As a journal aiming to publish papers that provide groundbreaking insights about management and organization in China and global comparable contexts, Management and Organization Review has attracted authors and readers from different countries and regions to share new discoveries and to learn new knowledge. We can take a glean of them in the six papers included in this volume.

Focusing on the types of knowledge flow from incumbents to new firms during the foundation of startups, the first paper (Jiang & Murmann, 2023) conducted a detailed qualitative analysis of six private startups in the Chinese synthetic dye industry. The authors discovered eight types of knowledge that can be further categorized into either functional or strategic knowledge and found different functions for each, i.e., strategic knowledge shapes the long-term competitiveness of surviving startups, whereas functional/technical knowledge is necessary for short-term survival but insufficient for long-term success.

Using the short-term, one-year after IPO performance of startup as an outcome variable, Kirschbaum et al. (2023) explored how private equity, board centrality and experience independently or jointly influence it. Based on Brazilian IPOs issued between 2004 and 2013, they found that private equity sponsorship is the most effective predictor; but for non-private equity backed IPOs, board centrality and experience significantly affected their performance. Although it is unclear how these findings would apply to short- or long-term IPO performance of startups in the China context, the findings from Li et al. (2023) may shed some light. In this paper, the authors used a sample of 508 Chinese firms to study how the exploration and exploitation strategy influence firm radical or incremental innovation, an important drive for firm success. By reframing exploitation and exploration as a duality of learning, rather than either positive or negative interaction, they identified a novel pattern of inverted U-shaped interaction between exploration and exploitation for both radical and incremental innovations.

Connecting to firm innovation, the next paper (Madrid-Guijarro & Garces-Torres, 2023) examined open innovation in 543 small and medium firms in Ecuador. Taking a strategic view, the authors found that firms’ formalization of an innovation strategy promotes both inbound and outbound open innovation activities, which facilitate firm innovative performance; but the positive effect of outbound activities only exists for inbound activities when there is firm control. Adopting an organizational behavioral approach, Zhao, Zhou, and Liu (2023) examined employee creativity in the workplace by focusing on an individual trait – narcissism. Based on a field survey of 269 full-time employees working in 86 work teams, the authors found that employees with a high level of narcissism became more creative only when their companies highly valued creativity, because such company value boosted their creative self-efficacy.

The last paper in this issue explored a very interesting question that is or might be faced by firms in many countries: how do firms respond to the government's mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditure law? Jain et al. (2023) studied this question in India by examining those firms with high levels of voluntary CSR, whether they would change their strategic choices in response to India's Companies Act (2013) that mandates qualifying firms to spend 2% of their 3-year average net profits on CSR. Their findings are very encouraging: these firms are less likely to choose dormancy and instead embrace and even surpass the stipulations of the law in their CSR contribution.

I truly hope you enjoy reading the articles included in this volume; I also look forward to receiving your submissions!