Today’s leaders need to have an adequate understanding of leadership for the digital age. This understanding we call “digital leadership”. It is a strategic knowledge asset and is indispensable for companies to be successful in a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). In their study Jäckli & Meier (2020) first asked the question as to what dimensions digital leadership actually consists of. After answering the question by establishing 10 dimensions, they next conducted surveys in 2018 and 2020 in Swiss companies to examine where they stand concerning digital leadership. It was planned to do the survey every two years. Conducting such surveys is time-consuming, mainly due to the fact that voluntary participants at the appropriate management level have to be identified, contacted and convinced to participate every second year. Additionally, experience shows that despite efforts, the response rate overall is low. Therefore, this study investigates the machine learning approach of text mining as an alternative option to the traditional survey. The conducted text mining-experiment is based on the data from the surveys of 2018 and 2020, using the contributors’ information contained therein as a basis for web scraping and training an artificial intelligence (AI) supervised learning model. The corpus obtained includes texts from 211 company websites, which are processed with Natural Language Processing algorithms and used for model training after labelling. This allows predictions to be made about digital leadership dimensions based on company websites. The experiment developed in the programming language Python showed that there is predictive power in company websites, but the prediction accuracy is low, ranging from 35 to 71 percent (49 percent on average) across all 10 digital leadership dimensions. Further, the imbalanced training data across all 5 values of the applied Likert scale leads to additional challenges. Predicting values that are rarely or not at all present in the training dataset is made impossible by the bias of the model. Opportunities exist to improve prediction accuracy with additional training data. Further surveys will most likely not correct the imbalance in the training data, but qualitative approaches in combination with unsupervised learning algorithms seem to be promising developments.

Critically reflecting on online information and identifying misinformation are increasingly becoming skills that every consumer of information should possess in the Digital Age. However, it is still unclear how individual predispositions combined with website characteristics influence the way people deal with online information. The aim is to derive insights for educational research on the critical use of online information. For this purpose, this work uses the data from the ongoing project and explores whether and how Need for Cognition (NFC) and Need for Cognitive Closure (NFCC) and website characteristics influence the search strategy of 144 young professionals from three domains. An online search task is used to measure so-termed critical online reasoning, for instance whether young professionals verify sources, check citations, and how their search terms are phrased. Qualitative analysis of the website characteristics assessed are combined with quantitative analysis, indicating that NFC and NFCC and sociodemographics, such as course of study and gender, can explain some differences in source verification, citation checking and specificity of search term. Website characteristics, like up-to-dateness and indication of evidence, are also related to the participants performance in the search task. The results presented show a demand of refining curricula in terms of more awareness of personal characteristics and sensitizing learners to critically reflect online information.

The Western Balkan region, despite achieving evident economic progress, is still significantly less developed compared to European average, in terms of per capita income and labour productivity and lags behind developed Europe in the intensity of research and innovation activities, but also in the quality of education and quantitative educational outcomes. Aim of this study is to investigate impact of lower research and innovation potentials to the economic growth of Balkan countries. In order to examine the causal relationship between GDP and variables which define the level of innovation development, the Granger-causality test based on the estimation of VECM and VAR models was performed on the panel data sample of 36 European economies and time frame from 2014 to 2019 (annual data). The results show that relationship between GDP and employment in knowledge intensive sectors do exist, but in only one direction. Changes in employment in knowledge intensive sector will have impact on the change of GDP value, but the GDP change will not have significant impact on the value of the number of people employed in the knowledge intensive sector. Relationship between GDP and R&D expenditure in the business sector is present in both directions. Relationship between GDP and R&D expenditure in the public sector indicate obvious relationship between those two indicators also. Relationship between employment in knowledge intensive sectors and R&D expenditure in the business sector indicate strong relationship between those two indicators in both directions. Relationship between employment in knowledge intensive sectors and R&D expenditure in the public sector, according to the results, identifies the impact in only one directions. It has been showed that the changes in the R&D expenditure in the public sector will impact the change in the number of employees in knowledge intensive sectors. Relationship between R&D expenditure in the business sector and R&D expenditure in the public sector does not exist. The study shows that relationship between GDP and tertiary education is not identified either. This raises the importance of the quality of education.

