This study was developed under the scope of a Portuguese project focused on the entrepreneur’s perspective and perception on the internationalization process of his company: more specifically, about the factors that enhanced the company entry into foreign markets as well as the constraints found in this process. This work focuses on the importance of using digital transformation to integrate technological tools in international business practice and strategy and the obstacles encountered with introducing these new technologies. This study aims to determine the relationships between technology categories and obstacles. The final goal is to assess the impact of these characteristics of the companies by the sector of economic activity, size, and percentage of profits resulting from international expansion. A questionnaire was designed and sent by email to 8183 companies from the AICEP database, distributed by three main activity sectors. A total of 310 valid answers were gathered from the Portuguese internationalized companies. The research limitations are related to the reduced number of interviews. These interviews showed that managers were not aware of the concept of digital transformation and misunderstood the use of digital technologies in the internationalization process of the business. This limitation can add some bias to the qualitative results. In addition to these limitations, the number of responses per sector was also not homogeneous. The practical implications of this study are that managers and top-level executives can use that to better understand how companies could use digital tools and what obstacles they should avoid when they want to internationalize their business. This paper is one of the first research contributions to analyze the impact of digital transformation in the internalization of Portuguese companies.

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The Importance of Digital Transformation in International Business

The article discusses current digitalization trends from the perspective of business innovation management, the relevance of which has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The relationship between the innovative and digital profile indicators and the level of entrepreneurship development is analysed and substantiated based on the world and European experience in general and Azerbaijan in particular. The study's main goal is empirical confirmation, formalization, and evaluation of digitalization's impact on entrepreneurship development in Azerbaijan, some European and Asian countries to improve public policy in the areas under study. For achieving the study goals, scientific methods of statistical, analytical, graphical, correlation and regression analysis, and economic and mathematical modelling using Excel and Stata software products were applied. The information base of the study is formed from scientific papers and publications in the field of innovation management, digital economy, and entrepreneurship, as well as World Bank data for a sample of 14 countries in Europe and Asia (Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovak Republic, and Ukraine) for 2006-2020. The author characterized trends in the total number of new firms, the overall density of business and the density of new business in the countries included in the sample, and indicators of the relative cost of procedures and the time to start a business in the studied countries. Particular attention is paid to the export and import of ICT goods, communication and computer services. A panel data regression model with fixed effects has been built to determine the influence of digitalization parameters on the business sector's development parameters. Evaluating the impact of digitalization on entrepreneurship development in Azerbaijan and other European and Asian countries could be useful to scientists, researchers, public authorities and local governments, business structures, and entrepreneurs.

Impact of Digitalization on Entrepreneurship Development in the Context of Business Innovation Management

Dynamic changes in the global economy, resulting from the implementation of the Industry 4.0 concept, cover practically all areas of life. They mainly concern companies that need to adapt to these changes as soon as possible in order to face growing competition. The digitalization process is of great significance in this respect, as it requires having appropriate material and personal resources as well as knowledge necessary to implement new innovative solutions. Problems associated with the digitalization of economy are very well understood in the European Union (EU), which makes every effort to ensure the best possible conditions for the implementation of this process in companies in all member states. A special group of these countries belong to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the youngest members of the EU. Given this extremely important issue, the paper presents the results of research on the level of digitalization of small, medium and large enterprises in this group of countries (CEE). Their aim was to evaluate the level of digitalization of the studied groups of enterprises and individual CEE countries. It was important to determine digital technologies dominating in particular groups of enterprises and, with the use of non-parametric tests, the influence of the digitalization level on selected economic parameters of particular CEE countries. The research was based on 11 selected indicators characterizing the digital technologies used, infrastructure for Industry 4.0 and personnel training in new technologies. The level of digitalization of individual groups of companies was determined based on the multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM). In this case, the TOPSIS and VIKOR methods were applied, for which the rankings and levels of digitalization of individual CEE countries were also determined. The entropy and CRITIC methods were utilized to measure the weights of indicators adopted for the study. The whole research was complemented by statistical analyses of the adopted indicators. The results showed a high differentiation in the level of digitalization for individual CEE countries and the studied groups of enterprises. The highest levels of digitalization were reported in Slovenia, Croatia and the Czech Republic. The lowest levels were reported in Bulgaria and Romania. From the point of view of the size of enterprises, the highest levels of digitalization were found in the group of large enterprises, which results from their potential and resources. The results are an important source of information regarding the current state of digitalization in the CEE countries, considering the size of enterprises. This, in turn, should be used when developing strategies for the digital transformation of the CEE countries and the entire EU.

