In the last decades, the concept of cluster has gone through the vast conceptual development, resulting in its various definitions and categories – ‘cognitive clusters’, ‘learning clusters’, ‘creative clusters’, ‘working cluster’, ‘effective cluster’ (Capello & Nijkamp, 2019; Martin & Sunley, 2003; Lagnevic et al., 2004). Despite of their different approaches all above definitions share one common ‘relational’ context. Starting from the Porterian concept of ‘industry cluster’ as spatial networks of industries, which enjoy positive externalities from co-location and frequent interactions, to the more recent concept of a ‘working cluster’, where firms and other organizations maximize benefits from the synergetic effects coming from integration, cooperation, and competition (Porter 2008). Furthermore, Bochniarz-Faoro refer to ‘effective cluster’, which is characterized by the rich social networks that enables all participants to efficiently cooperate with one another (2016). Social networks have been also recognized as underlying factor for cluster development in other studies, including Phillips (2006), Ostergaard (2009). Nevertheless, the inherent complex configuration of every cluster, and its divergent patterns of evolution make it difficult to determine the mechanism of Social Capital formation and its impact on cluster growth. To identify this dependency a more case by case analysis maybe useful. The study aims to explore and evaluate the role of social capital in the evolution of a cluster, using the example of the life sciences industry. Social Capital is defined here as a capital that results from investments in building relations, institutions and networks that produce collaborative attitudes, shared values, mutual understanding and trust. The notion evolution refers here to gradual transition from an emerging cluster to a functioning and growing cluster during the growth phase of markets. More specifically, the study takes an example of five life sciences clusters – San Francisco Bay Area (US), Cambridge (UK), Copenhagen-Lund (Denmark/Sweden), Seattle (US) and Poland, to answer: How does notion of Social Capital and its different dimensions operate within clusters’ evolution? What is the contribution of Social Capital within different stages of clusters’ evolution? Does Social Capital and social networks can exert a distinct influence on the performance of different clusters? What types of social networks induce cluster related positive externalities?

This paper attempts to unravel the research works on challenges corporate universities are experiencing to date. Bibliometric method was used to analyses 21 journal articles on the challenges faced by new-age corporate university for the timeframe 2000-2018. These articles were selected from the Scopus database. For the timeframe 2000-2018 authors critically discuss the results on the lines of most influential authors, countries, institutions, overlay of research works. This study also provides co-word analysis to unearth the major challenges faced by new-age corporate university like Strategic integration of Technology in corporate university, Bottleneck in sustaining Innovation as a catalyst to the competitive advantage of corporate university, and Dysfunctional knowledge management of Corporate University. The findings of this study can help HRD managers to devise measures to address the challenges and provides new lines of inquiry for future research. This study makes a unique attempt to move ahead of the descriptive and procedural aspect of corporate university to critically discuss the challenges aspect.

Digital technologies enable firms to streamline, accelerate, and automate the process of procurement, manufacturing, and distribution. Digital technologies allow seamless integration of upstream suppliers and downstream customers into the firm’s activities. As a result, a significant shift in supply chain practices and performance is experienced. Substantial research has been undertaken to measure digitalized supply chain performance and its effects on firms. This paper presents a systematic literature review on performance measurement for the digital supply chain to apprehend current practices, recognize gaps and advocate future research itineraries. We used the Balance Score Card (BSC) model to categorize 243 identified metrics into four BSC perspectives. Internal and financial perspectives received the most attention while “growth and learning” perspective received the least attention. External partners, such as distributors and suppliers, were virtually ignored in the identified literature.

