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Given the limited understanding of the process of transgenerational entrepreneurship and that knowledge is a fundamental antecedent of entrepreneurial endeavors, this study aims to shed light on how entrepreneurial families (EFs) nurture entrepreneurship across generations, which knowledge is required within the EF to spur new entrepreneurial activities, and how is this knowledge acquired.

Considering the paucity of empirical evidence on the topic under investigation and the related exploratory nature of this study, the authors adopted a qualitative approach by conducting a case study on an Italian wine-making family business.

The case analysis reveals that EF members are required to acquire different types of knowledge at different generational stages to spur new entrepreneurial activities, specifically technical knowledge in the second generation and business knowledge in the third generation. Moreover, the data analysis shows two mechanisms, namely, trust among generations and role separation, that, during both generational transitions, enabled and empowered the younger generations to exploit their knowledge to explore entrepreneurial opportunities and engage in new entrepreneurial activities.

This study provides novel insights into the role of knowledge in transgenerational entrepreneurship, particularly looking at knowledge acquired by EF members across generations. Accordingly, this research contributes to the literature streams of transgenerational entrepreneurship, knowledge management in family businesses and broader knowledge management research.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review of the adoption of immersive marketing technology (IMT) in terms of strategic planning of its adoption, resource requirements and its implications and challenges.

This study categorizes and contextualizes qualitative approaches to evaluate the literature, with Scopus databases serving as the primary source of 90 selected articles in the areas of information technology, business and marketing strands. Theme analysis was carried out using thematic techniques and grounded approach principles to facilitate thematic coding and generate theme analysis.

The analysis was supported by the three concepts of business flexibility, agility and adaptability, which were drawn as a strategy for IMT adoption. The findings presented three main themes: proactive flexibility, responsive agility and reactive adaptability that enable business owner–managers to craft a strategy for IMT adoption.

The novel contribution of this study is the inclusion of key implications related to IMT as a starting point of the next level of innovative marketing for all academics, practitioners and business owner–managers.

While existing literature extensively explores manufacturing firms expanding into services, little is known about the modes of servitisation, the means by which they carry it out. This paper concentrates on acquisitions as a mode of servitisation. Post-acquisition integration is when the potential of an acquisition is realised. The paper therefore aims to categorise types of integrations following the acquisition of servitised firms and discusses their consequences for servitisation.

The empirical part of the paper is based on two case studies, each involving the acquisition of servitised firms. Both acquirers changed their integration approach over time.

The paper conceptualises three types of integrations: rhetorical, insulated and transformative integrations, indicating whether and how the acquirer becomes servitised following the integration. These highlight the analysis of integration based on business models and customer orientation in relation to servitisation.

This paper contributes to research on servitisation by emphasising acquisitions as a mode of servitisation and conceptualising three integration types related to business models and customer orientations. Furthermore, the paper highlights how an acquirer's servitisation leads to new offerings targeting new customers, as opposed to strengthening existing relationships.

This study aims to solve the realistic dilemma between the importance of entrepreneurship and the high rate of entrepreneurial failure, and to point out the direction of subsequent research.

The paper takes the form of a literature review.

Entrepreneurial activities involve multiple dimensions. Entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial teams will be affected by multiple factors when starting a business, and sufficient attention should be paid to both the factors within the group and the factors outside the group such as institutional quality and market competition. High entrepreneurial failure rate is an essential characteristic of entrepreneurial activities, while solving this problem requires entrepreneurs to maintain passion, clarify their own motivation, improve their learning abilities and adopt appropriate entrepreneurial strategies to improve entrepreneurial performance. Meanwhile, it also urgent to build entrepreneurial teams with common goals, heterogeneous knowledge structure, outstanding learning ability, solid mutual trust, strong social influence and social capital. Successful entrepreneurship should adhere to the perspective of openness and cooperation. It should not only actively strengthen international cooperation but also fully adapt to the country’s system and culture. Sustainable growth of entrepreneurial enterprises requires not only stable commercial revenue but also responsibility to society, which in turn leads to a good reputation and high social recognition.

The authors hope this review can provide some insightful viewpoints for deepening the theoretical system of entrepreneurship, improving the success rate of entrepreneurship and promoting the sustainable growth of enterprises.

Further research can be carried out on the promotion of business growth by entrepreneurship at the micro level in the following aspects: analyze functional mechanism between innovation and entrepreneurship; entrepreneurship research by integrating multiple institutional contexts and cultural traditions; consider the changes in emerging technologies on entrepreneurial activities; diversified mechanism between entrepreneurship education and business growth.

Business Model Innovation is increasingly created by an ecosystem of related companies. This paper aims to investigate the transition of a manufacturing ecosystem toward electric vehicles from a business model perspective.

The authors investigate an automotive manufacturing ecosystem that is in transition toward electric and electrified vehicles, conducting semi-structured interviews with 46 informants from 27 ecosystem members.

The results reveal that the actions of several ecosystem members are driven by regulations relating to emissions. Novel requirements regarding components and complementary offers necessitate the entry of actors from other industries and the formation of new ecosystem members. While the newly emerged ecosystem has roots in an established ecosystem, it relies on new value offers. Further, the findings highlight the importance of ecosystem governance, while the necessary degree of change in the members' business models depends on their roles and positions in the ecosystem. Therefore, upstream suppliers of components must perform business model adaptation, whereas downstream providers must perform more complex business model innovation.

The paper is among the first to investigate an entire manufacturing ecosystem and analyze its transition toward electric vehicles and the implications for business model innovation.

Recognizing novel entrepreneurial opportunities arising from a crisis is of paramount importance for firms. Hence, understanding the pivotal factors that facilitate firms in this endeavor holds significant value. This study delves into such factors within a representative empirical context impacted by a crisis, drawing insights from existing literature on opportunity recognition during such tumultuous periods.

