Strategic flexibility provides an approach for tourism destinations to respond more readily to turbulent environments. It is a management method that can assist tourism suppliers to meet the challenges of achieving competitive advantage. The paper also explores the importance that is accorded to the facilitators or drivers of strategic flexibility by Slovenian tourism industry stakeholders along with their performance in actioning these drivers. Importance performance analysis suggests the priority strategic actions to reduce the risk of strategic drift. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of these findings for emerging destinations generally.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21321958
The promotion of energy efficiency is seen as one of the top priorities of EU energy policy (EC, 2010). This research combines the approaches taken in energy demand modeling and frontier analysis in order to econometrically estimate the level of energy efficiency for the residential sector in the EU-27 member states for the period 1996 to 2009. The estimates for the energy efficiency confirm that the EU residential sector indeed holds a relatively high potential for energy savings from reduced inefficiency. Therefore, despite the common objective to decrease ‘wasteful’ energy consumption, considerable variation in energy efficiency between the EU member states is established. Furthermore, an attempt is made to evaluate the impact of energy-efficiency measures undertaken in the EU residential sector by introducing an additional set of variables into the model and the results suggest that financial incentives and energy performance standards play an important role in promoting energy efficiency improvements, whereas informative measures do not have a significant impact.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21971430
This article uses importance–performance analysis (IPA) to assess the importance of different activities to underpin tourism development in Serbia, as well as the industry's perceived performance in respect of these activities. In several areas Serbian tourism industry considers itself to be underperforming in maintaining destination competitiveness. This article uses IPA as a diagnostic tool for investigating the implications of the findings for both destination managers and private tourism operators in Serbia that can assist them to develop a focused action agenda to achieve and maintain destination competitive advantage.
COBISS.SI-ID: 22178022
Although networks in prior research have been highlighted as a remedy to resource constraints experienced by smaller firms, little attention has been paid to understanding mechanisms through which smaller firms benefit from networks for effective innovation performance. In this paper we develop a conceptual model of direct and moderated network effects on a firm’s innovation. We test this model on a large sample of small and medium-sized firms from a post-transitional and developed economy. We show that absorptive capacity moderates the relationship between networks and innovation outcomes, but with some country level variations. The implications of these results in relation to entrepreneurship theory and practice are discussed.
COBISS.SI-ID: 22076390
This article analyses the causality between the firm’s employment and productivity growth based on the population of Slovenian manufacturing firms in the 1994–2003 period. By using the system GMM estimator, the authors find no evidence of employment–productivity growth trade-off, moreover, significant complementarities between employment and productivity growth, mostly driven by SMEs and firms from high-tech industries are found. The authors argue that the job-creation policy and productivity-promoting policy are complementary rather than trade-offs and that policymakers should focus on the optimal policy mix that provides the highest aggregate effect with regard to all growth aspects.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21959654