Most Popular Books by Mike Wright

Scholars are paying more attention to knowledge workers (KW) as they gain importance in the knowledge-based economy. Knowledge worker mobility (KWM) can involve various forms of employee and entrepreneurial movements: the transfer of employees from one organization to another either through locational movement or through a change in ownership, the transfer of employees within the same organization but in different units and/or geographies, and the spinning off by employees into new ventures. KWM spans a variety of different contexts which have rarely been explored in prior research. We focus on advancing our understanding of KWM in context, pushing the boundaries of theory and methods by developing a framework focusing on five main contextual dimensions: organizational context and roles, geographical and spatial context, social context and teams, institutional and cultural norms, and temporal dynamics. We summarize the papers presented in the special issue and also identify an agenda for further research.

This paper aims to better understand the development of entrepreneurial competencies to create new ventures within the non-commercial academic environment. We build upon the evolutionary perspective considering where resources come from to help define these competencies and explain their paths of development. The study follows the creation and early growth of four university spin-offs within the UK and Norway. We identified three competencies of opportunity refinement, leveraging, and championing that appeared crucial for the ventures to gain credibility. Although selected competencies were inherent within the academic founders, the specific competencies for venture creation had to be developed or acquired. This was achieved iteratively through entrepreneurial experience and accessing competencies from disparate actors such as industry partners and equity investors. Propositions are offered to guide future empirical research based upon our framework.

This paper reports the findings from a survey of the effects of management buyouts on human resource management (HRM). Buyouts resulted in increased employment, the adoption of new reward systems, and expanded employee involvement. These developments support the resource-based view that buyouts develop internal assets over agency theory predictions that managers will adopt a cost reduction approach. The type of buyout influences the subsequent development of HRM. Buyouts report more commitment-orientated employment policies where employees own shares, and where the buyout pursues a ''buy and build'' corporate strategy and adopts a business strategy of enhancing customer service and developing markets.

While much prior research has focused upon how Technology Transfer Offices and other contextual characteristics shape the level of university spinoffs (USO), there is little research on entrepreneurial potential among individual academics, and to the best of our knowledge, no comparative studies with other types of spinoffs exist to date. In this paper we focus on an important but neglected aspect of knowledge transfer from academic research involving the indirect flow to entrepreneurship by individuals with a university education background who become involved in new venture creation by means of corporate spinoffs (CSO) after gaining industrial experience, rather than leaving university employment to found a new venture as an academic spinoff. The commercial knowledge gained in industry is potentially more valuable for entrepreneurial performance compared to the academic knowledge gained by additional research experience at a university. This leads us to posit that the average performance of CSOs will be higher than comparable USOs, but the gains from founder''s prior experiences will be relatively higher among USOs whose founders lack the corporate context. We investigate these propositions in a comparative study tracking the complete population of USOs and CSOs among the Swedish knowledge-intensive sectors between 1994 and 2002.

It has widely been suggested that during the 1980s many diversified firms narrowed the scope of their activities by refocusing on core businesses, primarily through divestment activity. This study examines the impact of divestment on firm performance, using an unbalanced panel of 132 UK quoted companies over the period 1985 to 1993. The results suggest that divestment has a positive, significant and substantial effect in raising the profitability of the vendor company. We find limited support for the view that the benefit from divestment is greater for larger and/or more diversified firms and firms operating with weak governance arrangements.

This paper investigates the extent to which firms going private have different characteristics from other acquired firms. We find the firms going private have higher board shareholdings and higher institutional shareholdings. In addition, they have poorer growth prospects and experience more takeover speculation. However, there is no evidence that they have different internal governance structures, have higher free cash flow or spend different amounts on capital projects. It was also found that the premiums received by shareholders in firms going private were lower than those received by shareholders of other acquired firms. We also find novel evidence of private activity designed to ensure that a bid to take a firm private is successful. Overall the results offer stronger support for the financial incentive hypothesis rather than for the financial realignment hypothesis.