According to several authors (Kane et al., 2015; Yeow et al., 2018), strategy is a crucial element regarding firms’ digitalization and technology is not the only key factor. On the other hand, SMEs face specific challenges to seize digitalization opportunities and take advantage of them, mainly due to their lack of resources and capabilities (Cenamora et al., 2019). Therefore, the purpose of this research is to deepen the study of digitalization in SMEs, focusing on the analysis of the strategic dimension. In particular, the aim is to better understand the factors that condition digital strategy in SMEs, considering this as a kind of strategy supporting firm’s digitally-enabled growth (i.e. digitally-enabled growth strategy). The conditioning factors taken into account are digital leadership and digital organizational culture. A maturity model approach is applied. In particular, a self-assessment questionnaire based on the “DIGROW” digital maturity framework (North et al., 2019) was addressed to 7,040 SMEs from the Basque region (Spain) between July and November 2018, and was answered by the CEO or the IT manager in each firm. The number of firms that responded to the survey amounted to 540 (response rate 7.67%). After eliminating only partially completed or invalid questionnaires, the final sample consisted of 427 companies. The present study only focuses on SMEs (380 in total), leaving out micro-enterprises. The results of the regression model tested show that the relationship between each independent variable (i.e. digital leadership; digital mindset; empowered employees) and the dependent one (i.e. digitally-enabled growth strategy) is significant in all cases at a significance level of 95% (p<0.05) Therefore, it can be concluded that digital leadership, digital mindset, and the fact of having empowered employees who experiment with digital initiatives have a positive and significant influence on digitally-enabled growth strategy. This research sheds light on the factors that can support a digitally-enabled growth strategy, thus providing a better understanding of the aspects that need to be reinforced in order to sustain strategies guiding digital transformation and growth. The findings of this research are helpful for managers who want to foster the development of strategies than can support their firms’ growth based on digitalization. Moreover, policy making can be improved by prioritizing the key drivers of business digital transition.

This paper aims at analysing how the development of digital smart technologies and the Web affected the business model of a particular field of copyright-based companies: the collecting societies. The impact of the Internet and digitalization on the cultural enterprises will be investigated, focusing the analysis of the new business models established. It is necessary to clarify how the operators of the cultural enterprises have transformed their business model into an online business model and who the new players in this market are that have led to the change in the use of copyrighted works. Following an analysis of the literature on the subject, a vertical analysis of a specific sector of the creative enterprises will be carried out. Our research demonstrates the relevance of the analysis of the business models of cultural enterprises and how innovative business models can represent a tool to contrast the phenomenon of piracy. The findings of the research allow to assert that there is a close connection between innovation, intellectual property and business model: the high costs necessary for the creation of innovative products, also related to the protection of intellectual property, can be contained if the management of intellectual property is integrated into the within an innovative business model. Business model innovation can allow managers of this type of firms copyright-intensive to resolve the trade-off between costs and benefits of innovation, reviewing their business models for creating value.

Research in the areas of management and strategy commonly considers the issue of networks as a really broad issue in the organizational phenomenon but little addressed by its complexity (Moliterno & Mahony, 2011). However, recent studies have invited to different methodological approaches to distinguish different types of variables among networks issues (Chen, Chang, & Chang, 2015; Ofem, 2015; Oyedokun Akintunde, Adele Ademola, Ogunkunle Oluwatobi, & Adegbile Aderibigbe, 2016; Peltier & Naidu, 2012; Toledano, Urbano, & Bernadich, 2010). Despite the development of these studies, especially in Anglo-Saxon contexts, in Latin American countries have been less addressed, despite being described as an important area in the research agenda for management (Ferreira, Reis, & Miranda, 2015). For some authors, the absence of an integrated theory of networks in management has led them to design theoretical proposals, such as Moliterno & Mahony (2011) who suggested the multilevel capacity in organization’s networks, explained by different actors and interactions between them. In this paper we focus in to measure and analyze the relationship between Collaborative Managers Networks (CMN) and Performance of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in an emergent economy like Mexico, to provide recommendations to managers to integrate collaboration with different actors in management practices into their business strategies. The designed theoretical model was contrasted through a system of partial least squares (PLS-SEM) of structural equations modeling, using the SmartPLS® software (Ringle, Wende, & Becker, 2015) obtaining information from 170 SMEs operating in the Bajio Region (México) in the leather-footwear sector. The results provide evidence that companies with CMN have a positive effect on its firm performance. However, the majority of networks are oriented just on building links with business actors. Financial and political actors are less involved in managerial practices of collaboration. These findings have strategic implications for the entrepreneurs, mainly in getting advantage in new strategies of collaboration among new actors. This paper provides evidence of four main CMN insights. Firstly, derived from literature research, a CMN conceptual approach. Secondly, the research findings support understanding on the relationship between CMN and Mexican SMEs Performance and propose a multiple dimension CMN model using PLS-SEM as statistical tool. Thirdly, a Spanish adapted test of CMN that use measuring scales in a Latin-American country. Finally, this research attempts to recommend innovative networking strategies in managerial practices and entrepreneurial dynamics on SME companies.

