This study explores the intricate landscape of knowledge risks, with a specific focus on knowledge loss and doubts within the context of Dutch public organizations. These often employ talented individuals selected through rigorous entrance tests and expect the recruits to make substantial contributions to knowledge. However, outcomes are usually disappointing. This empirical study hones on knowledge loss with a focus on knowledge doubts – a critical dimension that can either hinder or accelerate knowledge creation. Doubts may breed cynicism, impede progress. Conversely, doubts can serve as catalysts for acquiring and integrating new knowledge, fostering innovation. Considering this context, this interview-based qualitative study (n=20) explores the intricate mechanisms and dynamics that underlie both knowledge creation, knowledge loss/doubt within a public organization based in The Netherlands. Part of the findings align with existing literature, emphasizing that learning, innovation, and knowledge sharing are vital pillars supporting knowledge creation. However, the study also shows that when these mechanisms falter, they can inadvertently lead to knowledge loss—a consequence influenced by various underlying dynamics: organizational factors, personal drivers, digital tools, and managerial aspects. Results show that communities of practice emerge as critical enablers. These informal networks facilitate the delicate interplay between knowledge and knowing. Unfortunately, communities of practice are often underestimated and underutilized, hindering cross-boundary knowledge exchange. Doubt emerges as a dual-edged facilitator: (i) questioning established knowledge and recognizing superior insights propel innovation, while (ii) embracing doubt challenges the norm of unwavering uncertainty. By embracing doubt and nurturing collaborative spaces, public organizations can navigate the delicate balance between knowledge creation and preservation. By recognizing knowledge loss as the complementary counterpart to knowledge creation, this study contributes to a holistic understanding of organizational knowledge dynamics in public organizations.

This paper investigates knowledge sharing driven by innovative behaviour as it occurs throughout the innovation process within private label food producing companies. Innovative behaviour is supported by employees’ expectancies -or the eventual consequences of their actions- and value -or the extent to which the actions benefit their own interests. Literature seldom investigates an emic perspective on the issue and focuses on the dynamics existing between employees and their managers, let alone an etic perspective, meaning the value and dynamics existing between employees and other stakeholders. Employees from private labels firms struggle experiencing the value attached to innovation as they cannot identify their company brands in the market. Hence, the objective of this study is to gain an understanding of how employees from private label companies share knowledge that positively contribute to innovation and how value is shared along the process. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews (n=12) conducted with innovation and commercial managers from Dutch private-label food companies. Results show that the overall objective of the production process explained by respondent can be referred to as a holistic value-laden innovation that engages both innovation and commercial teams of employees. The whole process is carried by employees whose engagement is determined by their personal drive and organizational pride. These two elements act as a fuel that determine the quality and speed of the innovation journey. These founding features are instrumentalized or translated by a constant interaction between a (i) knowledge and value sharing strategy a (ii) knowledge base constant development/updating and (iii) a set of practices and dynamics supporting an innovation-driven knowledge and value sharing. Practitioner working in private label companies benefit from this study who enhances the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic emotional and attitudinal organizational pride and other factors motivating knowledge sharing processes conducive to innovation, processes driven by value-laden expectations. Ad hoc knowledge sharing strategies are recommended to obtain the best support from employees engaged in innovation.

Measurement of the process of management innovation (MI) is critical for both practitioners and academics, yet the literature is scarce and characterized by a diversity of approaches and practices that can be confusing and contradictory. The consequence is the absence of a clear and holistic framework covering the range of activities needed to identify a tool allowing to measure the level of managerial innovation in companies. We attempt to address this gap by reviewing the literature pertaining to the dimensions of MI as well as to propose a measurement instrument through the identification of a new MI index (MIINDEX). The paper offers a review of key publications on the proposed dimensions of MI and the scales used for their measurement that have been published in research journal within the last two decades. We first develop a critical analysis – primarily focused on the proposed dimensions of MI and the scales used for their measurement – which has enabled the development of an original tool for measuring MI. Secondly, by using survey data of 415 managers of the service sector from different companies in Italy, the validation of the MIINDEX was conducted. Internal consistency analysis (Cronbach’s alpha), used to test the statistical reliability of the tool, yielded satisfactory results. Our research results lead to a number of conclusions that enrich the current academic debate about MI and contribute to managerial and business practices. The proposed index (MIINDEX) can be used as a diagnostic tool to measure the level of managerial innovation, to assess its effectiveness, identify areas for improvement and compare it with other organizations, being either a given industry or companies of the same size. MIINDEX also enables the identification of the key dimensions in which significant MI takes place, fostering a deeper understanding of the correlations between MIINDEX and organizational performance.

