Decision Supports Systems (DSS) are computer-based systems which are characterized as interactive systems, used to help decision makers to utilize data and models to solve problems and support activities linked to their decision making process by enhancing it (Ali, et.al, 2017). Until now most of DSS are developed and implemented for business sector depending on the company/organization perspectives, still there are few done within the area of sport. With those premises, the objective of this paper is to assess the current state of art implementation of new technologies – in the specific the Video Assistant Referees (VAR) – and the impact that it has in supporting the referees in their decision making process during soccer matches. In this paper, we propose a review of literature, starting with the online database through specific keywords in order to assume the current state of analysis.

This article deals with the topic of re-entry of family members to their original family business. The re-entry is defined in the article as the decision of the family to re-invest in the originally founded company and re-acquire the ownership of a previously left business. In particular, the paper advances the idea that psychological ownership is the main rationale behind the decision to re-entry in the company. The paper presents two exploratory case studies of Italian family firms. It identifies antecedents (local embeddedness and eponymy) and catalysts (economic distress and family values at risk) of psychological ownership. The article emphasizes the reasons that explain the maintenance of this state of involvement even after the exit from the company and how they may explain the re-entry. A key issue considered regards the knowledge about the company that is shared and individually perceived by the family members during the period of separation from the company.

The Copernicus Programme leaded by ESA (European Space Agency) has/is released/ing a huge amount of Earth Observation data and therefore firms operating in the Space Industry aim at getting most out of them. However, this is not straightforward in that, to be exploited, data need to be processed and interpreted and this, on its turn, requires to build on new digital technologies, and particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this perspective, AI, while allowing data processing, can change the way firms create, deliver and capture value, and hence can be interpreted as a trigger igniting Business Model Innovation (BMI). While understanding BM as a set of different components, our objective is investigating i) whether AI initially modifies a specific component of the BM, to be considered as epicentre of BMI, or if any of the BM components can be the epicentre of innovation, and ii) whether the innovation process spreads from the epicentre to other BM components and if this happens according to a common path.

Even if the notion of knowledge management (KM) has been introduced more than three decades ago, the application of this concept in the context of small firms has still not been sufficiently explored. The relatively few contributions, however, agree on the fact that small companies do not manage knowledge the same way as their larger counterparts. In order to fill this gap, the present paper aims to the investigate the if and how different aspects of knowledge management in small enterprises offering knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) – such as: type of adopted KM practices, barriers to KM implementation and use – are related with some characteristics of the companies such as: their size, the business sector they belong, the kind of adopted strategic knowledge approach followed. Specifically, paper examines some features of KM in companies belonging to various KIBS sectors (ICT, architectural and engineering services, professional services, R&D services and marketing and communication services) in Poland. The findings are based on a quantitative survey conducted among 104 small companies of this type. Investigated KM-related aspects were: the role played by knowledge and KM, the KM practices adopted, the factors that have hindered the adoption of such practices, the way they are used. KIBS companies were investigated because knowledge and its management are vital for their operations and they are perceived as intensive users of KM tools and practices. The findings of the survey show that the approaches to KM followed by small KIBS companies results to be rather differentiated. Concerning the factors that influence the KM approach adopted by the individual company, the size and the kind of followed strategy help in explaining the differences between companies more than the sector of belonging. In particular, the size seems to act as a constraint (in terms of number of adopted practice and of role of promoters) while the kind of strategy as an enabler (a more reflected strategy is connected with a greater number of adopted practices). The study offers food for thought about KM features in the KIBS sector and moreover, it contributes to a better understanding of KM in small enterprises. The knowledge presented in the paper may be of use to managers and owners wishing to better understand their KM practices and implement more suitable solutions.

