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Research shows peer health education programs on university campuses can support students in pursuing sustainable health-related behavior changes. However, few programs deliver peer health education through a nondiet, weight-inclusive framework. Research shows that health educators who challenge the status quo of diet culture and weight-focused health interventions may face unique challenges when sharing this perspective with others. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of peer educators who provided critical health education by introducing a nondiet, weight-inclusive approach to health.

Five health coaches from a university health coaching program at a mid-sized southwestern university participated in a semi-structured interview. The data were analyzed through interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Peer educators faced numerous challenges when introducing nondiet, weight-inclusive approaches such as lacking credibility as a peer to challenge weight-centric messages, feeling conflicted about honoring clients’ autonomy when clients are resistant to a weight-inclusive approach and feeling uncomfortable when discussing client vulnerabilities. Peer educators also identified several strategies that helped them navigate these challenges such as being intentional with social media, using motivational interviewing to unpack clients’ concerns about weight, and seeking group supervision.

Given the reality that health coaches will face challenges sharing weight-inclusive health approaches, educators and supervisors should explicitly incorporate strategies and training methods to help peer health coaches prepare for and cope with such challenges. More research is also needed to examine effective ways to introduce weight-inclusive approaches to college students.

Tracking trends in new technology funding patterns is essential for venture scaling. The emerging advanced digital technologies (ADT) such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and Internet-of-things (IoT) promote business innovation adaptations, and in turn, reshape the industrial landscape. To attract nascent funding for such prospective projects among the public, well-articulated project pitches that are equipped with effective marketing communication convey the projects' importance and marketability. Specifically, when the entrepreneurs and the crowdfunding platform users interact via different types of crowdfunding platforms, pitch framing, including the signaling of ADT terms, project location and fundraising goal, becomes imperative to help facilitate crowdfunding success.

Drawing on data collected from six leading US-based equity and reward-based crowdfunding platforms in 2020, an empirical study was performed. Using the text analysis approach, the authors examined the positive effects of incorporating technology orientation on crowdfunding success. While the effect between the project description's signaling of geographic location, fundraising goal and articulation style on fundraising success, while controlling for project and platform characteristics.

The results suggested that the technology-orientated projects are more likely to achieve better fundraising outcomes. Taking crowdfunding platform types, project locations, minimum fundraising goals and articulation with analytical and authentic into consideration, the results still hold.

Building on the theoretical framework of signaling theory, the authors consider the crowdfunding-specific contextual factors to enhance the understanding of the positivity impact of technology orientation. By such addition, it facilitates more effective strategic composition of entrepreneurs' fundraising conversations.

This study aims to explore how source type can influence organizational assets proposed by source credibility theory (SCT) when paired with matched situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) strategies for accidental, preventable, and victim crises. Crisis communication delivered online provides an invaluable outlet for organizations to disperse information to stakeholders quickly. It has been shown that receivers of this information have motivational assumptions about sources having their own agenda for producing content. Thus, it is important to explore how sources tasked with delivering crisis responses can influence perceptions of the sincerity and credibility of the message.

The researchers conducted a 3 (crisis response: matched accidental, matched preventable, matched victim) × 3 (source type: organization, CEO, The New York Times) online between-subjects experimental design (N = 623).

By identifying how the source disseminating crisis responses influences message perceptions, findings from this study recognize how the crisis response is situated in a greater context. Since perceived sincerity and credibility were found to influence message acceptance and reputation, making intentional decisions that acknowledge both within a crisis communication strategy may benefit both future practice and research applications.

The current study advances understandings afforded by SCCT, along with SCT, by experimentally testing the influence of these variables within crisis responses on outcomes such as account acceptance and organizational reputation.

The purpose of this study is to examine how crowdfunding backer perceptions of market orientation and foreignness impact crowdfunding performance in emerging economies.

Using content analysis software, the authors analyzed 756 Kickstarter campaign narratives from the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa for the period between 2009 and 2019.

The authors’ results show that behavioral market orientation signals are positively related to amounts raised while decision criteria signals are negatively related. The authors also find that foreign entrepreneur status interacts with the two market orientations to impact funding amounts.

When creating crowdfunding campaigns in emerging economies, domestic entrepreneurs should use high levels of behavioral market orientation rhetoric but low levels of decision criteria rhetoric within their campaign narratives.

This study unpacks the components of market orientation and examines their positive and negative effects on crowdfunding success in the context of emerging economies.

In this study, the authors explore students' and industry’s perceptions about the challenges and opportunities of participating in a large-scale, non-compulsory, individual, in-person and unpaid business placement programme at an Australian university. The placement programme aims to support students' workplace transition by emphasising the development of key employability skills through reflective learning and linking theory to practice.

Utilising a case study methodology and integrating survey questionnaires, the authors collected both quantitative and qualitative data with large sample sizes.

The results highlight curriculum areas for improvement, emphasising tailored feedback to manage placement expectations and addressing employability skill strengths and weaknesses.

Recommendations include co-partnering with students to develop short, tailored and hot tip videos along with online learning modules, including the presentation of evidence-based statistics to inform students about post-programme employment prospects.

The study contributes to benchmarking good practices in non-compulsory, individual, in-person and unpaid placement pedagogy within the business education context.

Fierce competition in the crowdfunding market has resulted in high failure rates. Owing to their dedication and efforts, many founders have relaunched failed campaigns as a second attempt. Despite the need for a better understanding, the success of campaign relaunches has not been well-researched. To fill this research gap, this study first theorizes how founders’ learning may enhance their competencies and influence investors’ attribution of entrepreneurial failure. The study then empirically documents the extent and conditions under which such learning efforts impact campaign relaunch performance.