Speed, effectiveness, efficiency and learning in multi-business model innovation are vital for gaining competitive advantage and even surviving in global business model ecosystems. However, the challenge is: How can businesses influence the participants and teams in these processes to stay and increase their multi-business model innovation competences, capabilities and appetite? This paper investigates how gratitude can influence participants in multi-business model innovation processes; more specifically, how gratitude as a tool and method can stimulate and strengthen the participants’ competences to stay engaged in the multi-business model innovation process. Gratitude techniques and exercises are very practical and easy to work with and end up with the same state of mindfulness as yoga, meditation and other techniques. The research is based on psychological theory on gratitude as a positive emotion linked to other positive emotions such as joy, creativity, optimism, passion and recognition. The research shows how gratitude in a multi-business model innovation process can have an effect on the output, the level of quality and the individual’s performance in the working process. Moreover, it shows that the individual’s mood, wellbeing and social relations in the teams improve when working with innovation processes. Finally, the paper discusses ways of measuring gratitude and positivity by means of, for instance, AI and face recognition, and self-assessment.

What can jazz and management have in common? At first glance, an unusual combination appears. Management recalls the concepts of organization, management, control, planning. Jazz immediately evokes creativity, energy, an unpredictable and sometimes disordered flow of notes. As much as they may seem like two very distant universes, jazz and management share many more aspects than we can imagine. In an era in which change, flexibility and innovation are the pillars that guide the development of organizations, jazz can provide interesting stimuli and food for thought to management, presenting itself as a suggestive metaphor for the organizational dynamics of the companies of the third millennium. The great complexity, turbulence and uncertainty that characterize our time require organizations to redefine their approach to management. In a chaotic and unpredictable context, managers will have to know how to make quick and effective decisions, creating the future based on the interpretation of fragmented and incomplete information, instilling courage in their collaborators, encouraging them to be innovative. This is what jazz musicians do: they learn by experimenting, they develop new solutions without any guarantee of the result, trusting in their own technical skills and those of the members of the group. Managers and jazz musicians share the same mission today more than ever: to abandon a certain degree of control and build the future by continuously shaping new ideas.

The faculty of Innovative Technologies of the University of Applied Science of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), started in January 2022 a study focusing on setting a snapshot of the current situation and assessing the maturity of organisation and project management with respect to the topic of resilience. The study has been based on a structured online google survey that will be sent via email to a selected target working in companies located in Switzerland and Italy and operating in different sectors, whose size will range from small, mid-size to large, including both local and global organisations. Former SUPSI project management graduates were also invited to participate in the survey. The aim of the entire study is to take a snapshot of the current situation and assess the maturity of project managers and organisations with regard to the issue of resilience. In particular, we want to know which practices are already implemented by organisations and which are the most critical and difficult to manage. In addition, it is intended to start raising awareness among the entities focused on, of the importance of this component of project management. The faculty of Innovative Technologies of the University of Applied Science of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), as a training and research Institute, will therefore be able on one hand to define courses or study programmes to fill these gaps; on the other hand, to continue to disseminate information and useful content on the subject in order to increase the awareness of organisations related to the importance of resilience in project management.

Even though some studies have analysed incubators in developing countries, only a few have analysed incubators in Africa. However, developing countries need entrepreneurial endorsements. Nevertheless, the attention on social and economic aspects in developing countries is relevant. To better understand it, this work aims at establishing a link between incubation and its social dimensions by answering the following Research Question: How can the social engagement of incubators be categorised in Cameroon, Senegal and Uganda? To answer this Research Question fifteen incubators in Cameroon, Senegal and Uganda were interviewed. In conclusion, this study proposes a new taxonomy on the social engagement of incubators through their support on projects and people. We explain that incubators in developing countries may be identified as Social Business Incubators. The results also explain how the incubators’ procedures and sponsorship are related to this categorization.

