Chief executive officer success secrets from Tunisia's tech sector

摘要

Humanity's nature and potential comes to the fore when our desires, skills, ambition, and insecurity are stirred together into a cocktail of working on difficult, change-riddled problems. A research paper by Najar and Dhaouadi (2020) examines how a Chief Executive Officer's (CEO's) personality and attitude traits affect a company's inbound and outbound open innovation (OI) strategy. The impacts of innovation climate (IC) and of an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on the CEO's actions are also determined. Data for the study were gathered from survey responses by CEOs from 178 Tunisian high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The high-tech sector relentlessly demands constant innovation from its participants, which over time adds economic value to a country's economy. As such, Tunisia's government has encouraged the country's tech firms to become more competitive through a bespoke stimulus program. This responsibility trickles down directly to SME CEOs, since these smaller, highly participative entities use their CEO as an uncomplicated, centralized voice for coordinating action. OlI can be understood as the practice of leveraging technologies through a combination of external exploration and internal exploitation activity - a combination that's focused on what knowledge those technologies can deliver for a company. Pursuing Ol is particularly beneficial for SMEs who possess limited resources, and who can quickly pivot thanks to their lean operational processes. Three core aspects that Ol sets out to inject into a company through its leader are a perception of the advantages it brings, a sense of how difficult changes will be to implement, and a voluntary spirit for effecting change.