This study examines 5,798 Kickstarter-relaunched campaigns. The founders’ learning efforts are empirically captured by key changes in campaign design that deviate from past business practices. Word movers’ distances and perceptual hashing algorithms (pHash) are used separately to measure differences in campaign textual descriptions and pictorial designs.

Differences in textual descriptions and pictorial designs during campaign failure–relaunch are positively associated with campaign relaunch success. The impacts are further amplified when the previous failures are more severe.

This study is one of the first to examine the success of a campaign relaunch after an initial failure. This study contributes to a better understanding of founders’ learning in crowdfunding contexts and provides insights into the strategies founders can adopt to reap performance benefits.

In the context of rewards-based crowdfunding, this study aims to examine the role of project backers as providers of knowledge inputs beyond just financial capital.

This study uses binomial regression to study the relationship between project creators’ and backers’ knowledge sharing, and the relationship of these two knowledge-sharing elements with achieving above-goal funding levels.

This study finds that the project creator’s knowledge sharing is significantly and positively related to backers’ knowledge sharing and that this relationship is moderated by the type of project. Furthermore, backers’ knowledge sharing is positively related to above-goal funding outcomes for a project.

This study established the link between creators’ and backers’ knowledge sharing in rewards-based crowdfunding, which has been underexplored in the literature. This study’s direct attention to the role of knowledge as a key resource in rewards-based crowdfunding and crowdsourcing in general.

For entrepreneurs seeking crowdfunding, this study highlights the importance of knowledge sharing with their project backers to attain above-goal funding. Furthermore, eliciting backers’ knowledge input acts as a signaling mechanism that increases the crowd’s confidence in the project. It also endows entrepreneurs with knowledge resources that can improve project outcomes and achieve broader market success postcrowdfunding.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to focus on knowledge content as a critical element in project backer-creator communication in rewards-based crowdfunding. This study also delineate the various knowledge types shared between the project creator and backers in both rewards-based crowdfunding projects.

Crowdfunding platforms are important innovations that allow nascent entrepreneurs to gain access to financial resources and crowd inputs to better refine and develop their business idea. The purpose of this paper is to investigate user-generated content (UGC) from both reward-based and equity-based crowdfunding platforms, in order to determine its implications for open and user innovation.

A total sample of 200 most funded technology products was extracted from four distinct crowdfunding platforms. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis was performed in an attempt to identify critical latent factors. The analysis was carried out through the theoretical lens of innovation literature, in an attempt to uncover the implications for open and user innovation.

The authors were able to highlight the implications of crowd inputs for open and user innovation, as backers provided nascent entrepreneurs with several types of feedback, ranging from product co-development to strategy and marketing. Furthermore, the study provided an overview of the key differences emerging between reward-based and equity-based crowdfunding platforms in terms of crowd inputs.

The present study features intrinsic limitations of the LDA approach being adopted. More specifically, it only provides a “snapshot” in time of the current sample, rather than investigating its development over time.

The present study solidifies the value of UGC as a resource to mine for trends and feedback.

The study contributes to both the innovation literature and the crowdfunding literature. It bridges several gaps found in both literature streams, by providing empirical evidence to test and verify pre-existing exploratory research.

The present study aims to assess the effect of barriers and knowledge sharing facilitators on organisational innovation in Iraq. Fundamentally, this paper seeks to answer “whether knowledge sharing can improve organisational innovation in firms listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange”.

For the study, the research method is practical, in the form of an objective and descriptive survey. The study sample includes all financial managers of manufacturing companies listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange. The sampling method of the present study is based on Cochran comprising of 467 participants; a total number of 211 questionnaires were completed as the study's sample. This paper uses PLS tests to assess the effect of independent variables on dependent variables.

Results show that knowledge sharing barriers have no impact on the organisational innovation of firms listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange, but that knowledge sharing facilitators can enhance the organisational innovation of these firms.

This paper is the first study on the effect of barriers and knowledge sharing facilitators on organisational innovation of firms listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange, which is an emergent country with specific conditions (lack of specialised workforce and modern systematic infrastructure), therefore the results will provide helpful information that will contribute to the development of science and knowledge.

This paper analyses the factors that make fashion-product crowdfunding campaigns successful. The authors argue that crowdfunding is an innovative and functional way of bringing new fashion items to the market. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question whether product innovation, lifecycle and sustainability have a positive effect on the success of fashion crowdfunding campaigns. The findings highlight that the success of the fashion crowdfunding campaigns depends on creators' adherence to the values of the platform which they use to raise capital.

A total of 300 fashion crowdfunding projects running between the 17th of October and the 15th of December 2017 were collected from Kickstarter – the world's largest crowdfunding platform based on reward-based all-or-nothing model. Two-step binomial logistic regression was used to analyse the data.

The model predicted a significant increase in the odds of success for the fashion items crowdfunded during the first-time production, and innovative and environmentally sustainable products with a higher price range of rewards. In line with previous literature, regression analyses predicted a significant effect of the control variables of goal amount (negative) and the number of rewards (positive). Contrary to previous studies, neither the presence of a video nor the campaign length predicted success.

The novel findings of this study contribute to the literature by providing an analysis of success factors of fashion items on crowdfunding platforms. The results show that innovative, environmentally sustainable and higher-priced products produced by early-stage ventures are better welcomed by the audiences.