In an increasingly dynamic and competitive business environment, the ability to innovate has become a crucial element for organizational survival and success. Compassion, defined as noticing, feeling, sensemaking and acting to alleviate the suffering of others, and resilience, understood as the ability to adapt and recover from adversity, are explored as predictors of employee innovativeness. Specifically, adopting a humanistic approach to human resource management, the research explore how compassion fosters increased innovativeness by enhancing resilience. Employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), data collected from 360 employees across various occupational sectors are analysed. Findings reveal a positive and significant relationship between compassion and resilience, as well as a positive association between resilience and innovativeness. Furthermore, resilience is found to mediate the relationship between compassion and innovativeness, suggesting that promoting a compassionate work environment can foster employees’ resilience, which in turn enhances their ability to generate and adopt new ideas and innovative approaches. From a pragmatic perspective, the study underscores the importance of cultivating work environments that prioritize compassion and resilience. By doing so, organizations can foster a positive workplace culture that encourages innovation. This research enriches management literature by offering empirical evidence on the crucial role of compassion in nurturing resilience and innovativeness, thereby advancing discussions on innovative and human-centric work environments.

This conceptual paper aims to identify and present the potential negative impact of employee withdrawal on knowledge sharing in organisations, in the post-pandemic work landscape. Employee withdrawal can be broadly defined as “a set of actions that employees perform to avoid the work situation – behaviours that may eventually culminate in quitting the organisation” (Hanisch and Hulin, 1990). According to Colquitt and Lepine (2013), withdrawal behaviours come in two forms, namely psychological and physical withdrawal. Psychological withdrawal includes behaviours named: daydreaming, socializing, looking busy, cyberloafing, and moonlighting. The second form, namely physical withdrawal, includes tardiness, long breaks, missing meetings, quitting, and absenteeism. Since an enormous amount of knowledge in an organisation is personalised, researching employee withdrawal behaviours is particularly critical in the context of knowledge management (Durst and Wilhelm, 2011; Zieba, Bolisani and Scarso, 2016). It is especially important to explore the impact of employee withdrawal on knowledge management processes, in the context of the changing character of employment, the evolving nature of work (hybrid, fully remote), and the rise in withdrawal behaviours brought on by post-pandemic times (International Labour Organization, 2022). A recent Gallup survey revealed that as of the second half of 2021, the percentage of disengaged and psychologically detached workers in the U.S. has steadily increased (Harter, 2022). In the face of the above, there is a clear need to investigate how different types of employee withdrawal behaviours may potentially hinder knowledge sharing. To realize this aim, the authors of this paper have analysed the literature both on withdrawal behaviours and knowledge sharing. This present paper contributes to the academic literature on employee withdrawal, knowledge management, and human resources management in general, and provides food for thought for managers and owners of the organizations.

