures may be more valuable than learning from success, there is a need for a much deeper understanding of the firm’s exit decision and its determinants. Firms may also re-enter previously abandoned markets. As such, projects in this area also examine the firm’s re-entry decisions
Managing Operations in Foreign Cultural Context
In today’s global environment it is crucial for firms to understand cultural differences that exist among different countries. Projects associated with this topic investigate the impact of cultural differences on different aspects of the firm’s operations (e.g. entry mode, backshoring, marketing strategy). Concepts such as cultural distance, psychic distance, and institutional distance are prominent in this field.
Innovation and Technology
Innovation and technology are important drivers of economic growth and firms’ competitiveness. Projects associated with this topic focus on areas such as:
- Innovation and knowledge sharing in manufacturing networks
- Sourcing strategies
- Industrial clusters
- Open innovation
- Project terminations
- Procurement
Tourism Management
Projects in this area focus on:
- Innovation implications of tourism interorganisational relations
- Approaches to management of tourism interfirm co-production
- Assessment of the financial performance outcomes of interfirm collaborations
Global and Local Agri-Food Supply Chains
Associate Professor Heidi Hogset is a work package leader in the international research project called GOLF, which is an acronym for Global and lOcaL agri-Food supply chains. It is an international research network, with EU funding for staff and student exchange under the Marie Curie RISE program. Partner institutions come from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, China, Thailand and Vietnam. The lead partner is the University of Liverpool. The main objective of the project is to study agri-food supply chains with an aim to inform future government policies targeting the food sector. Issues to be addressed are:
- How can agri-food supply chains be designed to improve food security and food safety?
- How do we assess the food security performance of an agri-food supply chain?
- What are the market failures that need to be addressed to improve food security and food safety?
- What makes agri-food supply chains sustainable and resilient?
- How do we assess the level of sustainability and resilience of an agri-food supply chain?
- What are the market failures that need to be addressed to improve the sustainability and resilience of agri-food supply chains?
Molde University College is the lead “beneficiary”, or responsible, for a work package with the title “Assessment of agri-food systems in a local eco-economy context”. One of the main tasks is to develop a conceptual model for assessment of the performance of agri-food supply chains, and later apply this model to case studies of carefully selected supply chains, covering different types of agri-food products with different categories of supply chains.