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The accelerating rate of technological progress and the increasing number of people having international experiences resulted in the emergence of entrepreneurial internationalization. Internationalization is challenging for entrepreneurs as they have limited resources to compete with large multinationals. We explore how entrepreneurs benefit from the unique individual-level resources and the country’s innovation at a macro level on internationalization pursued by exports. We develop a research model to test the direct effects of innovation, business relations, and the contextual framework conditions of country innovativeness as well as their interactions with firm age on export performance. We construct a data-set covering 72 economies over the globe drawn from GEM data and test our research model using multiple and hierarchical linear regressions. We find that innovation and country innovativeness interact with firm age on export performance when controlled for various entrepreneurial and business level characteristics. Our research contributes to the literature offering important implications for entrepreneurs and policymakers. At the entrepreneurial level, innovation is a unique resource that an entrepreneur can get the most benefit out from it in the early stages of foundation. At the country level, developing policies supporting a favorable innovative environment is crucial, particularly in low innovative countries, to boost entrepreneurial internationalization in their early stages.

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Professor M. Atilla Öner, who passed away in the most fruitful times of his scholarly life on the 29th of August 2018. Prof. Öner graduated in the first place of the Engineering Faculty at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey in 1978. Continuing in the path of engineering, he completed his academic degrees of M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Yale University. He went back to his home country following his Ph.D. and worked in the industry leading several R&D projects for more than a decade from 1985 to 2000. While he had gained intensive practical experience in the real sector, he never disconnected his ties with academic life. Prof. Öner taught courses in the field of technology management at Boğaziçi University and advised projects at the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey during these times as an adjunct faculty. As of 2000, he permanently moved to academia to achieve his tremendous passion for teaching and research at the Department of Business Administration at Yeditepe University in İstanbul, Turkey. He was a Professor of Technology and Operations Management and served as the managing director of the Management Application and Research Center at Yeditepe University. He contributed to the scholarly work in the fields of methodology, technology road mapping, R&D management, and technology management. He supervised several MS/MBA and Ph.D. theses on national innovation systems, pilot national (sectoral) foresight studies, system dynamic modeling of R&D management, project management, and public policy issues. He was an associate editor of Technological Forecasting and Social Change and served on the editorial board of Foresight, Futures, International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management.

Universities’ third mission of knowledge commercialization imposes them a core role as being entrepreneurial universities in the triple helix along with the government and industry to contribute to the regional development and innovation. The emergence of entrepreneurial universities is relatively a new concept in Turkey attracting stakeholders of higher education, policy developers and scholars. The contribution of the entrepreneurial universities to the entrepreneurship ecosystem and regional innovativeness has been quantified via an index developed by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council starting in 2012. Using this index as the dependent variable in our model, we explore how being located in a technology development zone and other university-specific characteristics play a role in getting higher scores in this index of the most entrepreneurial and innovative universities. Our analyses highlight how the contribution of universities undertaking technology development activities through a formal channel as in the form of technology development zones differ to the regional entrepreneurship and innovativeness. While the performance of the technology development zone and the composition of the university students with higher ratios of graduate students positively improve the scores of the universities, universities that are smaller in sizes are found to have higher scores.

Digital platforms force established companies to align their existing, traditional business models with the new digital business environments resulting in business model transformations and digital innovation. We explore the dynamics of business model transformations in established companies by studying a real-life business case at a global-tech company that transforms a traditional business model to a cloud-based digital IoT platform as a multi-sided, industry-wide platform business. We develop a theoretical framework with two compartments; one for observing the changes in core business model components and the other one for identifying the resisting, enabling, and driving factors affecting the transformation process. The interviews with the key informants in the business unit of the company revealed several changes that have occurred in the core business model components. The new subscription-based pricing and sales models significantly changed the way the company creates and captures value. The development and operations of the platform required new know-how and new skills, implying the importance of running the new one as a separate business model. Among other implications, our findings also highlight transformational leadership as a significant driver of business model transformation, which can be supported by establishing a business level market intelligence body undertaking the strategic management up to date in established companies.

The book presents a holistic view via the windows of physics and economics to the future of the human race starting from the formation of the universe going through the evolution of the humankind throughout the ages. The author adroitly explains the role of energy as an enabler of evolution, technology and economic growth with an increasing level of complexity throughout the ages. The availability of natural wealth in forms of coal, oil, and natural gas were transformed into useful work incubating technologies and enabling economic growth. Many of the advances in economic growth occurred because of the creative destructions which enabled evolutionary innovations. However, the Earth is no longer in excess of such natural wealth. The mankind should use the knowledge to extract exergy from what is left in terms of natural wealth, solar energy or some other form of energy in the light of thermodynamics that is also neglected for so long in economics and other fields.

This study is motivated through the paradox on the well-being of self-employed that self-employment is associated with greater satisfaction across various domains despite the lower income levels of such entrepreneurs. Since not all self-employed gain higher returns to income, there is a need to question to what extent income contributes to well-being as well as the most critical factors such as education or the reason that the entrepreneur starts a new business could play a role in this relationship between income and well-being. Using GEM’s data on entrepreneurs from a wide set of countries all over the world, the effect of income on entrepreneurial well-being is tested treating education as the moderator across necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs. While necessity entrepreneurs with relatively lower education levels gain higher returns to income, opportunity entrepreneurs gain higher returns to income when their education levels are higher. The results shed light on how the effect of income on entrepreneurial well-being changes adversely with the increasing education levels for different entrepreneurial motivations.