The recent significant developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) have contributed to renewing the interest of knowledge management (KM) scholars in Artificial Intelligence. In fact, the latest GAI tools, like ChatGPT or CoPilot, can process extremely large and varied sets of unstructured data and perform different tasks, such as classifying data, reading and writing texts, composing music, and developing software code. These tools already play a role in knowledge management by automating the generation of content and solutions. By harnessing GAI, knowledge management processes might become more efficient, scalable, and adaptive to the needs of organizations and users. In spite of this, studies on the use of GAI as a KM tool are still scarce, and there is a need to collect more empirical evidence about this phenomenon. This study intends to improve our understanding of GAI’s use in KM by investigating how software developers use such tools in their knowledge generation process, i.e., to create new software code. The case of software developers was chosen because they are currently among the main adopters of this technology, and the first studies about the use of GAI in software development are already available. Furthermore, while software developers used to reach out to fellow developers on forums like StackOverflow, they now rely more on GAI for help with coding. The study, which, given the novelty of the topic, followed an exploratory approach, is based on interviews with 11 developers coming from 8 different countries and having different backgrounds and experiences with GAI. We found that the interviewees liked the benefits of solving simpler programming tasks efficiently and rapidly. However, GAI requires expertise to review and modify the code and write the right prompts, as well as to evaluate the reliability of the output provided. The study also revealed that knowledge exchange with fellow programmers is partly, but not fully, exchanged with GAI, as it is more efficient. Furthermore, interviewees think that AI could become in the future a new member of the development team. Nevertheless, they also underline that continuous learning, adaptation, and ethical consideration are needed to fully realize the benefits of these powerful tools in software development.

The paper aims to investigate the evolution of women’s participation in financial research over the last decade. To this end, the research moves on threefold streams: (1) female authorship of scientific articles on finance, (2) the gender gap in authorship and (3) female participation in articles in more impactful articles. The research is supported by the quantitative methodology of bibliometrics analysis. We used a unique dataset of 10,457 academic articles published in 250 scientific journals by 26,858 (co)authors. The data were obtained from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core Collection database. Subsequently, the gender of the 26,858 (co)authors was determined to determine the role of women in financial research. The findings show that over the last decade female authors in finance articles averaged around 22%. However, at the beginning of the period (2014) women accounted for 20.1% of (co)authors, while at the end of the period (2023) their representation has reached 26.7%. Consequently, this has reduced the gender gap from 59.8% to 46.5%. Despite the evidence of the gender gap during the sample period (2014-2023), we also found that the situation of women in academia is improving. These results are still far from gender balance (40:60%) or gender parity (50%:50%), thus showing an under-representation (<40%) of female authorship in finance research. This study contributes to gender studies and financial literature, as well as supporting the gender equality debate linked to SDGs 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls) and SDGs 10 (Reduce inequality within and among countries). Our study, unlike previous works, does not limit the analysis to one type of journal (e.g., leading journals), to a reduced period (usually less than 10 years) or to a specific country (usually the USA), but proposes a broader approach by considering articles published on finance in international academic journals during the last decade. The main limitation of this paper it could be recognized in the use of binomial variable for determining gender (female vs. male) with the objective to restrict the focus of the analysis, given the scarcity in the availability of data on the gender variable. Future lines of work could advance towards the inclusion of non-binary gender in the analysis of gender authorship in this field, although this would require recognizing the need to use smaller samples given the difficulty involved.

Despite the increasing attention on gender diversity and equality as drivers of competitive advantage, they are still scarcely investigated with reference to sustainability and integrated reports. Research focusing on the quality and the relevance of information provided in non-financial disclosure addresses broader ESG aspects and mainly focuses on the drivers for reporting such as being compliant with the law, legitimize operations, get access to capital or other resources. In addition, it is still not clear whether the journey of sustainability reporting is able to foster coherent internal changes that enhance sustainability actions. In order to better understand whether a novel sustainability reporting process may function as a tool that internalizes and disseminates the external pressures for greater commitment to gender equality, this work analyses the case of a small-sized Italian companies that is strongly devoted to empower its female workforce and spread the culture of gender equality. The case study describes the progressive reporting journey of the company that initially prepared an impact assessment (as benefit corporation) and now discloses its integrated report since 2020. Processes and actions necessary for preparing the report favored greater knowledge and strategic awareness on how companies may create multiple values for different stakeholders. The reporting process helped the company to think holistically and put adequate attention to all stakeholders, and in particular implement gender equality projects and strategies dedicated to employees and suppliers.