This paper deals with the main meta-choices problems that arise in the multidimensional benchmarking of knowledge-based organizations. The first is the metachoice problem related to the choice of the algorithm used to compute the ranking (Iazzolino et al., 2012; Laise et al., 2015; Daraio, 2017a). The second is the metachoice problem related to the choice of the variables to be included in the model (Daraio, 2017a). Lastly, a third metachoice problem is related to the choice of the data on which the analyses are carried out (Daraio, 2017a). The authors focus on multidimensional benchmarking analysis applied to KPIs related on one side to the IC (divided in the three dimensions of Human Capital, Structural Capital and Relational Capital) and on the other side to performances, evaluated in both financial and non-financial terms. In particular, this paper analyzes the problem of ranking a sample of 65 Italian Universities based on performance-related criteria. The methods used to carry out the comparative analysis are (i) Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and (ii) Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The paper demonstrates the difficulties of the “implementation problem” in performance measurement, related to the subjectivity of results of the evaluation process when there are many evaluation criteria, as in a benchmark context.

Collaborative innovation networks represent adequate structures within which to foster members’ abilities to interact and cooperate in order to increase the level of knowledge and facilitate access to innovation. In this paper we consider two collaborative innovation network models, called orchestration and choreography and we compare them in terms of knowledge flow by means of a network centrality measure called Neighbours’ Information Patrimony, recently introduced to study the influence of the pattern of connections around a network member. We present empirical results on a wide set of simulations and we discuss outcomes and results to explain some behaviour in such innovation networks.

The main objective of the study is to investigate how firms can improve their performance. In particular, the impact of the creation of knowledge by firms (closed innovation) or the share of knowledge among firms (open innovation) on the firms’ performance is investigated. Both economic and innovation performance are considered. The economic performance is evaluated using the turnover of firms, whereas the innovation performance is evaluated using not only the number of patents but also other patents features that are relevant in predicting the forward citations that are considered as a proxy of the innovation performance and capability. The results show that firms’ innovation performance increases in the share of knowledge case, whereas the economic performance has a better result in the case of no share of knowledge.

Organizations are increasingly considered Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). This view has outlined the need to adopt a different theoretical and methodological approach in organizational research and design. The present paper copes with this challenge and aims firstly at introducing an agent-based computational laboratory, named CLOD (Computational Laboratory of Organizational Design), to explore the advantages that agent-based approaches could offer to scholars and practitioners in the organization research, particularly in the field of organizational design. Furthermore, some generative simulation experiments are reported and discussed to analyze the impact of the increasing complexity of the external environment on learning performances of organizations of different sizes. The conceptual architecture of the computational laboratory CLOD is based on the seminal March’s model of exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Some generative experiments have been performed (18 experimental sets), in which organizations of different sizes have to learn by coping with external environments characterized by increasing complexity levels (modeled through the values of the parameter K in the NK landscape), and, eventually, by a certain level of turbulence. In a stable setting, as expected, the learning performances of the organization decrease significantly, moving from a single peak environment (K=0) to higher levels of environmental complexity (K =5). Furthermore, the increasing size of the organization is related to better performances in stable environments for low or moderate levels of complexity. In turbulent and complex environments, instead, the size of the organization, particularly in the medium-long period, seems to be not influent and other organizational solutions have to be found to reach significant learning performances. The Clod lab can be considered, at this stage of the research, as a tool supporting theory development or refinement in organizational design disciplines. Further applications can be tested for practical and teaching purposes.

The present paper is aimed at proposing a training evaluation model specific for anti-money laundering in bank. This evaluation model was structured to take into account challenges that today banks and other intermediaries subject to anti-money laundering regulations have to face, and the possible exposition of intermediaries to those risks related to knowledge management. The originality of the proposed model lies in the fact that, to the authors’ knowledge, today, a model specific for AML training evaluation in banks still not exist. Among the limitations, there is the fact that, for the moment, it is a purely theoretical model and that needs to be tested.

Climate change mitigation is the central challenge of the 21st century. An increasing proportion of economic and psychological applied research addresses the question of how to encourage people to adopt more climate-friendly behaviour (Pettman und Zabel 2005; Schmitt 2018; Stoknes 2015; Thaler und Sunstein 2008). Although many people think it is important to protect the environment and have a stable pro-environmental behavioural intention, this is reflected only to a limited extent in specific environmental behaviour (Bundesministerium für Umwelt und Naturschutz und nukleare Sicherheit (BMU) 2019). The present explorative study addresses the question of which measures could foster everyday climate-friendly behaviour. The study focuses on an evaluation of the measure “Klimaschutzbürger 2.0” (“Climate Protection Citizens 2.0”) undertaken by a local authority in Germany. The explorative study, in which qualitative and quantitative interviews were conducted to generate hypotheses, took place as a participating observation of the last workshop meeting with subsequent written questioning of the participants. Special attention was paid to the question of whether online services such as climate change mitigation apps have a positive impact on behavioural intentions. The primary data collected enable hypotheses to be generated, facilitating the further exploration of the predictors of environmentally responsible behaviour in subsequent projects.