This paper aims to examine the value communication capabilities required in service development by proposing a way for value communication of a preventive maintenance solution. The research questions the paper aims to answer are, therefore, (1) how customer value of preventive maintenance services can be quantified, visualized and communicated and (2) what the implications of this value quantification and communication development to the wider MA capabilities development are. The study is based on an interventionist case study in a manufacturing company and its hose assembly supplier. The researchers have worked with the case companies on development of a new production innovation eventually providing value potential also for the OEM’s end users. In addition to supporting the service development, the MA researchers have worked on creating models for value quantification and visualization of this potential new aftersales service concept. Customer value of preventive maintenance services can be communicated by quantifying and visualizing the cost behaviour of direct and downtime costs. The required capabilities can be accessed from the financial department requiring also effective knowledge management practices. Value quantification and communication capabilities are in crucial role in also in the early stages of the servitization process and may warrant the help of the financial department. Value quantification and communication is needed early in development of a service offering in order to push the idea forward. Thus, these capabilities need to be developed to a sufficient level even before the development starts. The financial department can have a role in this as the value analysis requires certain skills and information to provide reliable estimations. The framework provided may also help manufacturers understand the value created by preventive maintenance solutions. The paper answers the call for more practical tools for servitization. Moreover, the paper adds to the discussion about the role of MA in the servitization process and provides insights in the capabilities required in this process, especially in value quantification and communication.

Social software is becoming increasingly important in companies and has long since been used in organizations not only as an instant messenger but also as a collaboration tool. Therefore, this paper deals with the potentials and challenges for knowledge management (KM) in Enterprise 2.0 using the example of the social software Slack. Based on episodic interviews, new challenges such as “blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure” and “misunderstandings due to text-based communication” are identified. The implications derived from this should help companies to deal with the challenges of social software like Slack in Enterprise 2.0.

Our study arose from a need to find and fill lacunas in knowledge systems supporting machine translation. The paper focuses on the challenge of developing a model that describes processes of goal-oriented enrichment of linguistic typologies as dynamic knowledge systems about language units and their translations. To describe the processes, we have developed a model of knowledge discovery for filling lacunas. The model is based on the idea of the spiral of knowledge creation and describes a process of populating a typology. The population process is based on conceptualizing potential sources of new meanings. In our projects, the potential sources are parallel texts. The conceptualization provides an opportunity to discover and describe new meanings of language units in question. The goal of the paper is to present the proposed model and scrutinize iterative stages of the discovery of new meanings of language units for filling lacunas in a typology. We develop a computer system to represent discovery outcomes and populate the typology. We give an example showing that new meanings could be discovered and used to enrich the typology.

This paper investigates heterogeneity in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of a sample of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) firms actively operating in Italy over the period 2012-2018. Business service industries can be defined as KIBS if they are private sector organizations that offer specialist professional, consultancy, and outsourcing services to other organization relying heavily on professional knowledge. On the basis of an ample literature, KIBS firms support the innovation process of organizations in different industry market, including, in particular, small and medium-sized ones, and of those operating in the public sector, through knowledge generation and diffusion. Starting from the underlying idea that KIBS firms differ from each other in several ways, whatever their location, and such heterogeneity in firm-specific characteristics is supposed to translate into heterogeneity in business performance, the main object of the present contribution is to analyze KIBS productivity heterogeneity on the basis of their localization and business sector. The empirical analysis is conducted at firm-level using a large sample of KIBS firms, obtained, as primary source, from the AIDA- Bureau van Dick database, which contains all Italian firms’ disaggregated balance sheet and profit and loss statement information for the period 2012-2018. In particular, we consider the following Eurostat NACE Rev. 2 statistical sectors: 62-63 (information technology and communication sectors), 69-70-71-72-73-74 (professional, scientific and technical sectors). Based on the efficiency scores obtained from DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), we estimate the Malmquist Productivity Index for the period under investigation (2012-2018) to measure the variation of firms TFP. Moreover, in order to investigate if the source of productivity heterogeneity among the firm can be explained by firm specific features (geographic location, activity sector), a multilevel statistical modelling approach is used.