The authors conducted a qualitative inspection of 14 Italian firms during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The authors collected a rich body of multi-source qualitative data, including 34 interviews (with senior managers and entrepreneurs) and secondary data (press releases, videos, web interviews, newspapers, reports and academic articles) in two phases (March–August 2020 and September–December 2020).

The results suggest the existence of a process model of opportunity recognition during crises based on five entrepreneurial influencing factors (entrepreneurial knowledge, entrepreneurial alertness, entrepreneurial proclivity, entrepreneurial personality and entrepreneurial purpose).

Various scholars have highlighted that, in times of crises, it is not easy and indeed very challenging for entrepreneurs to identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities. However, recent research has shown that crises can also positively impact entrepreneurs and their capacity to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities. Given these findings, not much research has analyzed the process by which entrepreneurs identify novel entrepreneurial opportunities during crises. This study shows that some entrepreneurial influencing factors are very important to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities during crises.

This study aims to explore how to overcome and address the loss of exploratory innovation, thereby achieving greater success in exploratory innovation. This phenomenon of loss occurs when enterprises decrease their investment in and engagement with exploratory innovation, ultimately leading to an insufficient amount of such innovation efforts. Drawing on dynamic capabilities, this study investigates the relationship between organizational foresight and exploratory innovation and examines the moderating role of breakthrough orientation/financial orientation.

This study used survey data collected from 296 Chinese high-tech companies in multiple industries and sectors.

The evidence produced by this study reveals that three elements of organizational foresight (i.e. environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and integrating capabilities) positively influence exploratory innovation. Furthermore, this positive effect is strengthened in the context of a high-breakthrough orientation. Moreover, the relationships among environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and exploratory innovation become weaker as an enterprise’s financial orientation increases, whereas a strong financial orientation does not affect the relationship between integrating capabilities and exploratory innovation.

Ambidexterity is key to successful enterprise innovation. Compared with exploitative innovation, it is by no means easy to engage in exploratory innovation, which is especially important in high-tech companies. While the loss of exploratory innovation has been observed, few empirical studies have explored ways to promote exploratory innovation more effectively. A key research implication of this study pertains to the role of organizational foresight in the improvement of exploratory innovation in the context of high-tech companies.

This paper contributes to the broader literature on exploratory innovation and organizational foresight and provides practical guidance for high-tech companies regarding ways of avoiding the loss of exploratory innovation and becoming more successful at exploratory innovation.

The research study provides empirical insights on the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership (EL), entrepreneurial passion for founding (EPF), entrepreneurial bricolage (EB) and project success (PS), in the case of freelancers. The study aims to get a better understanding of whether freelancers, who behave like entrepreneurial leaders, can successfully complete projects through EB.

The study collected data from 209 freelancers through snowball sampling, in two waves, with a time-lag of fourteen days, to better examine the causality of variables. Data were analyzed by Model No. 4 and 7 (i.e. mediation and moderation, respectively) of Process macro.

Drawing on the effectuation theory, the results show that EB mediates the relationship between EL and PS and EPF moderates this relationship.

The freelancers can formally establish businesses later, after knowing whether they can complete these new types of projects. These online freelancing platforms can provide special services to freelancers who first want to test their skills on unrelated projects. In sum, the paper suggests that freelancers can be successful entrepreneurial leaders.

The EL, EPF, EB and PS are studied in the context of the informal sector, i.e. freelancing, which is the emerging working style in the world. It provides an in-depth understanding of phenomena in freelancers that lacks background literature.

Quality management (QM) can support organisations in contributing to sustainable development. As a result of an expanding focus from customers towards stakeholders within QM, the perspectives to consider multiply. Understanding how practices and tools for process management are specifically affected by this increase in perspectives is key to creating the right conditions for improvement initiatives that support sustainable development.

This paper constructs a typology wherein the use of process management practices and tools is described in nine distinguished system contexts. Inductive discrimination is used to differentiate the system contexts and different use cases for process practices and tools.

Using the system of systems grid (SOSG), mainstream business process management (BPM) practices are positioned in a simple unitary context, whilst sustainability challenges also involve more complex contexts. Addressing these challenges requires integrating new tools and methods from paradigms outside of traditional functionalist business process management practices.

This paper highlights the necessity to consider system contexts when developing feasible practices and tools for effective process management.

Practical implications are that quality practitioners aiming to exploit the potential in process management to support sustainability get support for planning and conducting process improvement initiatives aiming to consider several stakeholder perspectives.

This paper presents a new typology for understanding the context of QM process initiatives and BPM in light of a contemporary sustainability focus.

The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature regarding the open innovation management approaches that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can use to access digital technologies and incorporate them into their organizational processes. The research question is: What organizational and process-level managerial actions do SMEs take to successfully access and implement digital technologies within their organizational processes?

Using Guertler et al.'s (2020) Action Innovation Management Research (AIM-R) framework, this study examines the digital transformation experiences of 10 European SMEs to gain insights into the managerial actions that foster successful digital transformation.

The findings of the paper reveal two major contributions. First, a digital transformation roadmap for SMEs is proposed, with a focus on accessing external resources and reconfiguring internal ones to ease their digital transformation journey. Second, three distinct paradoxes that influence the digital transformation process in SMEs are highlighted, providing useful insights into the challenges and tensions SMEs face during this journey.

This paper provides a unique perspective on the digital transformation of SMEs by examining the managerial actions required for successful technology adoption and revealing the paradoxes that may emerge during this transformative process. The findings form the basis for future research, deepening our understanding of digital transformation in SMEs and providing actionable advice to managers and practitioners navigating this journey.