Conference Agenda

Building supply chain resilience (SCR) can help enterprises improve supply chain performance, playing a vital role in mitigating risks. However, enhancing SCR is not an easy task for many enterprises across various industries. Compared to large enterprises, SMEs find it even more challenging to implement recovery plans in the event of disruptions due to limited available resources. Technology-based SMEs have increasingly become the main actors in developing high tech industries and establishing state innovation systems. Understanding the factors that affect technology-based SMEs’ resilience is crucial. While existing studies provide insights into the antecedents of SCR and how enterprises respond to supply chain risks and disruptions, there has been inadequate research on how SMEs, especially technology-based ones, improve their SCR. Furthermore, scholars and practitioners tend to believe that lack of financial support may be the most important factor hindering the development of technology- based SMEs. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how supply chain finance influences SCR in technology based SMEs and subsequently affects their supply chain performance.

Amid supply chain uncertainty, establishing resilience is imperative for firms to maintain a competitive edge. Achieving desired resiliency levels through precise networks and innovative capabilities amidst rising uncertainties remains challenging. Leveraging an analysis of 242 manager responses, our study reveals that uncertainty positively influences firms toward building supply chain resilience. Introducing two mediators, network capabilities and innovation ambidexterity, we explore their roles. The mediating role of innovation ambidexterity alone is insignificant, while network capabilities emerge as a substantial mediator. We unveil a significant sequential mediation relationship from network capabilities to innovation ambidexterity between uncertainty and resilience. This suggests that the combined influence of these two mediators significantly shapes how supply chain uncertainty impacts a firm’s ability to enhance its supply chain resilience. Our research bridges a knowledge gap, offering theoretical insights and practical implications for navigating supply chain uncertainties.

The last few years have been characterized by different types of supply chain disturbances such as the COVID-19 pandemic, earthquakes, piracy, the Suez Canal incident, trade wars, wars, and volcano eruptions. The response from manufacturing firms has been to build resilience to cope with such disruptions while simultaneously improving operations, i.e., trying to both survive and thrive. A variety of perspectives and practices have been implemented such as lean operations, manufacturing innovations, environmental sustainability, and changing the global manufacturing footprint. We analyze the impact of these practices and strategies on operational performance and explore differences between make-to-order and make-to-stock plants. We use survey data from 161 Swedish manufacturing plants collected in November 2022, capturing a period characterized by disturbances.

We examine how well firms’ perceptions of climate change risks and opportunities predict the adoption of an emission target and an internal carbon price. The resource-based view of a firm considers this capability to be an intangible resource that provides a competitive carbon advantage. Based on Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) data, we consider eight risks and five opportunities in each stage of the value chain (upstream, direct, downstream). Logistic regression results indicate that the likelihood of adopting an emission target or internal carbon price is more strongly influenced by opportunities than risks, although both are significant. Random forest classifier results reveal that the most important predictors among types of perceived opportunities are downstream products/services and direct operations resource efficiency. The most important perceived risks are both direct, namely acute physical and emerging regulation. Overall, our findings suggest that firms are driven by a proactive, rather than reactive, carbon strategy.