Therefore it follows that companies today live in a business landscape that requires them to be more resilient, imaginative, intuitive and flexible. Organizations are challenged to face the growing complexity, turbulence, unpredictability and changing competitive environment. Competitiveness follows the new trends dictated by the market from the ecological transition to digitalization. To survive, businesses must invest in these directions and with the support of institutions and the banking system. This document analyzes the literature on access to credit and to bring to the attention a particular business case that, having implemented ESG criteria, has improved its ratings and its creditworthiness towards the banking system At the moment, limits of research are represented by the scarce analysis methodologies and the storage of information on ESG, as well as the lack of uniform regulation. This study provides new information on the effects of a company policy oriented towards an eco-sustainable business.

Most new ventures will never develop into a profitable enterprise. Therefore, knowledge about new venture failure and how to possibly prevent it should be part of entrepreneurship education. Drawing on the theory of negative knowledge, we developed an entrepreneurship education program that included working with case studies dealing with start-up situations with negative outcomes. We tested the effects of the program with an intervention study where vocational students were assigned to one of three groups: a group that learned with negative case studies (n=137), a group that learned with positive case studies (n=129), and an engaged control group that participated in the entrepreneurship program without case studies (n=113). Participants in all three groups received entrepreneurship knowledge and had the opportunity to develop a business idea. Results show that learning with negative cases can increase learners’ ability to identify potential dangers in starting a business compared to learning with positive or without cases. At the same time, learning with negative cases had no negative effect on students’ entrepreneurial intentions or perceived desirability or feasibility to become entrepreneurs. However, the effect sizes were small, and while we found a significant time x group interaction, suggesting differential changes in the main study variables between the three groups, post-hoc test were not significant.

Entrepreneurs with little or no knowledge of IT infrastructures are establishing innovative digital solutions enterprises while communicating and interacting in no-code online start- up communities. This phenomenon requires additional research not merely on the technical aspects, but the patterns of knowledge sharing, learning, and networking resources accessible within these online communities. This paper will be based on analysing the no-code founding community and user interaction behaviour of their members. No-code founders are an online start-up community network of non-technical entrepreneurs, innovators who are establishing or expanding their ventures utilising no- code technologies. The community members assist each other in developing their no-code competences and business know-how through co-learning. Knowledge is initially acquired via entrepreneurial learning and then communicated to other individuals with whom entrepreneurs interact with, e.g., through online start-up platforms, however not all participants in the network are willing to share their experiences or knowledge (Ratten and Usmanij., 2020). Abbate et al. (2019) suggests that further research can highlight how users are connected to the community to analyse the activities, resources, technology, and services to strategize using an open innovation approach. Flamini et al. (2021) have indicated that open innovation literature requires further research to determine affiliation between entrepreneurs and organisational entities, where an entrepreneur transforms information into knowledge, manages various information and knowledge flows, influences the innovation course through his/her capabilities (Hsieh and Wu, 2019). Therefore, this paper aims to explore the patterns of knowledge sharing within selected United Kingdom and German no-code entrepreneurship communities. UK and German no-code entrepreneurship online communities’ platforms were selected as critical units of analysis and comparative cases which represented the research criteria. The data collection commenced with six semi-structured interviews to explore both no-code communities and the patterns of sharing knowledge between its members. The applied qualitative method helped providing an in-depth investigation leading to capturing the participants’ patterns, experiences, intentions, conceptions when interacting within the studied no-code community. The research findings revealed specific drivers and patterns of sharing knowledge within the studied no-code entrepreneurship online communities; and contribute to addressing the current literature gap and provide fresh insight to management practice and concerned stakeholders to nurture knowledge sharing practices within similar communities.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are projects that require knowledge from different areas and the integration of multiple actors, organizations and public institutions. The cooperation of public and private sectors and the strategical networks on PPPs strengths the Open Innovation (OI) approach in these projects as a knowledge prospecting catalyst. The purpose of this research is to advance the level of PPPs projects by integrating the OI and PPP approaches. The aim is to evaluate the impact of OI practices on the performance of PPPs in Brazil’s highways. This study was tested through a questionnaire survey applied to specialists in projects of PPPs highways in Brazil. The findings can have profound impact on these projects by evidencing the OI practices that more impact each performance analyzed and can be prioritized by managers, entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers and public administrators.