The issue of gender is becoming increasingly important both in the business and academic realms, where researchers highlight its potential influence on market structure. It is in the 21st century when women gain visibility in academic studies, marking a shift in the representation of women in economic and marketing studies. This study is motivated first of all by previous experimental research on the impact of organizational rules on women’s participation motivation in scientific tournaments and is based on the premise supported by numerous studies that women have a distinct way of perceiving and transforming the world. Secondly, evidence suggests that there are differences between women and men in business characteristics, such as experience, motivation, entrepreneurial skills, and conflict resolution approaches, and a greater sensitivity towards sustainable entrepreneurship has The main objective of this study is to analyze the evolution of the gender variable in research conducted between 1950 and 2024, focusing on the treatment of entrepreneurship in academic literature. It aims to understand if the evolution of the role of women influences the structure of purchasing and sales processes in business environments. This translates into examining the active or passive role of women in the motivational factors of the market, specifically in the context of gender and sustainability. To conduct this study, a documentary research approach has been employed, using longitudinal analysis. The results indicate the growing interest in the study of women’s decision-making in the business sphere. Likewise, the role they play in making such decisions influences the outcomes of market structure, both on the supply and demand sides. This is reflected in sustainable entrepreneurship projects, where women show greater motivation than men. Furthermore, it is evident that knowledge and attitude are variables influencing their empowerment, and the inclusion of women has led to the development of new, more sustainable markets. Additionally, there is sufficient evidence to believe that these structural differences in entrepreneurship between men and women could be the origin of what is known as the “glass ceiling,” which influences women’s leadership positions.

Should managers be more trained in the topic of diversity? Must they develop specific skills and competences? Which strengths and weaknesses regarding diversity management do managers have? A qualitative investigation tried to answer these questions. Around 70 interviews with managers and employees of large DAX companies were conducted. It could be shown that there are tensions between self-perception and perception of others and the assessment of the significance of diversity attitudes and measures, competences, and their actual implementation. These findings suggest that there is the need to train competences, in particular intercultural competence.

The objective of this article is to provide a succinct overview of the current research trend regarding women’s participation in high-tech businesses, as well as an analysis of the opportunities and obstacles that have been looked at in earlier studies. After conducting a thorough search for scientific articles in the Scopus database using a Boolean equation to filter 398 articles published from 2000 to 2023, a bibliometric analysis was performed. The findings indicate that the state of art consistently demonstrates the challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in comparison to their male counterparts in securing funding and credibility. Research on the perceived traits of women in the context of business and the economy is, in fact, becoming more and more popular. In order to mitigate the identified disparities and encourage the participation of women in technology-related business environments, this interest focuses on significant aspects like willingness to take risks, innovation, creativity, teamwork, and leadership styles from the perspective of various actors involved in the development of ventures, such as investors and government programs. This article places emphasis on high tech female entrepreneurship through a bibliometric analysis to visualize gender disparities and proposed new alternatives to reduces the gaps and promote equality.

Over the past decade, the rise of digital platforms has significantly transformed business landscapes, prompting numerous firms to adopt platform-centric models. These models thrive on the inherent network effects that facilitate consumer interactions and leverage direct network externalities. The development of two-sided platforms, where distinct customer groups interact through a platform, exemplifies this trend, evolving into multisided platforms that broaden their ecosystem and enhance value creation. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into these platforms has accelerated their significance, enhancing scalability and global reach. This study focuses on the intersection of AI and two or multi-sided platforms, using ChatGPT as a case study to explore the evolution of its business model within the platform thinking framework. It highlights Artificial Intelligence’s potential to transform business models towards a more interconnected, platform-based approach, emphasizing the strategic shift in value creation and customer engagement. This research contributes to understanding the long-term impact of Artificial Intelligence on platform-based business models, underscoring the importance of strategic integration of AI for sustainable growth and market adaptability.