Due to the dynamic nature of the market ecosystem, businesses must constantly think and plan ahead to stand a chance of surviving. Companies must keep track of their competitor’s offerings and adapt to their customer’s altering needs and criteria to stand out. Thus, the importance of Marketing for any business. This paper compares Industrial Marketing and customer-oriented marketing from an information dependency point of view through a field investigation. Our focus will be on industrial marketing and its need for information. We highlight the textual information dependency and the lack of decision support systems based on the knowledge extracted from textual data. A novel ontology approach is proposed to enable Information Analysis for Industrial Marketing.

The “knowledge distribution power” of the innovation system helps us to understand how and why innovation occurs. In this study we show how an SME implemented a strategy of insourcing & innovation to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and compete with the dominant market leaders. Specifically, our research shows how this family run automotive trailer manufacturing business in Busto Arsizio, Italy, accessed knowledge from universities to enable it to secure advanced manufacturing technology with a Doing-Using- Interacting mode of innovation (DUI) to gain competitive advantage. We identify an internal innovation process that captures the relevant specific Doing-Using-Interacting phases. This study contributes to the stream of literature on DUI innovation, specifically to Trott and Simms’ (2017) study.

A quite recent, emerging intellectual capital research stream has established theoretical foundations and provided empirical evidence on how different key drivers and enabling factors, such as the firm’s complementary resources and capabilities, can help to drive the relationship between intellectual capital and firm performance. The objective of this study is to establish a state-of-the-art understanding on the role of these key drivers and enabling factors that affect the relationship between IC and firm performance. This is done by systematically reviewing the empirical IC literature published in peer-reviewed academic journals between January 2000 and January 2022. The results of this study suggest that there are four main categories of the key drivers and enabling factors, which explain why some firms can transform their IC into firm performance and some firms cannot, including knowledge management, dynamic capabilities, IC-friendly organizational culture and climate, and the diversity of firm performance measures. Based on these findings, this study provides managerial implications on how firms can transform their IC into firm performance, and paves way for future research areas that have been left untouched.

The digital world and its complex interactions create new challenges for the Digital Enterprise. The knowledge required for human activity in the value creation is fragmented and dispersed across systems which in their turn are not normalized, siloed and inconsistent. The disconnection of the knowledge and business context render the results obsolete, due to the high pace of changes in our societies and behaviours. In this paper we present a general framework to enable knowledge modelling that relies on the semantics of natural language in order to ensure sustainable data governance for the entire business ecosystem. Our proposal based on the Data Excellence Science is to provide a new vision, method and mechanics for knowledge modelling that enables semantic driven communication between humans and machines.

Organisations continue to invest in business analytics to improve their ability to make decisions that help them generate competitive advantage. However, all organisations do not manage to realise the value potential of business analytics. One of the explanations suggested for this is that organisations developing their business analytics capabilities tend to focus on tangible resources, such as data or technology, and overlook the human skills and intangible resources, such as data-driven culture or organizational learning (Gupta & George 2016). Using systematic literature review and content analysis, this study investigates how tangible, human, and intangible resources are addressed in business analytics literature. It identifies three prevailing themes within recent literature and makes conclusions on the role of business analytics in terms of managerial decision making.

The research on business model innovation in certain business energy sectors is limited. This paper, which reviews the business model literature in the biomass energy sector, identifies trends as well as challenges and complications in the use of biomass. We used seven data bases to search for relevant international, peer-reviewed research on business models and biomass. In our initial database search, we identified 287 relevant articles published in the years 1990 to 2020. After elimination of duplicate articles, we had a collection of 170 articles. We used Zotero software to refine our search. After application of our criteria, 146 articles remained. Further analysis reduced our review to 95 articles that had a theoretical focus on business models and biomass. Our review presents various data for the articles including author affiliation by country, article publication date, article title, journal of publication, journal impact factor, country of empirical data, unit of analysis. research methodology, and topics addressed. Additionally, our review reveals trends (e.g., research/practice challenges and implications) in the study of business models and the biomass energy sector as reflected in the reviewed articles. To our knowledge, this is the first literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles on business models and the biomass industry. By limiting our final review to the 95 theoretical articles we identified, we provide researchers and practitioners with sources of recent discussions and analyses on the trends, challenges, and implications related to the use of biomass in energy production.