Italian Inner Areas are fragile territories, often offering only essential services and thus characterised by depopulation and degradation. The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) is a recent innovative Italian policy to counteract marginalisation and demographic decline by creating new employment circuits and chances of local development through territorial cohesion. In recent years, some public policies are working towards this final goal: for instance, the Law 158 of 2017 (“Measures for the support and enhancement of small municipalities”) and its National Plan or the public call “Projects of cultural and social regeneration of small historic villages” (within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan), which promote projects for regeneration, enhancement and management of the cultural heritage in small Italian villages. Currently, also several research projects are carried on to study how to reactivate these fragile contexts: i.e., “Branding4Resilience (B4R)”, which the paper refers to, funded in 2019 by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. B4R involves four academic partners with the aim of investigating the potential of branding in four Italian inner areas, by proposing the implementation of minimal tourist infrastructures as an engine for the development of resilient territories and local communities. By assuming a knowledge management perspective, the aim of the paper is to propose a methodological approach, structured in five processes and a series of phases, aimed to explore fragile territories and to support the identification of some territorial resilience strategies. This approach was applied to the case of Alta Valsesia, located in the northern Piedmont (Italy), which is one of the inner areas studied within the “B4R Branding4Resilience” research project. By using different dimensions and sub-dimensions of analysis, a series of indicators and indexes were jointly analysed not only to support a first exploration of the territory potentials, but also to highlight territorial vulnerability and vibrancy aspects. Some first results, obtained from spatial and attribute queries in relation to the objective of developing new cultural-touristic infrastructures, supported the identification of the most fragile areas of Alta Valsesia, which deserve a particular attention and priority in funding enhancement strategies and actions. On the basis of these results, a co-design workshop with local stakeholders and B4R research groups was organized to foster enhancement strategies, design actions/interventions and identify possible funding sources to guarantee their economic- financial sustainability.

Digital transformation and new technologies offer companies a unique opportunity to tap into new revenue streams while increasing value creation. Through targeted investments in digital and knowledge management, it is possible to develop new sources of income and expand their business. Digitizing knowledge, for example, makes it easier for a company’s employees to access information. In addition, individuals can use technology to share and control the information they have access to. The development of innovations and the improvement of business models will benefit all stakeholders so that everyone can benefit from the digital revolution. In this framework, we conduct a bibliometric study of the digital transformation literature and identify the factors that influence the success of a digital transformation project. In this work, we have considered a query: “knowledge management”, assets, and “digital transformation”, where The scientific production considered covers scientific articles from 2005 to 2022. Methodologically speaking, we combine two different separate statistical analyses from the construction of the bibliometric database. First, we considered a multivariate analysis using multiple correspondence analysis; then, we used cluster analysis to identify the relevant groups of keywords in the literature. In this respect, the performed exploratory multiple correspondence analysis aims to visualize on a two-dimensional map the significant keywords from the articles which can be considered in this scientific literature. We uncover the most significant relationships between the most relevant terms from the subsequently published literature. We repeated the complete bibliometric analysis to evaluate the sensitivity of the results by using different terms than the previous study. More specifically, from the second bibliometric analysis, we analyze the robustness of the results obtained in the study performed by considering slightly different terms valid to discover relevant issues related to the use of similar keywords on the queries (digital “change” instead of digital “transformation” for instance). Throughout this research, it is possible to discover the different clusters of ideas associated with the basic conceptual groupings that characterized the literature. Therefore, it is necessary to perform a cluster analysis to understand the critical needs for digital transformation and the links between these needs and knowledge management and digitization. Overall, we emphasize the importance of intellectual capital in the digital transformation process, as higher intellectual capital leads to better use of resources.