Nowadays information flow overload is typical for most of the companies, universities as knowledge organizations are not the exception. Little emphasis is placed on knowledge transfer efforts made by universities in passing knowledge to internal stakeholders (Chugh, 2013). The paper describes a sketch of a knowledge base for university research. The case of Graduate School of Management St. Petersburg State University is taken into consideration. The knowledge base in the form of ontology helps to create a big picture view of the different information pieces involved into research and improve understanding of research in general as well as its various research aspects (Gruber, 1993; Hahn, Chang, Kim & Kittur, 2016; Hammar, 2017). This paper is consistent with design science research and systems thinking applied for generalization of the selected research domain (Dresch, Lacerda & Antunes, 2015). It is based on literature review, the systemic analysis of knowledge portals of several universities as well as semantic analysis and in-depth interviews. The paper is focused on the ontology development for research domain so methods of ontological engineering are used. The study considers knowledge base and ontology from knowledge management perspective. According to Ameen et al. (2012) the university ontology generally portrays an institution, representing the local reality of the entire educational process. The knowledge base in the form of ontology is designed considering various aspects: organizational structure, research activities and workflow processes, including administrative structures, research results and their dissemination. The analysis of knowledge bases and literature review showed that existing university knowledge bases serve more like digital repositories (Koperwas, Skonieczny, Rybiński & Struk, 2013). But there is no survey devoted to university research domain. This research fills the gap.Proposed knowledge base is linked to the existing Pure Cloud Information System developed for a very specific application being a digital repository. The sketch of ontology of a knowledge base creates a big picture of decomposed comprehensive research aspects and tasks and their relationships; and allows the research data to be aggregated, filtered and delivered in a user-friendly way to the faculty and administrative staff. Presented sketch of ontology of a knowledge base for university research may help researchers, managers and knowledge analysts to develop a big picture view, improve the navigation among different knowledge assets. The paper considers the feasibility of using the ontology for research data integration from relational databases and other information sources.

The use of Enterprise Social Media (ESM) platforms is rapidly diffusing in the business context, as they are increasingly considered crucial for the future competition. In particular, as commonly underlined by scholars, ESM can bring substantial benefits to companies and especially to their knowledge management (KM) processes. However, such benefits can materialize only if the active use and contribution by individual employees to ESM are ensured. Therefore, it is crucial to better understand how and how much an ESM platform is used by a company’s employees. This explains why the literature is devoting particular attention to the analysis of the level of participation and the type of activity performed by the users of such platforms. While “frequency of use” is the most considered dimension to classify different users’ groups, scholars also resort to other dimensions, as the distinction between passive and active users, sometimes called as “posters” and “lurkers”. The paper proposes a new typology of ESM users based on the results of a survey, which involved 262 employees of an international engineering project-based service company that has adopted an ESM platform. What emerged from the analysis of the survey data confirmed the existence of different types of ESM users and provided the empirical basis to develop a users’ typology based on two dimensions: frequency (high vs. low) of use and kind (active vs. passive) of use. This allowed identifying four different users’ groups (of different size but all populated), that were denoted as: “frequent contributors”, “sporadic contributors”, “frequent lurkers” and “sporadic lurkers”. Furthermore, applying descriptive statistics and variance analysis on the survey data allowed to verify the reasonableness of the proposed new typology and identify the main aspects that characterise the different users’ groups such as: position in the company, role inside the community, specific types of relevant knowledge sources, perceived usefulness, information novelty and satisfaction with the platform and the Community of Practice. The findings of the study have both academic and managerial implications. As regards the latter, managers should consider that different employees might behave differently with respect to new media, so that an undifferentiated approach to different behaviours may be ineffective. The main limitation of the study is that only one company was analysed belonging to a particular sector with specific knowledge needs and capabilities.

Based on panel dataset of 33100 Italian firms collected by the MET company, this paper compares the differences in the innovation value chain of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS), manufacturing and other services. The study demonstrates the relative importance attributed to different internal and external sources of information on innovation outcomes of KIBS in terms of product, process and organization, compared to manufacturing industries and to other services. Significant similarities exist between some aspects of firms’ innovation behavior in these sectors: strong complementarities emerge between firms’ internal and external knowledge. However, the outsourcing to Italian firms, to foreign partners or to other institutions and the local, domestic and international networking are valued differently across the three sectors. The findings shed new light on the innovation process of Italian firms and can be used in innovation management decisions.

