About
Prof Ganotakis carries out research in three interrelated areas; those of international business, entrepreneurship and innovation as well as in their intersection (e.g., international entrepreneurship). He is also interested in how and why strategies that firms adopt change over time, and how those temporal variations affect firms' ability to learn.
In the area of international business Prof Ganotakis has examined the relationship between innovation and exporting, including how firms can successfully assimilate foreign based knowledge into their innovative effort (learning by exporting), depending on the exporting pattern they adopt and the internal and external resources they possess. He has also investigated both the determinants and consequences of different forms of foreign market exit and re-entry (de- and re- internationalization).
He is particularly interested in the open innovation process and specifically in how firms form foreign collaborations with different types of partners, how they can successfully manage those collaborations in order to enhance their new product development effort, and finally how different levels of 'openness' can influence a firm's overall performance and growth.
Prof Ganotakis has also carried out work on what determines the growth of high-tech entrepreneurial firms, what allows those firms to start exporting and then perform well in foreign markets, and what enables the adoption of different types of innovation at various levels of sophistication.
Finally, Prof Ganotakis has examined how time, and how changes over time in various firm level activities, influence different performance outcomes. For instance, by developing dynamic models, he has considered how cumulative experience in different types of alliances assist the formation of new ones, and how the same experience affects firms' innovative performance. He has looked at how the amount of time lapsed since exit from export markets (time-out from exporting), affects both the chances of foreign market re-entry as well as export performance after re-entry. Finally, he has investigated how changes in firms' activities (e.g., exporting, external knowledge sourcing) influence new product development.
In terms of theory development Prof Ganotakis is known for his work on advancing Organizational Learning Theory (OLT), especially in regard to the relationship between single and double loop learning, the conditions under which unlearning can be detrimental or beneficial, and the role of external focused search and it's relationship with unlearning. Prof Ganotakis has further contributed to OLT by examining how single short-term strategic changes affect managerial ability to learn and how and why the effect of single changes differs in relation to that of multiple changes.
His work has been published in a number of journals such as Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of World Business, Industrial Marketing Management, International Business Review, Small Business Economics, Journal of Business Research, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Production Planning & Control and Oxford Economic Papers.
Prof Ganotakis currently acts as the Director of Ethics for the Univerisity of Liverpool Management School (ULMS) and has previously held posts as Director of Research and PhD program director at the Universities of Warwick and Leeds.