The relevance of knowledge assets as fundamental strategic factors of business success has been widely recognised in today’s competitive scenario. This contribution analyzes “Collaboration agreements between administrations and citizens for the commons care”, a regulatory instrument for the implementation of the horizontal subsidiarity principle of the Italian Constitution. More than 250 municipalities developed this kind of regulations and nine Regions have approved analogous legislations. The heterogeneity of the local agencies, in terms of demographic and territorial breadth and their distribution on the national, regional, inland and mountain areas, are symptoms of a widespread interest in experimenting these new governance paradigms based on civic participation: from “governing for” to “governing with”. Therefore, this paper analyses territorial agreements in nine cities and explores the presence in these administrative processes of two functions that can characterize the capacity of modification and adaptation of the administrative structure: communication and evaluation.

Within the healthcare setting, knowledge management would result in better addressing the patients’ needs, enabling greater efficiency in diagnosis and research activities, and improving the decision-making process. One of the main assets that could be used to ameliorate delivery of services, quality, and efficiency performance, through an analysis of data and evidence (Alsunaidi et al, 2021), is represented by use of big data, generated at hospital level, that if accordingly handled, could support the management of complex situations. The success of big data in healthcare sector, depends also on the skills, competencies and expertise of the professionals that are demanded to acquire, manage, process data and extract knowledge from them, known as Data Scientists. Due to the current lack of a dashboard of specific skills and competencies devoted to such innovative professional role, the present paper aims to structure and validate a shared framework required to cover this role in the healthcare sector, based on the scientific literature on the topic and specific needs directly derived from real practice. For the achievement of the above objective a multi-methods approach was used, with the development of a 3-stage study design. At first, an in-depth examination of potential Data Scientist skills and competencies was conducted, by reviewing literature evidence, university undergraduate and graduate international courses, and examining job postings (Stage 1). Secondly, a synthesis of the main skills and competencies was produced, with the creation of a structured framework (Stage 2). In conclusion, a specific survey was conducted by involving 125 healthcare professionals, to gather their perceptions on the relative importance of the specific skills and competencies collected in Stage 1 and in Stage 2, thus defining the main assets leveraging on the proper introduction of a Data Scientist in any healthcare organization (Stage 3). The proposed framework identified three main categories of skills and competencies (i.e. Technical ones, Business & workplace-related, Soft and other personal skills) and related items of interest. This study represents a first attempt to rationalize the fragmented body of knowledge deriving from different stream of literature on the Data Scientist topic, focusing on the healthcare sector, validating their importance and related prioritization, thus offering theoretical and practical implications,

The aim of this paper is to introduce and discuss the design and the main contents of a survey-based research methodology supporting data collection to better understand how food companies identifies and manage levers, practices and initiatives of positional innovation. After a literature review aimed to briefly modelling theory about the role and the characteristics of the positional innovation, and on the base of a first testing of the survey-based research methodology, the article presents then a set of empirical evidences gathered in the Italian context useful to clarify theory and to show how the various conceptual issues may be operatively and effectively applied. In order to implement the survey-based research methodology to investigate more widely experiences and practices of positional innovation in food industry, a dedicated questionnaire has been elaborated. The items of the questionnaire have been built combining the results of a desk research with empirical deductive data collected through dedicated focus groups and interviews with experts and opinion leaders. A first test of the questionnaire has been carried out on a sample of Italian leading companies in food industry through collecting public available data. The questionnaire includes currently three main sections: Section 1 – Company’s data; Section 2 – The main goals of the positional innovation strategy; 3- The intended levers and actions implemented by companies to manage practically positional innovation. Although there is an increasing need to inform companies producing mature and “not technology-driven” goods as food about how to analyse, shape and renew their management and innovation practices, there is still a general lack of empirical data around the real goals, orientations, needs, expectations that food industries feel and put in place to revise and innovate their products in terms of perceived value. Accordingly, it is of strategic value to build knowledge and collect data around positional innovation experiences and practices for the development and the sustainability of the food industry. In order to fill this gap, this paper provides then a survey-based research methodology capable to theoretically support the data collection grounding a better understanding of the managerial initiatives of positional innovation defined and implemented by food companies. On the base of the testing of the research design and methods, it emerges from one side the strength and the quality of the tool to identify significant knowledge domains and collect related data about positional innovation; and, on the other side, the variety and the multifaceted aspects through which positional innovation can be operatively translated and managed.