Because of the development of migration during the last past years, this paper’s objective is to identify and/or confirm factors, which predict the development of prejudices. With Germany as a preferred destination of many refugees, the research focuses on German students and their attitudes towards people with migration background. This study examines if the construct of social identity is a possible predictor for prejudices. Thereby, it also examines if there is a moderator effect of contact quality and contact quantity. The results indicate the importance of contact quality und contact quantity in reduction of prejudices, but the effects were only significant for some of the tested models. Because of the relatively weak manifestation in the study at hand, alternative instruments should be used for investigation. Based on the obtained results this paper finally tries to give some guidance for the facilitation of diversity and reduction of prejudices at higher education institutions.

Banks are nowadays compelled to implement specifically adequate internal procedures and reporting files to be able to identify and manage potential non-performing corporations at a very early stage. This practice has become necessary to monitor performing loans and avoid any deterioration in credit quality. Banks have to fix the set of UTP (“Unlikely-To-Pay”) and consider all the situations listed both in the EU CRR (“Capital Requirements Regulation”) definition of default and in the IFRS notion of impairment. Different sets of UTP triggers may be defined on a portfolio-by-portfolio basis where the core corresponds to the financial distress prediction, which represents an extensive ongoing research topic. To investigate the influence on different states of financial distress of both micro-economic indicators and firm-specific factors, this paper applies a predictive model, well known in academics, on a unique sample of UTP. In particular, the Z-Score and its revised version were applied to companies included in a special and confidential register of UTP loan positions from a major Italian bank. This allowed the authors to effectively analyze the Z-Score and Z’-Score ability to predict UTP positions. Existing literature on Z-Score, on the contrary, considers the filling of bankruptcy procedures as a criterion for distress, which represents only the final phase of a crisis. In addition, the inclusion of corporate governance variables as control variables is another relevant contribution, since most of past research includes only economic and financial variables. Results confirm the ability of the Z’-Score model to predict UTP, which is an event far earlier than insolvency

As knowledge intensive organisations, higher education (HE) organisations also face a challenge of creating value from data and utilising knowledge in decision-making. However, in many HE organisations, knowledge management practices and culture are not very evolved. Overall, knowledge-based management is not yet widely recognised in HE-context. The aim of this research was to study knowledge-based management in HE context through a case study of a Finnish technical university. This research was conducted as a qualitative single case study and research material was collected by 19 thematic interviews consisting mostly of upper and middle management personnel. The results are analysed through a Framework of information and knowledge management. Based on a vast analysis, some suggestions were made of how the knowledge-based management could be improved in the organisation.

In modern society, municipalities and cities are accountable for various societal service missions. In addition, cities and municipalities are expected to take a responsible role in solving the wicked problems such as climate change and ageing of population, coupled with sudden challenges, like the COVID-19 virus, together with the government. This kind of development has increased the role of municipalities and cities as decision-makers in global and social challenges and their ability to use information has become a critical success factor in modern society. By systematically exploiting information use possibilities in the public sector, it is possible not only to make more informed decisions, but also to serve the citizens better and use resources more effectively. The purpose of information and knowledge management is to collect, process, organize, store, share and utilize information in a way that enhances individual and organizational decision making and operations. The current trend of digitalization in the cities and municipalities is changing the way these activities can be carried out. At present, public organization’s ability to manage its information and knowledge resources is critical and there are still many lessons to be learnt in taking the best out of digitalization. In this study, a maturity evaluation instrument (Jääskeläinen et al., 2019) based on Choo’s knowledge management model (2002) is used to evaluate the status of information and knowledge management in a large municipality organization. The aim of the study is to increase our understanding on the status of information and knowledge management practices used in the digital era governance of public sector. Theoretical part of the paper analyses and combines research literature related to digital era governance and knowledge management in order to find out connections between these research areas for the empirical analysis of this study. The empirical context of the study is a large Finnish municipality that has gone through a large scale administrative and managerial system reform a few years ago. A survey will be used to gather the empirical data for this study. Around 300 responses representing all the branches of the municipality were received. The results show that organizational information and knowledge management requires improvement especially in relation to organizing and storing knowledge, knowledge acquisition and information products and services. However, performance benefits of information and knowledge management can be obtained only through successful knowledge usage.