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The Level of Digitization of Small, Medium and Large Enterprises in the Central and Eastern European Countries and Its Relationship with Economic Parameters

Purpose This study aims to mainly explore the impact of business strategy and annual reports readability on financial reporting quality in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Design/methodology/approach The sample comprised 160 companies listed in TSE from 2014 to 2020. Five proxies (including two accounting-based attributes and two market-based attributes) were used to measure financial reporting quality. In this study, cost leadership and differentiation strategies were considered and Fog index was used to measure the annual report readability. Findings The results showed that in all methods of calculating financial reporting quality, cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy and annual report readability had a positive and significant impact on financial reporting quality. Also, only at the high level of the differentiation strategy, the annual reports readability influenced financial reporting quality. In addition, at all levels of high and low annual report readability, cost leadership strategy affected financial reporting quality, but only in companies with a high annual report readability, the differentiation strategy affected financial reporting quality. Only for companies with a low readability, the annual report readability affected financial reporting quality. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study had examined the impact of business strategy and annual report readability on financial reporting quality at the core of the present study. Furthermore, little was known about the strategic choices made in Iran. So, the research filled this gap in TSE. This study provided insights for policymakers to enhance the readability and reduce the complexity of annual reports. 

The impact of business strategy and annual report readability on financial reporting quality

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic was an unparalleled crisis that has affected businesses, individuals, institutions, and governments in multiple ways. This paper comes to critically analyze the impact of the pandemic on entrepreneurship and innovation. Studies show that crises can also be perceived as opportunities for continuing creating new solutions and adopting innovative ways of doing business. In this sense, the present paper analyzes the current state of the art in terms of the pandemic impact on small and medium enterprises and the innovation status and proposes a systematic literature review and comparative analysis to depict the situation in Romania. For the purposes of this research, the data from the Global Innovation Index Reports is being used. The results show significant positive and negative changes in three main categories, namely business sophistication, infrastructure, knowledge & technology output. The paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by summarizing the main findings from multiple publications and proposes recommendations for policymakers and institutions to provide the corresponding framework so that entrepreneurs could benefit from innovation.

https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/picbe-2022-0051

Exploring the COVID-19 pandemic impact on innovation and entrepreneurship – Review and evidence from Global Innovation Index

The influence of technological innovations on international business strategy before and during COVID-19 pandemic

Chang-Kang Hu,1, 2, 3, ∗ Jiahao Yuan,1, 2, 3, 4 Bruno A. Veloso,5 Jiawei Qiu,1, 2, 3, 4 Yuxuan Zhou,1, 2, 3, 4 Libo Zhang,1, 2, 3 Ji Chu,1, 2, 3 Orkesh Nurbolat,1, 2, 3, 6 Ling Hu,1, 2, 3 Jian Li,1, 2, 3 Yuan Xu,1, 2, 3 Youpeng Zhong,1, 2, 3 Song Liu,1, 2, 3 Fei Yan,1, 2, 3, † Dian Tan,1, 2, 3, ‡ R. Bachelard ,5, 7 Alan C. Santos ,5, 8, § C. J. Villas-Boas ,5 and Dapeng Yu1, 2, 3, 4 1Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China 2International Quantum Academy, Futian District, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518048, China 3Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China 4Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China 5Departamento de Fı́sica, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Rodovia Washington Luı́s, km 235 SP-310, 13565-905 São Carlos, SP, Brazil 6National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210093, China 7Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Institut de Physique de Nice, 06560 Valbonne, France 8Department of Physics, Stockholm University, AlbaNova University Center 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

Conditional coherent control with superconducting artificial atoms

The indicators of student success at higher education institutions are continuously analysed to increase the students’ enrolment in multiple scientific areas. Every semester, the students respond to a pedagogical survey that aims to collect the student opinion of curricular units in terms of content and teaching methodologies. Using this information, we intend to anticipate the success in higher-level courses and prevent dropouts. Specifically, this paper contributes with an interpretable student classification method. The proposed solution relies on (i) a pedagogical survey to collect student’s opinions; (ii) a statistical data analysis to validate the reliability of the survey; and (iii) machine learning algorithms to classify the success of a student. In addition, the proposed method includes an explainable mechanism to interpret the classifications and their main factors. This transparent pipeline was designed to have implications in both digital and sustainable education, impacting the three pillars of sustainability, i.e.,economic, social, and environmental, where transparency is a cornerstone. The work was assessed with a dataset from a Portuguese higher-level institution, contemplating multiple courses from different departments. The most promising results were achieved with Random Forest presenting 98% in accuracy and F-measure.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/20/13446/pdf?version=1666170703

Bruno Veloso

Papers

The Importance of Digital Transformation in International Business

The influence of technological innovations on international business strategy before and during COVID-19 pandemic

Conditional coherent control with superconducting artificial atoms

Interpretable Success Prediction in Higher Education Institutions Using Pedagogical Surveys