Museums contribute to urban regeneration processes and wellbeing of communities. Museums and communities help improve urban spaces and quality of life. Culture helps to support urban innovation, opening up to urban regeneration as a source of well-being for communities. Social innovation, as well as a dynamic vision for urban change management and sustainable development, might be enhancing factors. Museums contribute to urban redevelopment strategies and act as social agents of change and spaces of cultural innovation and experimentation to revitalize urban spaces, fostering solidarity, integration, and collaboration. Museums select a pathway for building community wellbeing, by developing social innovation, and driving urban regeneration processes that benefit urban communities and environments.

This study investigates how managers and entrepreneurs can learn about the interplay between leadership and followership from jazz musicians. The jazz metaphor is no stranger to management, with application in several fields such as organisation theory, innovation and leadership. The finest expression of jazz occurs during the “jam sessions”, described as relatively informal musical events where jazz musicians play improvised solos using different tunes and chord progressions. To “jam” means improvising music without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements and often without knowing the other participants in advance. One of the most distinctive yet overlooked features in jazz improvisation occurring in jam sessions is the practice of taking turns soloing and supporting, switching between leading and following. In jazz, leadership is an activity that is shared among the group, with individuals taking turns according to their skills or the demands of the environment and the moment. Several scholars have argued about the need for novel approaches to tackling the “grand challenges” of our volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) times, which need new leadership and coordination mechanisms. Like jazz musicians, future managers and entrepreneurs will need to develop confidence in interpreting vague cues, processing incomplete knowledge, facing unstructured tasks and unprecedented problems, and yet taking action. The literature has not yet investigated the strategies and routines for the operationalisation of creative and shared leadership, and we believe that the metaphor of jazz could offer interesting insights. The purpose of this study is to identify the codes and conventions that might allow members of an organisation or team to promote creativity by switching between moments of leadership and others of followership. Furthermore, we wish to investigate how this skill might be trained and stimulated. The study is organised as follows. First, we start with observing the jazz world through participant observation in jam sessions and interviews with jazz musicians. Second, we model practices and patterns of jazz, and we report our insights and findings to the world of management, providing contributions to both research and practice. Third, we discuss the role of challenge-based initiatives such as hackathons, which share several similarities with jam sessions, as promising platforms for managers and entrepreneurs to improvise, experiment and nurture creative and shared leadership, just like jazz musicians do through their unique jams.

Understanding the reasons why some areas are more attractive than others is strategic for all municipalities located in weak socio-economic contexts, which need new development opportunities to strengthen their economies and tackle the depopulation trends. Single or multiple factors can act as triggers or detractors in inner areas and fragile territories: one of these is the real estate market, which is strictly related to different social and economic issues. In order to identify adequate strategies, policies and actions, data and indicators from different sources must be jointly analysed. For this purpose, a five-phase methodological approach, based on a sequence of knowledge management operations, is proposed, so that an adequate knowledge base could support multiple analyses. Its application on the fragile of the Eporediese area (Northern Italy), consisting of 54 municipalities, led to the identification and collection of more than 35 indicators, to their organization in a GIS and finally to the utilization of this preliminary knowledge base for analytical purposes. Different statistical analyses were performed and interesting results achieved on the existing relationships between real estate market variables, the presence of urban services and the main characteristics of the population. In particular, property listing prices and the advertisements frequency emerged as key factors to be jointly considered with social vulnerability aspects. Moreover, results pointed out other interesting variables, such as the Digital Transformation Indicator and the Urban Development Indicator, to be further explored in future research developments. Also the current version of the GIS has to be further tested and extended by selecting and adding more variables and data from other data sources, with the aim of properly support local authorities, scholars and study centres in identifying, collecting, organising, using and sharing multi- level data.

