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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of senior managers in managing intra-and inter-organizational relationships with key customers and the factors that influence such involvement in a novel context in the Arab Middle East region.

An exploratory qualitative research design was used in which 68 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted in Jordan with endogenous and Western firms.

Top/senior managers play a significant role in Arab business relationships and in creating value for the firms. Their involvement in key accounts is imperative at all levels – strategic, operational, and relational – mainly due to cultural and institutional factors that are unique to the Arab context.

The study is limited to operations in one emerging country situated in a novel setting in one particular region of the world, which is the Middle East.

Arab senior managers’ participation is imperative and should continue with their relatively intense involvement with key accounts. For foreign investors operating in that part of the world, it is highly recommended that senior management have a more a hands-on approach when dealing with the Arab key customer and to focus more on the relational aspect of key account management than on the organizational aspect.

This paper adds to the very limited number of studies on senior management involvement in key account management, making a theoretical and practical contribution and adding insight on how to manage the relationship with the Arab key customer.

This paper aims to highlight the importance of relational resources (trust and relationship effectiveness). The authors investigate how the Chinese guanxi is utilized to create and develop service exploitation and exploration activities for adopting non-technological innovations.

This study surveyed 252 Chinese and Taiwanese firms. The results were analyzed through structural equation model.

Relational antecedents of collaborative communication and constructive conflict positively relate to trust, as well as to relationship effectiveness. Constructive conflict positively relates to exploration and exploitation. Relationship effectiveness and trust mediate two relational antecedents to exploitation. Relationship effectiveness crucially mediates two relational antecedents to exploration.

Dyadic data would be more desirable to study firm interactions.

Chinese society perceives conflict as being detrimental to relationships. Constructive conflict enhances inter-firm trust and relationship effectiveness. Relationship effectiveness, which motivates suppliers to mobilize their guanxi network, mediates the supplier–customer interaction in broadening relationships to produce new services, as well as reinforcing networks to strengthen existing ventures.

This study contributes to a relatively under-explored relationship effectiveness area. Chinese suppliers capitalize their guanxi networks to achieve competitive advantages in non-technological innovation.

Interpersonal and informal ties and networks, known as wasta in the Arab Middle East region, remain a major force in Middle Eastern societies, determining most economic, social and political outcomes. Yet the literature on informal ties and networks is largely characterized by a lack of contributions from the Arab world, despite the adverse effect that lack of understanding of the wasta phenomenon is having on the effectiveness of expatriate managers and subsequently on business performance. This chapter therefore aims to shed light on the meaning, characteristics, structure, and role of wasta in establishing and maintaining successful business relationships. It ends with recommendations for foreign investors and international managers who wish to establish and maintain successful business relationships in the Middle East on how to capitalize on interpersonal networks within this process.

This paper aims to propose the following questions: How do structural network embeddedness influence firms’ incremental innovation capability? Does technology cluster moderate the relationships between them?

In this empirical research, the authors collected a sample of patent data in the smartphone industry over the period of 2000-2018. Then, the authors examined the direct roles of structural network embeddedness on firms’ incremental innovation capability and the moderating role of technology cluster by using ordinary linear squares regression.

The empirical results show that occupying the central position positively affects firms’ incremental innovation capability, and clustering strengthens this linear relationship. Furthermore, bridging structural holes has an inverted U-shaped effect on incremental innovation capability, and clustering positively moderated this nonlinear relationship, while bridging ties across different clusters plays a negative moderation role in this relationship.

This empirical research provides new insights into whether and how firms can grasp the benefits of structural network embeddedness to conduct incremental innovations and the moderation effects of technology cluster contingencies. It further contributes to the structural network embeddedness–incremental innovation capability issue by extending its research context to the smartphone industry.

Understanding a technology’s patent landscape, including patent strategies, helps organizations position themselves regarding their innovation and provides insight about a technology’s future direction. This study aims to provide an overview of the blockchain technology patenting trends and outlines an exploratory framework of patenting strategies for blockchain.

A total of 3,234 registered patents are analyzed to determine the geographical distribution and identify key actors patenting around the globe. In addition, an empirical study consisting of multiple case studies in the form of ten in-depth interviews with owners/managers of organizations based in North America was conducted to understand organizations’ strategies for patenting the blockchain technology.

Several novel insights regarding the strategies are used for blockchain technology patenting. For example, the existence of strong anti-patent sentiment which results in a lack of patenting by start-up organizations or has led to a form of open source patenting strategy. Larger organizations appear to be patenting defensively, and small to medium organizations are primarily patenting to defend their competitive advantage.

Start-up organizations harboring anti-patent sentiment should consider the open-source patenting strategy to ensure that the collaborative innovation network can continue. They should also consider collaborating with other actors within the network to have a competitive position in the market.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to conduct an empirical study with organizations currently using the blockchain technology to understand patenting strategies used for blockchain.

The purpose of this study is to conduct an empirical investigation into the impact of supply chain dependence (including customer dependence and supplier dependence) on credit risk through the lens of social network theory (SNT) by focusing on how to manage firm risk using supply chain relationships in the context of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Using data from public databases, this study selects a unique sample from a Chinese SME board and uses an ordered logistic regression model to investigate the relationship between the dependence on major customers or suppliers and both credit risk and credit rating. It is found that the results are robust to the use of different empirical methods.

The main findings of this study are that a firm’s dependence on major customers is positively related to its credit risk but negatively related to its credit rating, while a firm’s dependence on major suppliers is positively related to its credit risk but negatively related to its credit rating.

To broaden the understanding of industrial marketing and purchasing, this study contributes to research on supply chain relationship management and risk management by focusing on SMEs’ dependence on major customers and suppliers and empirically examining the influence of this dependence on both credit risk and credit rating in an emerging market.