University ranking indexes are considered very useful benchmarking tools in comparing the performance of universities around the world. Being placed in these prestigious indexes provides a strong advertisement for a university and helps them to attract high-quality students and academicians all over the world. However, there are some important deficiencies of university ranking indexes such as taking into account the whole university as a single unit without differentiating according to different fields of study or research, being limited to some well-known universities, and not considering institutional characteristics such as size or age. This study aims to explore the leading global university rankings to determine the similarities and differences in terms of their ranking criteria, main indicators, modeling choices, and the effects of these on the rankings. Designating the Times Higher Education World Rankings as the base ranking, a comprehensive comparison of the positions of the top universities of the base index with the matched positions of the same universities under other leading indexes including ARWU, QS, Leiden, and URAP is given. Correlations highlight the significant differences among some indexes even in measuring the same criterion such as teaching or research.

Studies based on the relationship between the evolution of family firms and their innovative performance have been rare in family-business research. This chapter reviews the characteristics of family firms and their relation to innovation strategies in emerging markets, with the case of Turkish family firms, and provides an explorative analysis of the relationship between the factors affecting the development of family business and their innovative strategies in Turkey. The most prevalent characteristics of Turkish family firms that affect their innovation decisions are the collectivist family culture, pragmatic growth decisions, and paternalistic control tendencies. The differences based on these characteristics should affect their approach to innovation differently. Founders follow an exploitative innovation strategy. Later generations coming after the founder generation generally focus on more exploratory strategies to meet market demands. By the third generation, as the firm has institutionalized, they try to balance the two forms of innovation by using their resources and exploring environmental opportunities in the form of ambidexterity.

Surgery is considered as an integral part of any health system, comprising 30% of global burden of disease along with serious access problems and catastrophic payments across the world. More than 230 million major surgeries are done every year. Surgical innovations typically represent the greatest part of innovations in terms of their contributions to ensuring safer and high-quality care and thus saving lives in the field of healthcare management. Such innovations also contribute significantly to the knowledge society. Correctly identifying innovations in surgery and enabling them to be known and adapted by other surgeons is a critical concern for all stakeholders in healthcare. There exists no information on surgical innovations from a managerial perspective in Turkey. This study aims to explore how surgeons identify surgical innovations based on their real experiences of past surgeries using a semi-structured questionnaire distributed to surgeons in a major hospital chain in Istanbul, Turkey. The results shed light on recognising and evaluating surgical innovations provided by the practicing surgeons via a management perspective. WOS: 000512898900002

Global ranking indexes measure university performances in terms of criteria such as education, resarch, publication and internationalization. While the dicsussion on the role of global ranking indexes in determining the quality of higher education is going on in the academia, such indexes have started to be taken into account seriously by the public opinion. The leading university ranking indexes share the rankings of world universities that are mostly ranked in terms of a single score based on predetermined criteria, indicators measuring the criteria, and the associated weights of the indicators annually with their stakeholders. While understanding how employed criteria and differences in methodologies influence the actual rankings has been an issue, Turkish universities' placements in such rankings make another avenue for research. This study explores Turkish universities that take place in the leading indexes including THE World, QS World, ARWU, and URAP during 2011 and 2015, their similar and different aspects, and the changes in the rankings over the given time period. Factors such as size of the university, being a state or foundation university, existence of the medical school, and long established reputation play a role in Turkish universities' placements in leading international indexes. WOS:000393558200005

Universities can significantly contribute to the regional development and innovation capability of a city if the knowledge produced in universities can be appropriately cycled back to the city in the form of technological innovation. Technology parks and technology transfer offices (TTOs), as urban knowledge and innovation spaces, are two important channels of building research platforms with enterprises where universities can disseminate knowledge. While technology parks create space for knowledge generation and innovation within a city, university TTOs play a critical role in enhancing knowledge spillover and creating new start-up firms. This paper highlights the contribution universities can make to Istanbul's potential of becoming an innovative city that houses successful urban knowledge and innovation spaces. By conducting interviews with the managers of technoparks and TTOs in Istanbul, we explore how the existence of technoparks and TTOs within a university affects the success of technology-transfer mechanisms. WOS:000382498400006 Q2

As one of the most important topics of internationalization in higher education, international student mobility has turned into an area which countries and higher education institutions from all over the world have been focusing on and developing policies since 1980s. Data on international student mobility from UNESCO (2016) show that the number of outgoing international students all over the world has been more than four million doubling in the last fifteen years. While the increase in student mobility and the economic return of such activities increase the competition in this area, this also requires questioning both the position and the trends of Turkey over the years. In this study, the world countries with the highest inflow of international students along with Turkey and the change in their international student profiles are evaluated based on the available data between 1999 and 2013. The findings indicate a change over time in the patterns of international student flow with respect to the number of incoming students and the regions of their home countries both for world countries and Turkey. These findings are expected to shed light on the Turkish higher education policies on internationalization.

Small firms dominate the economy in terms of their share in employment and enterprise totals in most economies. Despite their central role in economic growth and their potential for innovation, the innovation activities these firms undertake are limited or unknown in contrast to many large firms. Most governments across the globe establish frameworks, create funds and revise their taxation and educational policies to stimulate the innovation activities of small firms. This study concerns the relationship between the innovation policies initiated by the Turkish Government to promote innovation among small businesses and the performance of these organisations at the firm level. We investigate the effect of support funds, for the innovativeness of SMEs given by the public agency of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization, on the firms' net sales with respect to size, sector and location. Our results reveal support funds positively contribute to net sales with higher contributions in manufacturing firms relative to the firms from other industrial sectors. Size and location also matter for net sales. Firms that are relatively larger and those located in industrial zones and technology development centres established by the small business development organisation and universities create higher contributions.