Due to the important role of knowledge in the sustainable development of organizations, this topic still attracts several practitioners and researches. Therefore, knowledge management research area is considered as a young discipline that needs further exploration. The purpose of this study is to map the challenges in knowledge management by investigating the key themes and their relationship for the period 2009-2019. The study updates the previous study of Gaviria-Marin et al. et al. (2019) by specifically investigating the challenges in knowledge management to identify current research gaps and future research directions. This study utilizes the bibliometric analysis technique to identify the challenges in knowledge management. The dataset for this study was retrieved from the Scopus database. In total, 915 articles published between 2009 and 2019 were retrieved. These articles cover 2215 authors, 277 journals and 5400 keywords. The bibliometric analysis was conducted through the VOSviewer software. The study included activities like co-author and co-word analysis by mapping it to the theoretical foundations. The co-word analysis identified three broad themes of challenges in knowledge management: Organizational learning, knowledge development and sharing; optimization through knowledge management; knowledge sourcing and planning. This study helps researchers to understand the challenges in knowledge management studies in last decade and the direction that challenges research is taking in order to identify available avenues for future research.

Open Innovation (OI) is still a young phenomenon and its adoption by industry subject to a number of still poorly understood context factors and drivers. The development and implementation of the OI paradigm in business poses specific challenges not only to the management of the external environment but also to the development of organizational skills that would specifically prepare the organization to operate in OI networks and successfully integrate external knowledge flows into the innovation process and products. Each organization is at some level of maturity, but imperfect signalling and deliberate withholding of firm-internal information prevent the necessary alignment both among units of the same firm and between corporate entities as a whole necessary for external and innovative collaboration. This study applies the concept of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)—which focuses on the quality of organizational processes—to the domain of intra- and interorganizational collaboration for innovation (open innovation). We propose the organizational-internal concept of inside-in innovation to complement boundary-spanning innovation flows such as inside-out and outside-in innovation. Based on research of three case companies, we outline an OI-CMM, identifying some of the key capabilities needed, and suggesting further avenues of research.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is characterized by a different attitude towards scientific research and development processes taking in account potential impacts on the society and ecosystem previously to the actual implementation. RRI has spread as a new approach towards the design of policies, services and products including the various actors not only in the final solution but also throughout the entire development. Even this perspective has been widely discussed in theory, it is facing issues in being transformed into practice. This article discusses design thinking in RRI as an approach to stakeholder engagement aiming at operationalizing RRI while exploring its impacts. This is done by means of ten real-life experimentations within the project SISCODE funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. The experiments are conducted by 10 different innovation labs across Europe launching bottom-up initiatives to work on context-based challenges producing new forms of evidence for policy makers about the effectiveness of co-design in RRI and how co-design can contribute to shorten the distance between STI policy making and society. This potential is explored concretely to feed theoretical studies on putting RRI into practice. At the same time, it is aimed to open the practices of policy making to evidence coming from real co-design: context-based initiatives shall trigger and reinforce the learning process of policy makers to become more open to experiment with policies. This paper describes the design research for SISCODE that is mainly based on the notion of codesign experiment in real contexts as a playground for policy makers and its following application to verify the assumption that: local design projects developed in response to specific societal challenges could work as living prototypes for the policy makers to observe directly how codesign work and to take advantage from the evidence produced during these experiments to develop and better define policies. The paper reports the main results obtained during 1 (January 2019-January 2020) year of experimentation in the 10 labs with respect to the engagement of policy makers and the effectiveness of design thinking as an approach to make RRI into practice. Results discussed in the following are based on the triangulation of the data coming from a self assessment exercise conducted by the labs at the beginning of the project ( co-creation knowledge baseline) and after 1 year of development, and the data from the labs case studies as developed by project researchers.