This paper builds on the relatively underexplored yet increasingly intriguing domain of ignorance, a topic that is garnering interest within the academic community. Traditional crisis management often relies on existing knowledge, creating a restricted view of crisis nature and organizational reality. This approach can miss insights from recognizing and understanding the unknown. This paper employs a mixed-methods approach comprising a literature review, interviews, and a Security Café workshop to examine social media’s role in sensemaking in different crisis stages (anticipating, responding, and recovering). The paper’s findings highlight two main contributions: First, it redefines ignorance not just as a void of information but as a pivotal element affecting decision-making during crises. Strategic use of social media is presented as a means for public authorities to manage ignorance by improving their sensemaking processes. This involves the active gathering, verification, and dissemination of information, utilizing social media as a tool for early warning and analysing public sentiment. Second, the paper illustrates how social media serves as a dynamic platform for building trust, fostering public engagement, and combating misinformation before, during, and after a crisis, thereby enhancing public authorities’ capacity to respond to rapidly evolving situations. The paper concludes by advocating a proactive stance in managing ignorance through social media, emphasizing the importance of strategic communication planning, fostering public trust, and collaborative knowledge creation to anticipate and respond to crises effectively.

Performance measurement and management represents a strategic system employed by public sectors to assess outcomes for public organisations and aid decision-making processes. Despite the contributions of numerous management scholars to the scientific literature on healthcare, there remains a notable gap in understanding how the healthcare sector develops these systems for outcome management. Through an exploratory case study conducted within a leading health service, this paper endeavors to shed light on the development of performance measurement and management systems for outcome management. Initial findings reveal a sophisticated performance measurement and management system tailored to support decision-makers, facilitating the monitoring of healthcare services delivered by Italian public and accredited private hospitals. It assists in programmatic, organisational, and at times clinical decision-making processes, while also promoting audit activities and timely corrective measures. This paper enhances understanding of these key systems, however, it should be viewed as a first foundation for future research in this area. Future research may compare the design, implementation, and use of different national outcome programs.

Healthcare systems in many countries are under pressure for renewal due, for instance, to demographic changes or service delivery fragmentation. This paper focuses on organizational capacities for change by illustrating knowledge, processes, and resources needed for implementing healthcare reforms at the meso-level organizations. We examine these capacities in the empirical context of the Finnish healthcare reform to find out how the reform goal of fostering social impact in policy documents is expected to be operationalized and managed in the newly established “Wellbeing Services Counties”. In our paper, we present four organizational capacities for making social impact: 1) systematic use of effectiveness information in knowledge management, 2) holistic evaluation and measurement system supporting for managing effectiveness, 3) effectiveness as a key principle in resource allocation, and 4) translation of reform policy objectives into organizational goals. However, to achieve the goals and understand the desired change at the level of organizational action, collective sensemaking of social impact would be needed in aligning different interpretations and effective organizational practices. We call for more collective knowledge formation processes in transforming reform objectives into organizational activities to make a social impact.

This position paper explores the emergence and transformative impact of generative artificial intelligence and projects how organizations can adapt by optimizing their knowledge management for generative artificial intelligence integration. As a continuum to the data-driven age that has soared since the 2010s, generative artificial intelligence provides organizations with new opportunities to reap benefits by systematically processing and combining their unstructured data to gain a better understanding of what they know, which potentially leads them to make better informed, more consistent, and quicker decisions. Generative artificial intelligence models, especially Large Language Models, stand apart from other artificial intelligence models that merely predict or classify, by being capable of processing text-based data as its input and generating novel data as its output. Organization-specific generative artificial intelligence models can process unstructured data from various organizational sources, allowing the organization’s personnel to know significantly more about the organization’s proprietary knowledge, which could revolutionize knowledge work. To reap the potential benefits of generative artificial intelligence, organizations must be prepared to go beyond the simple acquisition of this new technology. In essence, the relevant information must be first identified, captured, organized, stored, and finally served for the organization-specific generative artificial intelligence model. Knowledge management may find itself in a driver’s position in this regard, as its academic and practitioner communities have explored for over three decades how organizations could identify and efficiently manage their key knowledge resources to create intra and extra-organizational value. For instance, the knowledge processes and knowledge management practices subsets of literature provide strong foundations for managers responsible for planning the steps organizations must take to re-assess and develop their knowledge management capability for generative artificial intelligence.