Industry 4.0 is an issue that has already reached most companies, although its implementation still varies significantly. This variance is mostly due to the fact that planning and implementing networked technologies in companies requires new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. The approach developed in this paper provides guidance to manufacturing companies to identify and exploit digitally enabled market opportunities and to start a project-based learning process to transform the organization. We propose an approach using only remote guidance for competence building on digital transformation to increase companies’ ability to act. The proposed approach nurtured on existing digital transformation frameworks and agile project management tools suitable to achieve cognitive learning goals from the simple to the difficult, from the straightforward to the complex. By that it mitigates shortcomings with regard to application in practice. An integrated virtual supported training format for companies addresses therefore initial knowledge building, assessment options, derivation of focus areas, development of target scenarios and implementation experience. Numerous theoretical principles on digital transformation can be found in the literature. Approaches that translate these into practical procedures can only be found to a limited extent. Therefore, the originality of this paper is to propose a project- based approach that can enable companies not only to assess their digital maturity level and plan its increase, but at the same time to initiate a learning process for implementation. It enables employees to communicate inside and outside the organization, share knowledge/data and organize joint projects. So that the collaboration between team members of different disciplines is encouraged. The developed approach offers companies the opportunity to launch coordinated holistic initiatives for digital growth. Supported by agile development approaches, this can also be done location-independently in distributed teams. So, the effort for bringing distributed teams together can be reduced and interdisciplinary work is enhanced.

Over the last decade, B Corp Certification arose as a new business opportunity, an alternative to traditional ones and aimed to offer a new approach to managing sustainability issues. This certification attests that a business meets high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials. Empirical evidence in this domain is divergent, highlighting in some cases how B Corps’ willingness to pursue non-economic goals could undermine the financial performance of these entities. However, pursuing a more significant public benefit may improve legitimacy and stakeholder relationships, improving financial performance. Accordingly, this work tries to shed light on this divergent evidence, exploring the relationship between the B Impact Scores and firms’ financial performance. We apply a cross-sectional study using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) approach to verify how non-economic goals affect B Corps financial performance, testing the five single dimensions of the B Impact Score and the impact of the overall assessment. We consider all the 169 B Corps operating in Italy, referring to the B Lab directory. Empirical findings denote that the overall assessment does not impact B Corps financial performance, whilst some dimensions of the B Impact scores are positively related to firms’ financial performance. This research fits the stakeholder management research field, investigating how additional and non-financial disclosure regarding sustainability issues improves stakeholders’ relations and firms’ reputation capital. Our main contribution is to adopt for the first time a quantitative approach in the context of the Italian B Corps, pointed to verify whether additional efforts to meet social and environmental instances are financially rewarded. We have only selected spin-offs with at least one academic member on TMT and which have been started in a university.

The aim of this work is to analyze the Gender Equality issue within the context of Intellectual capital and performances with specific reference to knowledge organizations. The final purpose of the article is to investigate the relevance of gender issues in knowledge-based organizations including universities and firms and to provide a complete mapping of IC, gender equality and performance by identifying a rich set of indicators which integrate the existing literature both published in international peer-reviewed papers and in the grey literature, e.g. practical-based reports, produced within knowledge- intensive firms. We propose a map of the indicators grouped according to the three dimensions of the IC (human capital, structural capital, relational capital).

Concern for unsustainable development has reached its peak, and it is vital to promote and design sustainable production and consumption. Although there are many studies in different fields and many concepts such as sustainable supply chain, symbiotic industry, symbiotic marketing, and sustainable marketing concepts in literature, there is no holistic concept that will cover all of them. They usually have a narrow focus on industrial activity or only marketing strategy. Therefore, we propose the concept/model of Symbiotic Sustainable Marketing, which we believe can protect environmental, business, and consumer interests and needs. In the sense of sustainable marketing, we observed that most sub-concepts priority to either the environment or the business. These practices, which can sometimes be called green, eco-friendly, or environmentally conscious, can reflect on the consumer at an extra cost and may challenge the implementation of sustainable marketing strategies. This study provides an overview and examines the environmental and organizational developments that have contributed to the widespread acceptance of symbiotic sustainable marketing as a way of doing business. We reviewed essential articles in the literature by Scopus and Wos database. We proposed a new concept of sustainable marketing strategy that will be examined within a symbiotic relationship by the framework of a win-win for each side for the planet, profit, and people. In this vein, we compiled all related studies and a strategy and model presented to contribute to the sustainable marketing paradigm and guide entrepreneurs and business practitioners. Accordingly, all studies on Scopus and Web of Science that reviewed, strengths and weaknesses are pointed out, and a new conceptual model is presented that could be helpful for sustainable marketing.