Framed within researches underlying the appliance of digitisation in public administrations, this paper analyses the relevance of investigating barriers and enabling factors present in the “grey area” which ranges from the positive test of digital innovation trials to their generalisation in all the different bodies of a public administration. Having a double step of analysis, the research starts from a systematic literature review looking at how, digital transformation in the public sector, is considered and analysed in academic journals in order to look at how much failures and barriers about wide-spreading and diffusion of it were already investigated and depicted. Starting from the analysis of the literature review – in which it was found a lack of analysis upon the aspects we intended to investigate – we executed a qualitative case study upon three Italian local public bodies dealing with the full implementation of digitalised tools for the interaction with end-users and citizens in general. Findings seems to suggest that the actual wide-spreading of the implementation of a “new” tool thanks to digital transformation, requires years and it is not devoid of obstacles and costs, which should lead both researchers and practitioners to “reconceptualise” the analysis of strategies and efforts for the full implementation of a “smart” digital transformation in the public sector.

Recent studies on EU public procurement showed how an increase in public accessibility of procurement data can raise the likelihood of having competitive bidding processes, increase the number of bids per contract, and facilitate market entry by new vendors. According to OECD, the application of Open Government principles emphasizes governmental accountability and legitimacy; nevertheless, these principles foster collaboration and engagement between civil society and public administrations. In the context of public procurement, the adoption of Integrity Pacts – a signed contract between public authorities, companies bidding for a contract and a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) acting as independent monitor – represents a viable solution so far applied in many countries for enabling governments to gather and mobilize public support for their programs and to avoid the high cost in loss of reputation attached to occurrences of corruption in highly sensitive projects. Beside Integrity Pacts, open contracting data standard – a scheme that provide shareable, reusable, machine-readable open data across the entire cycle of public procurement – has the potential to foster the achievement of open government principles, i.e. transparency, participation and accountability. This paper explores the extent to which the dissemination of Integrity Pacts and the adoption of innovative digital solutions (OCDS) might build shared knowledge and enable a real transition to Open Government principles in public procurement.

Digital Transformation is one of the most important drivers for the progressive changing of a broad range of health care sector. Digitalization allows organizations to radically improve their performance by providing consistent opportunities to disrupt their value creation process and, therefore, by creating new customer relationships through digital infrastructures. ERP and SAP are currently analyzed in healthcare as tools for change and success in the digitization of control and management systems. At the same time, the IPSAS principles supporting NPFM tools direct the organization towards a single integrated system aimed at guaranteeing the decision-making processes that hospital structures need in the face of a significant incapacity of Italian healthcare companies to have a overview in real time. Two theoretical approaches guide the reading of the case and allow to highlight the impact of the digitalization of the control and administration system. The analysis of the Bambin Gesù of Rome (Italy), a polyclinic of pediatric excellence, guides the analysis, and allows some innovative observations. The study uses an empirical research method that integrates case study analysis, structured interviews, analysis of hospital documents and interventionist approach. The case study was analyzed between 2017 and 2020 to identify changes and principles that have changed the company’s management and organizational approach, confirming the basic theoretical model. The heads of the organization and management control of the Hospital were questioned through a survey on the identified theoretical elements. The analysis was triangulated through interviews and analysis of internal management reports in order to confirm what emerged. The Interventionist approach was realized thanks to the involvement of two of the authors in the progressive change of the organization and the internal control system, guaranteeing direct observation and a refutation of the opinions gathered by the internal experts. The introduction of NPFM tools, such as the SAP management control system and IPSAS accounting principles, has led to a standardization of accounting processes relating to clinical and research activities. The adoption of new control instruments and adhering to the accounting approaches referred to by the NPFM is currently applied and has led to an increase in efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of services with greater transparency expressed in the financial statements. The possibility of obtaining reports in real-time, the standardization of processes, homogeneity of data management associated with the characteristics of data quality guarantee support for decision-making processes and respond to the aim of the research.

The paper proposes a plan for introducing digital transformation into the estimates of the spending on drug-related healthcare, by identify the models currently available in scientific literature to make bottom-up estimates of the costs of providing treatment to substance abuse. The authors performed a scientific review of the literature, complemented with the snow-ball method, and applied a qualitative method of content analysis. Authors do not rule out the possibility that additional cost calculation tools may exist, because many methods are published in grey literature by public or private entities in charge of monitoring drug treatment. These studies are not always possible to capture in scientific reviews of the literature. Finally, the paper contributes to set the theoretical framework required to apply methods to estimate the costs of providing substance health care, in a digital context.