21st Uddevalla Symposium 2018
IIMS Leading research fellow Victoria Golikova took part in the 21st Uddevalla Symposium “Diversity, Innovation, Entrepreneurship – Regional, Urban, National and International Perspectives” that was held in the Sweden on June 14-16, 2018.
This year the Uddevalla Symposium was hosted by the Luleå University of Technology. Few universities in the world are so exotic and situated so far north out near the polar circle with midnight sun and with very bright nights.
The symposium is designed to bring together leading-edge views of senior academic scholars and mix them with the critical and creative views of post-docs and PhD students engaged in their thesis work.
Following the tradition established by the previous symposia, starting in 1998, researchers from various fields, such as economic geography, entrepreneurship, international business, management, political science, regional economics, small business economics, sociology and urban and regional planning were welcomed.
Victoria Golikova presented her paper «The Role of CEO and Firm Characteristics on Firm Innovative Performance» (co-authored by Fernanda Ricotta and Boris Kuznetsov).
The main objective of the paper is to analyze the impact CEO characteristics on the firm innovative performance and to test if there are differences in the case of family owned firms in mature and transition economies. We found that the age of CEOs demonstrate the same negative effect among family firms both in Europe and Russia where the firms with CEOs who are more than 65 years old are less innovative being compared with young peers less than 34 years old. CEOs gender is a significant factor that impacts the probability to innovate only for European firms (both family and non-family) and not for Russia. For EU sample huge country heterogeneity is worth to mention and worst innovative performance of firms with female CEOs.