This paper examines the potential of Synthetic Users (SyU) as a possible alternative or supplement to conventional human surveys in the area of innovative product or service development. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) can be an invaluable technology for companies and creative businesses during the “Eureka phase” and in testing, economic analysis, development, and manufacturing. GenAI can rapidly answer hundreds of questions without causing fatigue, creating rapid feedback and making it a cost-effective alternative to human testing (Aher et al., 2023). The deployment of SyU promises a more efficient business world, offering benefits such as predictive and cultural insights, and faster iteration, contributing to a deeper understanding of the emotional drivers behind user behaviours. SyU could be an innovative approach that blurs the boundaries between qualitative and quantitative investigation by allowing researchers to gain rich insights and leverage large-scale data, lowering biases in human interactions, observer-expectancy effects, emphasizing the importance of diverse data, objective questioning, and regular evaluation (Santurkar, S. et al., 2023). Finally, while conducting a survey again under identical conditions in the real world is not always feasible, in the synthetic realm it is possible to improve the LLMs approach through a recent technique known as “self-refinement” (selfrefine.info), based on an iterative algorithm, punctuated by two moments, feedback and refinement, that result in higher quality output and a more structured process. (Maadan et al., 2023) After reviewing the current state of the art, the article explores the potential of Large Language models (LLMs) to simulate human-like interactions and judgments through a real case. One company, Syntheticusers.com, based on GPT-4, has been selected to test the comparison between human participants and SyU in evaluating an immersive museum experience within a 5G-focused project led by the University of Turin. Our results suggest that scientists study the right mix of humans and artificial intelligence, rather than focusing on whether artificial intelligence will replace humans.

Through the lens of Digital Humanism and technological singularity, the study critically examines the role of dynamic capabilities (DCs) of Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) and their influence on triggering digitalisation and accelerating technological convergence through clients and employees. This is evaluated by employing a single case study approach of a multi-award-winning technology solution company, namely Kubenet, based in Scotland. Their partners are Cisco and Microsoft to guarantee global access to clients’ applications. They own the ‘next generation network’ which allows flexibility, safety, and resilience supported by ISO, ITiL and Cyber Essentials accreditations. The analysis of the Kubenet has allowed us to notice that CDOs assume a relevant role in disseminating the principle of digital humanism which even if the technologies are completely in the organizational settings, human skills still have a central role in the whole organizational life. Creativity and innovation cannot be replaced by technologies which denote an integration of digital humanism accompanied by technology singularity.

The study delves into the nuanced dynamics of attachment within the context of music artists and their fans, extending the discourse to parallelisms with attachment to other mediums like brands and products. Drawing from the premise that human beings inherently seek attachments for psychological well-being and social belonging, this research broadens the scope of attachment beyond interpersonal relationships to include connections with creative products and personal “heroes” like music artists. Specifically, the paper aims to identify the factors shaping the relationship between fans and artists. The research employs an inductive approach through qualitative interviews with regular music listeners. Moreover, it also involves netnographic analysis of online fan communities. In terms of findings, the research identifies key dimensions shaping the fans-artists bond: emotionality, identity, sociality, and the perception of music. The study’s findings illuminate the multifaceted nature of attachment in the digital age, revealing diverse modes of fan engagement ranging from deeply emotional and identity-driven connections to more casual, background interactions with music. A key contribution of this study lies in the development of a fan taxonomy based on varying degrees and modes of attachment, offering new insights into consumer behaviour in the creative sectors.

By using the concept of harmony, this paper aims to contribute to the existing literature about joint value creation processes and practices diminishing the risk of trade-offs in the tourism sector. The study focuses on the role of the most strategic resource, namely knowledge, as a common and collaborative input created in the context of an imperative and strategic relational equilibrium among stakeholders for a long-term sustainability.