Recently, there has been a progressive shift of focus from the traditional intra- firm view of knowledge management (KM) to an inter-firm perspective, which has become increasingly relevant especially in the context of supply chains (SCs). So, knowledge, which is a critical resource of companies, must be managed properly not only in single companies but also across SCs for the success of business for all the companies involved. The literature does not yet offer a clear picture of what KM practices are or how they can be specifically used especially in inter-firm contexts. In addition, their level of diffusion and use has not been well addressed so far. This study aims to contribute to fill this gap by investigating which KM practices are adopted in SCs, measure their intensity of use, and compare the adoption level of inter-firm vs. intra-firm KM practices. A survey of a sample of European manufacturing firms was conducted. Two measures were used: ‘‘degree of spread ( oS)’’ to know how many firms adopted a specific KM practice, and ‘‘intensity of use (IoU)’’ of each practice. The study confirms that many KM practices are used but with a very different spread and intensity. A lower use of KM practices generally regards the inter-firm than the intra-firm level. Also, firms use less intensely those practices which are popular in the KM literature. The study provides insights into an increasingly important but still underexamined issue, namely, the spread and intensity of use of inter-firm KM practices in comparison with the intra-firm use. The findings also support practical efforts to develop KM programs by improving the awareness of business managers and consultants and can be useful for designing KM courses targeted to current and future business managers.

Companies spend lots of time and cost for developing new technologies and granting the results as patents, but unfortunately it is often the case that many of them are dormant being unused. The purpose of our study is to examine the effect of the Licensable Patent Information Database (LPID) in Japan, an open web system which can be used freely by companies, universities and public research institutions, on the performance of patent distribution and matching agreement between potential licensers and licensees based upon empirical analysis combining questionnaire survey and case study. From the analysis of the questionnaire survey, it was found that the number of matching agreements mediated via LPID was quite limited: as much as 90.8% of the companies registering their patents in LPID did not have any agreement at all. Examining the result more carefully, we found that the number of inquiries, a premise of the agreement, was also limited: 77.0% of the responding companies had no inquiry from outside. In order to explore the reason why inquiries and agreements were so limited, we conducted regression analysis. As a result, it revealed that past experience of in-house implementation and trial production based upon patented technology affected significantly the number of inquiries. The presentation and publication of the technology also gave positive impact on the number of inquiries. These findings suggest that the limited number of inquiries and agreements is not due to the open web system itself, but the content of information posted in the system. A complementary case study on patent transfer and licensing in a successful local government in Japan well illustrated the plausibility of such findings. The local government staffs called “patent distribution coordinators” often visit large companies, potential licensers, as well as SMEs, potential licensees, to understand the existence of licensable unused patents in the former and the needs of accepting technologies in the latter. They insist that it is almost impossible to find effective patents and transfer them to other companies without continuous face-to-face communication. Especially, it was difficult to grasp implicit needs of potential licensees in the web-based matching system, and therefore a direct human network should be prerequisite. With these findings, we induced some practical implications for R&D and innovation managers of the firm as well as theoretical implications for advancing the study in the field of innovation management.

The study moves from the need to depict the role of universities in furthering sustainability and sustainable development goals in society (Purcell et al., 2019) starting from the set of entangled relationships linking Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with local businesses, government agencies, students, the civil society, and international partners. The relevance of HEIs in such a domain is also mirrored in their communication and reporting efforts (Lozano, 2011). This paper focuses on the identification of the main drivers and barriers that HEIs encounter in their increasing attempts to implement sustainability-oriented strategies, policies and initiatives. The chosen approach relies on service innovation to the extent that such concept can provide HEIs with the necessary support to stimulate the development of sustainability-related strategies and activities. Indeed, universities play a relevant role as collector of knowledgeable actors and innovators in the social context in which they are embedded (Gallouj et al., 2018). The research questions guiding our study highlight the core aspects of the debate concerning universities as catalysers of sustainability in multiple domains. The analysis conducted for the study is based on mixed method methodology, combining qualitative and quantitative data gathered from semi-structured interviews and two surveys on a broader sample of deans and academics across European HEIs. The outcomes of our study are expected to contribute to the advancement of knowledge concerning the depiction of sustainability-oriented policies and strategies to be adopted by HEIs. Such results help to combine the need for innovative solutions in terms of the service provided in the field of education and research, with the increasing interest in service provision towards the private sector, the civil society, and the governmental institutions.