Over the past few decades, the attributive point of view on “information” entered the discussion as something constituting or directly characterizing the physical world. Thus, some scientists, like L.Floridi, began developing the “philosophy of information.” In the 80s, a four-level representation of “knowledge” spread (DIKW-structure), preceded by two-level representation. The basis is “data (concepts)” – individual facts characterizing objects, processes, and phenomena of the subject area. The DIKW-structure includes “data (concepts)”, “information”, “knowledge” itself and “wisdom”. For the two-level structure of “knowledge” graph and other mathematical methods of representation and processing have long been used, but not for DIKW. In 2012, a version of the graph and mathematical representation of the DIKW-structure was published in Russia. This shows that the four-level representation is most constructive for working with knowledge and information, and also provides the opportunity to objectively understand different approaches to information, their rationale formerly built on a verbal basis. We go from 500 different definitions to 6 small groups. A powerful group of attributive point-of-view remains as “information1”. “Information2” is the result of actions/communications of highly-organized living or technical entities. The Shannon approach based on statistical estimation is called “information3”. Information derived from a data-links is “information4”, corresponding to “information” (in narrow sense) used in DIKW-structure of knowledge. The sentence plays an important part, acting as “information4”. From the linguistic point-of-view, it carries a semantic content, from the semiotic – a set of signs. The legal definition of information is called “information5”, defined as “the total amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind”, the “information in a broad sense”. Such an interpretation is the result of combining all types of knowledge components from the DIKW structure in a graph representation based on the rules of discrete mathematics. This graph G is very complex, can also be obtained practically, in a special form based on the technology of direct imposition of knowledge via methods of AI and computer linguistics. The philosophical point-of-view we’ll call “information6”. An ontological comparative analysis of the four-level structure of knowledge with some interpretations of information and knowledge was carried out.

There is an interesting debate around the role played by a European Capital of Culture in the development and growth of creative and cultural organisations working in the city designed as cultural capital, in the sub-region and. Whilst it is understandable that the designation of European Capital of Culture of a city has an impact on the broader profile of the city and can give an improved credibility of the city’s creative offer, there is a variety of experiences about direct impact on cultural organisations engaged with the development of the mega event European Capital of Culture. Leaving out the broader understanding of the changes occurring in cultural and creative industry in a European Capital of Culture, this study focuses on an analysis of the impacts of big cultural projects co-created with citizens on cultural organisations that have developed these projects. The impacts mainly concern changes occurred in organisation’s business model, capabilities, growth and position in creative and cultural sector. The study adopts an exploratory approach based on multiple case studies. The cases regard five cultural organisations that have lead as many big projects within the Matera ECOC 2019 programme. The cases provide a consistent scenario for deepening understanding of changes experienced by cultural organisations engaged in the development of big projects involving citizens in ECOC context.

Nowadays, Living Labs have become a very popular research topic in Innovation Management literature. The existing literature suggests that the Living Lab is a multidisciplinary phenomenon that can be seen simultaneously as an environment and methodology rooted in open and user innovation paradigms. These Labs are conceived as physical or virtual space in which to solve social challenges, especially for urban areas, by bringing together various stakeholders for collaboration and collective ideation. In a broader perspective Living Labs are user-driven open innovation ecosystem where business, citizens, government, institutions take an active part in innovation processes. This paper analyses Living Lab as a catalyst of entrepreneurship development and innovation in a peculiar context such as a European Capital of Culture (ECOC). ECOC represents a yet under-utilised opportunity for cities and regions to develop existing and prospective local businesses, firstly via their engagement in the event. ECOC programme, indeed, has great potentials to trigger, strengthen and diversify local entrepreneurship by encouraging innovation, cross-sectoral cooperation, networking as well as internationalisation. The study provides an analysis of the Open Design School, i.e. a Living Lab designed to invent, prototype and build creative and technological solutions to have been made available to the events planners of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019. The Open Design School (ODS) has engaged in its activities many actors, such as businesses, entrepreneurs, citizens, an international team of professionals with the most diverse stories behind them. In doing this, the ODS has given to these actors the opportunity to approach interdisciplinary experimentation and innovation, learn new skills and build new relational networks, in a process that has put the community at the centre of the mega cultural event. Among the different actors involved in the ODS’ activities, the study – Upon the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation’s request who financed the research – looked at the Living Lab’s suppliers and has investigated the following issues: what impact has the collaboration with the ODS generated on innovation capacity of its suppliers? What are the effects that cooperating with the ODS has generated on business model of its suppliers? More generally, has the ODS helped create a fertile milieu for developing innovative and entrepreneurial skills, new medium-long term opportunities for local community? The study adopts an exploratory approach based on case study methodology.

