Volumen 67 (2021): Heft 3 (September 2021)

Human resources (HR) represent a crucial resource of enterprises. This especially applies to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in which HR can create a competitive advantage and affect survival and development. Changes in the business environment, the need for new knowledge, skills and abilities due to changes in the market and business all lead to widening the gap between existing and required competencies of employees. In the process of training and education of HR, employees acquire the necessary knowledge, refine their skills and/or acquire new skills, and experience. More to the point, they obtain the competencies they need to stay and/or become successful in their job and future jobs that they will perform in the enterprise. The principal aim of this research is to determine the correlation between training and education of HR and business performance of SMEs. The survey was conducted in SMEs in the Federation of B&H from August to September 2020. An original questionnaire was created for the research, used for collecting the views on the HR training and education of top managers as well as four business performance perspectives of companies based on the Balanced Scorecard model. Data were analysed using SPSS 20.0. The following were used from the statistical procedures: Pearson’s coefficient of correlation, t-test for independent samples, Spearman’s correlation of coefficient and Mann-Whitney U test (depending on the results distribution). The results of the survey showed that there is a correlation between training and education of HR and business performance in SMEs. In addition, the survey results indicated differences among the enterprises in terms of their size; i.e., between small and medium-sized enterprises. However, those differences are not statistically significant.

The purpose of this paper is to obtain and analyse data on the higher education lecturers at the 16 largest, state-owned faculties of economics in seven central and eastern European countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia), about their scientific impact and reach. An analysis of their research areas and scientometrics (citations, h-indices) was performed, and aggregate rankings are presented. Data was collected from Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus by using proprietary specialized web crawlers (“bots”). The differences among countries and faculties are significant, and institutions should observe good practices from Slovenia, as its faculties are ranked highest. The insights are important for evaluating scientific progress, mobility, and cooperation, rewarding and promotion requirements, accreditations, project and institution funding, and higher education lecturers’ promotion.

Effective teaching methods for the coming generations of pragmatic students and teachers are evolving towards much greater involvement on all sides, attempting to bridge real life and academia in innova-tive ways. Our theoretical foundation lays upon the Triple Helix, n-Tuple Helix theory and the innova-tion triangle, but in a problem-based multidisciplinary setting. After introducing and validating the Mul-tiCreation approach in teaching/learning for the business-academia collaboration, where multiple disci-plines, diverse profiles of students, professors, and managers have taken up various roles to address relevant business issues, we were encouraged to expand its applicability beyond the business world - toward societal problems. We retained the problem-based and participatory learning but shifted the positioning of the problem towards the safety of primary school children, incorporating economic, pro-ject-based, managerial, traffic engineering, logistical, regulatory, and governance issues. By including two primary schools, collaborating with their principals, advisory teams, and teachers, as well as chil-dren and parents, in two different cities, we aimed to provide complete research, engineering and educa-tion for the stakeholders so that the schools could just hand in documentation to the relevant municipal bodies to be acted upon effectuation. The involved students came from two faculties -of economics and traffic engineering, steered by three university professors on the subjects of project management and basic and advanced techniques for traffic management. The blended learning components took place as prescribed in the MultiCreation approach, during two semesters of two academic years. They combined countermeasures and solutions. The MultiCreation approach has been enhanced regarding its components and workflow and its effectiveness has been validated in a multi-stakeholder environ-ment of direct and indirect educational beneficiaries.

Communication between seller and buyer is done through multiple channels. There are multiple ways to use technical media and channel selection to create more information, but does this lead to a better performance of a firm? Research on the impact of different marketing channels in the industry regarding performance factors remains scarce. The performance of a firm is the most significant factor and will be monitored through different attributes. The purpose of this paper is to review the drivers of a sales process in terms of sales cycles, channels and communication in relation to it’s effect on performance. Beyond the characteristics of sales the review delineates the changes from the past to the present. The contribution of this review is to understand the various capabilities in channel management and communication that can be adapted to the sales process and increase a firm’s performance.

The existing literature documents that computer simulations can reveal how characteristics of micro-level individuals give rise to macro-level phenomena of systemic wholes. This paper seeks to establish such an important simulation-based observation as a theoretical result on a sound foundation. Going beyond addressing when holistic phenomena can naturally emerge from micro-level characteristics, this paper investigates how and why many macro-level entities appear to answer market calls through organically gathering micro-level agents into uniformly-oriented operational wholes, even though these agents have inconsistent or even conflicting interests. This paper develops conclusions based on results of systems science and establishes a sufficient condition under which characteristics of micro-level agents can naturally lead to the appearance of macro-level properties of a systemic whole even though the former are heterogeneous and behave in an unintended and uncoordinated manner. This paper suggests to root each theoretical result of economics on elementary facts of personal belief-value systems and expands methods of networks and computer simulations to those of systems science. It explains when macro socioeconomic phenomena emerge out of unintended and uncoordinated actions and interactions of micro economic men, and provides a more general approach for developing reliable conclusions than those observed from computer simulations. It additionally derives conditions for when macro-level economic entities appear to answer market calls and how micro-level individuals with inconsistent or even conflicting interests can be organically congregated into operational business organizations.