In today’s fast changing environment large companies need to be fast and flexible to compete successfully against smaller, more agile competitors. Strategic foresight encompasses a set of tools, processes and organisation forms that enable large companies to identify, assess, and act upon...

This empirical survey is based on a questionnaire which was distributed to 6,000 medium-sized German companies with international activities. The analyses included responses from a total of 533 enterprises. The areas examined include the importance of globalization, the motives for and the...

While abundant literature evaluates how the adoption of proactive environmental strategies affects corporate performance, we have little understanding of the organizational mechanisms that link such strategies to competitive advantage. It is therefore unclear how environmental strategies relate...

Absorptive capacity is defined as the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends. It is regarded as an important factor in both corporate innovation and general competitive advantage. My approach recognizes the...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the �draperies� or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German...

This paper introduces a large-scale administrative panel data set on corporate bankruptcy in Germany that allows for an econometric analysis of involuntary exits where previous studies mixed voluntary and involuntary exits. Approximately 83 percent of all bankruptcies occur in plants with no...

This paper investigates the performance of Germany's three-pillar banking system in providing financial services nationwide, regarding different outreach indicators. At the federal state level, bank outreach shows South-North and West-East gaps. Combining regional and bank data at the district...

We extend prior empirical research on the questions of whether, how much, and under which conditions strategic leaders matter to the fate of their firms. With a 20-year Panel of 110 German firms, our analysis broadens the prevalent focus on CEO influences in U.S. settings. The results indicate...

Ideals (or ideal values) help people to navigate in social life. They indicate at a very fundamental level what people are concerned about, what they strive for, and what they want to be affiliated with. Transferring this to a leader-follower analysis, our first Study (N = 306) confirms that...