This paper addresses the topic of the regeneration of historic villages and small towns. It is part of an ongoing research project questioning if and how cultural heritage can be a trigger for civic wealth creation. Building on the previous literature on urban regeneration, we deem that in such contexts the mobilisation of cultural resources could be pivotal for the development of a ‘culture-based economy’. Meanwhile, putting the community at the centre is fundamental to maintaining the vibrancy of a local area and implementing regeneration projects based on CH. We deem a promising solution for historic towns’ resilience and development is to activate processes of CWC, i.e., the creation of social, economic and communal endowments that benefit local communities and allow these communities to be self-sufficient, therefore, generating positive societal change and sustainable impact. In an attempt to question if and how CH can be a trigger for Civic Wealth Creation in small historical towns, our paper contributes to contextualising the CWC framework proposed by Lumpkin and Bacq in 2019 by identifying other key stakeholder categories and providing evidence and rationale for their inclusions.

Crisis management for the Covid-19 epidemic is unquestionably an emergent issue. It also taught us several lessons about how to prepare for future crises. When it comes to the healthcare industry, the need for urgent discussion as well as innovation to address the issue takes precedence. Over the last two years, there has been a high crisis in emergency drugs, scarcity of drug ingredients, and patients have become helpless in the fight against the coronavirus disease all over the world. The European Union (EU) was the central hub of this tragedy, and the EU is mobilizing all available resources to assist member states in coordinating their national responses, which includes providing objective information about the virus’s spread, effective containment efforts, and measures taken to repair the pandemic’s economic and social damage. The research explains pharmaceutical business models and tools that can help businesses respond to emergency situations. A systematic literature review was conducted, and a list of bibliographic notes is mentioned in the reference section of the paper, where future research ideas can be found.

The agri-food system is facing numerous challenges in recent years, which impact significantly on the companies’ production and profitability. Meanwhile, the consumer evolved, becoming increasingly aware of sustainable food and nutrition choices to safeguard the health. This transformation resulted in the creation of a new target market, which demands to intercept the needs of providing intelligible information associated to the food product. This paper aims of supplying empirical and procedural guidance on this strategy, which is feasible as a result of the digitisation of the agri-food supply chain and technological solutions of the Industry 4.0. It investigated how the use of analytics techniques can improve efficiency in agri-food supply chain data sharing by enabling companies with the quality description of the food product. To this aim, a reasoned procedure was proposed: starting from raw data collected by IoT sensors, several analytics were processed, through mathematical operations that considered the complexity of the data itself and the frequency of measurement. The analytics were converted into a quality scale that classifies the intervals of the variable into quality categories of increasing order. Finally, the analytics and qualitative scales were combined to obtain an overall indicator of product quality. The studied procedure was therefore applied to a case study, by including an Apulian (Italy) company involved in organic olives production. Results of this study represent a way for agri-food companies to increase their awareness on digitalization strategies, focusing on how technologies, big data and analytics could provide insights to increase operational efficiency and consumer communication and how a completely transparent data-driven approach towards the customer could foster new management approaches.

Despite considering ourselves to be in the Knowledge Society, in practice there are gaps in the use of evidence. Specifically, it appears that there is a waste of use of this valuable resource for making wise policy decisions, which lead to actions that respect sustainability and human rights. This article presents an exploratory literature review that aim to identify relevant publications around main concepts around Evidence Use. We identify four main thematic areas: 1) Link Science and Policy; 2) Evidence architecture; 3) Clear communication, Trust and Collaboration and 4) Evidence Use and Knowledge Governance. Those knowledge areas will be the building blocks of an evidence chain model. This review is a project starting point that aims to build a conceptual model. This model will be validated and refined, to support knowledge-based decision and wise action process at health context.