Stakeholder Engagement – i.e. all the practices the organisation undertakes to involve stakeholders in a positive manner in organisational activities (Greenwood, 2007) is one of the main topics in the Stakeholder Management Theory (Freeman, 1984). According to Mainarder, Alves and Raposo (2012), stakeholder engagement is a bi-directional process that happens when both the company and its stakeholders accept to interact with each other to mutually (produce modular new knowledge) define their future behaviour and to become more relevant. As a consequence Stakeholder engagement involves cognitive, emotional, and behavioural aspects (Correia Luoreiro et al, 2020).
According to De Colle (2005), these practices should involve a broad set of heterogeneous stakeholders in order to create a positive generalized exchange producing innovation (Rowley, 1997; Surroca et al., 2010; Sciarelli and Tani, 2012).
These practices help companies in identifying the valuable stakeholders’ knowledge resources (Harrison et al., 2010; Aarikka-Stenroos et al., 2017) and improve their ability to plan and implement innovative entrepreneurial strategies collaboratively (Caputo et al., 2018; Tani, 2020).
If follows that stakeholder engagement processes are not only one of the ways companies may use to start developing new relationship, but they can be exploited to promote shared goals (Gould, 2012) with a positive influence on their value creation processes (Laursen & Salter, 2006; Noland & Phillips, 2010)
Several authors have highlighted how managers can leverage the interactions with the stakeholders to comprehend which resources are present in the stakeholder network (Tani, 2020). At the same time the more intensive practices of Stakeholder engagement help companies and communities to become more effective at innovative processes (Lopatta et al., 2017; Leonidou et al, 2020) when they are able to create an open innovation process to obtain new innovative ideas/feedback from their relevant stakehoders (Ayuso et al, 2011; Shams et al., 2020) and, at the same time, leveraging a broader knowledge set, they may use these processes to reduce the innovation-related risks (Wayne Gould, 2012).
As a consequence, management may use Stakeholder engagement practices to strengthen the organizational competencies and to become more effective at knowledge exploration, knowledge retention, and knowledge exploitation (Ayuso et al., 2006; Andriof and Waddock, 2017), three capabilities that are needed to get the most out of Open Innovation processes (Lichtenthaler & Lichtenthaler, 2009).
Today, stakeholder engagement has become a staple in several processes such as those to help the circular economy transition (Camilleri, 2020; Salvioni and Almici, 2020). Morever, companies may use digital platforms Bogers et al., 2019) to reduce the expenses linked to engage each stakeholder, becoming more effective at these processes as they can leverage a deeper and broader knowledge set (Viglia et al., 2018; Troise and Tani, 2021).
Still, research is needed to explore and determine how companies may become more effective at leveraging the stakeholder engagement practices as a source of external knowledge.
In particular, in this track we welcome empirical and theoretical papers on:

• Stakeholder Engagement and Knowledge Integration
• Engagement Practices in Digital Platforms
• Stakeholder Interaction in Networks
• Stakeholder Engagement and Circular Economy
• Stakeholders’ Networks, their engagement and Business Model Innovation
• Stakeholder Influences Strategies
• Open Innovation and Stakeholder Engagement
• Reverse Stakeholder Engagement
• Ecosystems and social innovation

Mario Tani, University of Naples Federico II,Italy
Gianpaolo Basile, University Mercatorum, Italy
Mohamed Gheith, Mansoura University, Egypt
Anna Prisco, University of Naples Federico II, Italy