This research aims to study the nature of the relationship between digitalization and organizational resilience (OR). Further, it examines the role of Knowledge Sharing (KS) as mediator of digitilazation and OR relationship. To investigate the conceptual framework, a quantitative approach has been adapted using Smart PLS 3.0. Based on the analysis of 264 valid responses using the Structural Equation Modeling approach (PLS-SEM), results showed that digitalization has a significant and positive impact on OR. KS was found playing significantly a mediating role in the relatioship between digitalization and OR. Furthermore, company size and years of experience were found to be significant moderators in the modeling of OR. Finally, findings showed that coefficients of determination of KS and OR were augmented based on unobserved heterogeneity analysis.

As one of the fastest growing industries in the world (R. Baggio, 2013), Tourism is a key player in sustainable development (Serra and Jakulin, 2006). Consistent with their role in the global economy, international and regional governments require organizations to transform the way they conduct their business towards sustainability outcomes (Chofreh et al. 2017). Specifically, firms are called to evolve the classic way of business, towards a model in which to develop, according to collective needs such as environmental and social sustainability (Meda, 2018) results consistent with the expectations of its stakeholders (Luthra and Mangla 2018). The present work, through an empirical survey conducted on several case studies with the combination of quantitative and qualitative data (Gummesson, 2017) useful to investigate the business models used by the parties involved, highlights the considerable development of business realities related to the tourism sector, specifically the sea, linked to sustainable business models. The selected firmss, although they have little capital, staff and, in some cases, even experience, strong of their link with a territory with high environmental value, show a growth almost stable over time, despite the difficulties presented by the global pandemic crisis. The sustainable business model of these firms is also distinguished by the digital innovation component. The use of digital technologies, and in particular social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, the website, and the possibility of booking online (in four cases out of five), it’s an essential tool for addressing what appears to be the target audience: foreign tourism.

In the current era, modern cities meet several challenges in providing citizens with an appropriate level of services to manage urban development. Knowledge management and digital transformation are recurrent themes in governments agendas and technologies support policymakers as well as enable citizens towards a knowledge and digital-based perspective. In other words, in the past few years, thanks to the digitization process, city administrations have been capable of ensuring transparency and participation in the decision. In such a context, open data represents a valuable trend to face the threats opposing urban development. They can significantly improve the effectiveness of local policies and the quality of life of citizens. Open data, publicly shared by modern cities, made this process possible. They allow researchers and private citizens to investigate matters related to public services, providing powerful insights for policymakers improving the shared value inside the city borders. This study investigates how the transportation sector has been affected by policymakers’ decisions during the period of lock-down established in the area of the metropolitan city of Rome. The data used for the purpose of the study are related to the car accidents that occurred before and during the pandemic emergency, provided by an open data initiative of the municipality of Rome. This research provides useful insights about how the Italian policymakers managed the crisis due to the pandemic emergency. Investigating how specific policies actually affect mobility represents a valuable point of comparison in managing comparable future crises. It also shows how it is possible to spread technology and data-oriented culture to lead to an actual improvement of the open data provided by public administrations in quantity as well as in quality. Thus, a technology and data- oriented culture can represent the indispensable base for open innovation to be applied to the Italian’s public services.

Today’s industry is fast-paced, dynamic and in a continuous process of evolution and change, like never seen before. This paper focuses mainly on the consumers’ behavioural shifts and questions how the global pandemic changed consumer preferences towards more sustainable and socially responsible businesses. As sustainability and accountability become a more urgent concern, brands need to escalate their efforts to reflect the customers’ values and beliefs since consumers more than ever want to know where materials come from, how products are made, and the working conditions of the people involved in the manufacturing are fair. The empirical research consisted of a mix-methods approach that included a survey performed on 227 Gen-Zers, extending previous studies on generational theory, a focus group, and an implicit association test (IAT). Results show that sustainability practices are very important for the samples’ perception of the brand (through rational thinking); however, the focus group and the IAT showed otherwise. Although sustainability practices remain pertinent, participants in the study demonstrated different behaviours according to the role they play in society, i.e. as individuals (moral values); or as consumers (mainly price and feeling of belonging).