The paper aims to discuss the role of Innovation Labs as innovation management model fostering continuous innovation practices within organizations operating in the digital ecosystem. An Innovation Labs management framework is proposed, through the analysis of a case study, with the main purpose to collect further insights on the field and to catalyse research interests in a field on which the attention of the academic and practitioners’ world is growing even more. Innovation Labs are Innovation management models based on the construction of an innovative space with physical, virtual, hybrid and relational features. They are based on the development of a platform that contemplates tangible and intangible infrastructure dimensions aimed at fostering creative and critical thinking, promoting and supporting user-driven, open, and continuous innovation approaches; to facilitate stakeholders’ engagement in innovations processes; to better understand users’ needs; to drive digital transformation; to imagine and defining innovation opportunities; and to continuously develop new solutions capturing and delivering value to society in order to drive the organization in finding the best ways to generate knowledge and digital culture, introduce technology, digitize operations, and implement digital strategies for continuous and digital innovation. The research of new solutions, practices, and management models enabling continuous innovation dynamics and digital exploitation is a current hot topic both for scholars and practitioners (Fecher et al., 2018). Among emergent practices, Innovation Labs have appeared as a valuable answer to organizations’ needs to develop digital culture and continuous innovation attitudes (Osorio et al., 2019). Although the practice of Innovation Lab is raising interests among scholars and practitioners, the literature in this field still reveals a lack of management models based on innovative approaches and methodologies and addressing current competitive challenges (Osorio et al., 2018). To address this gap and catalyse research interest, the paper is based on the analysis of a single case study. It has been conducted in an Innovation Lab to understand its functioning, and its management logic, as well as proposing a framework for its organizational management that could increase knowledge and suggest guidelines on the field, both for academic and practitioners. The paper combines the insights from theory with the empirical evidence gathered by adopting a case study approach. Therefore, the proposed framework springs from a case study, i.e., an Innovation Lab designed to develop and foster innovation capacity and digital continuous innovation among organisations and stakeholders of a tourism regional ecosystem. The originality and the value of the paper stand in the contribution aimed to enrich theoretical and practical knowledge on management issues of Innovation Labs and proposing a cycle-based framework for their successful management. The study puts particular attention to management issues of Innovation Lab as a “guide” of the digital innovation journey of an organization. The study advances theoretical and practical knowledge about how effectively manage Innovation Labs and provides scholars and practitioners with useful insights and managerial implications for the development and management of these initiatives.

The effect of digital transition on today’s knowledge creation processes is becoming relevant for companies operating in different industries, and the body of literature examining this impact is fastly growing. Nevertheless, systematizing existing studies on digital technologies supporting the firm’s knowledge creation processes to reconceptualise existing knowledge management models and paradigms is still a challenge. In this scenario, the SECI model can provide theoretical guidance to achieve this research objective. Indeed, through the implementation of digital technologies, firms are redesigning the way they access and manage knowledge. Therefore, this paper aims to critically analyse the literature on the impact of digital transition on knowledge creation by providing a novel structuring model. This model seeks to analyse the role of digital transition along the innovative digital knowledge creation processes identified (Webinarisation, Informalisation, Systematisation, Explication, Digitalisation), according to the traditional epistemological and ontological dimensions. Integrating these perspectives, the authors design the WISED model to evaluate the impact of digital transition on the knowledge-creating companies.

Public organisations are changing by using the potential offered by information technology in order to better contribute to value creation moving towards sustainability as a vision for change and action. As organisations seeking sustainability by strengthening sources offered by use of information technology, public organisations select a community-driven approach and adopt a logic service view as strategic choice to enable and facilitate public value creation within society. Information technology is leading public organisations to identifying a pathway towards sustainability for driving change moving from providing information to managing and using knowledge, enhancing openness between transparency and accountability by developing smart and digital platforms as a mean that enables both knowledge and openness views. Public organisations contribute to value creation, innovation and sustainability within communities improving technological advances in government in order to develop digital, smart, lean and open platforms for social and knowledge exchanges that open up to promoting public value creation processes.