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Despite its potential, warehouse managers still struggle to successfully assimilate autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their operations. This paper means to identify the moderating factors of AMR assimilation for production warehouses that influence the digital transformation of their intralogistics via AMRs.

Drawing on innovation of assimilation theory (IAT), this study followed an explorative approach using the principles of the case study method in business research. The cases comprised of four AMR end users and six AMR service providers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews.

Four clusters of moderators that affect each stage of AMR assimilation were identified. These clusters include organizational attributes of end users (i.e. production warehouses), service attributes of service providers, technology attributes of AMRs and relational attributes between the AMR service providers and the AMR end users.

The authors extend the IAT framework by identifying various moderating factors between different stages of the AMR assimilation process. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to introduce the perspective of AMR end users in conjunction with AMR service providers to the “Industry 4.0” technology assimilation literature. The study propositions regarding these factors guide future intralogistics and AMR research.

The study aims to compare and analyze the impact of the commonly used pallets (wooden pallet and plastic pallets), using life cycle assessment (LCA), then provide certain suggestions for the development of green packaging.

In this study, software Simapro was used to calculate and analyze the whole life cycle of pallets from the stage of raw materials and production to processing and waste disposal.

A total of 12 environmental categories were used to quantitatively analyze the environmental impact of the four different pallets. The results showed that, regardless of raw material, processing, or waste stage, the environmental impact of wooden pallet was lower than that of plastic pallet. Wooden pallet was better than plastic pallets.

This study compared and analyzed the pallet of 1 × 1.2m with different materials.

Green packaging is the development trend of the future packaging, which follows the principle of 3R1D. According to the calculation results, corresponding suggestions can be put forward from production, processing, using, wasting and other aspects, and make corresponding contributions to the development of green packaging.

The contribution and impact of each stage of the product on the environment can be studied. The environmental impact, such as global warming potential, water scarcity, can be reduced through different solutions such as the use of green materials, good processing techniques and higher recycling rates.

Sustainability has become an integral part of the real estate industry, alongside advancing globalization and demographic development. Due to real estate's influence on greenhouse gas emissions throughout its life cycle, both the regulatory and legal requirements concerning the sustainability of real estate are growing and, as a result of social responsibility, the interest of tenants and investors in sustainable real estate. However, criteria for measuring the ecological sustainability of a real estate investment in the purchase process in order to reduce the risk of including “stranded assets” in the portfolio are missing. This paper aims to address the need to integrate the issue of carbon stranding into existing sustainability rating tools.

Existing tools are examined based on defined criteria to determine whether they are suitable for purchasing a property before suitable tools for purchase are compared. Strengths and weaknesses are identified, which are to be remedied with the scoring tool. Taxonomy regulation is integrated into the existing valuation basis as a legal regulation.

The result is a scoring tool that enables real estate companies to measure and evaluate the ecological sustainability performance of a property during the acquisition process, taking into account the three aspects of sustainability and considering them when determining an appropriate purchase price in line with market conditions. Moreover, the developed tool helps to minimize the risk of acquiring a stranding asset.

The environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework employed in this study does not incorporate governance considerations. While the analysis extensively evaluates the building's environmental and social aspects, it does not extend to examining the governance practices of the companies involved. Thus, the assessment is confined solely to the physical attributes of the property without accounting for broader corporate governance factors.

The developed scoring tool represents a valuable tool for the real estate industry, offering insights into sustainability performance during property acquisitions and providing a structured framework for decision-making. By addressing both certification and taxonomy regulation requirements, the tool contributes to the industry's evolution toward more sustainable and environmentally responsible real estate practices.

In response to the growing importance of sustainability in the real estate industry, this paper introduces a novel scoring tool for evaluating the sustainability of real estate investments during the acquisition process.

This study combines institutional and organizational learning perspectives to investigate the impact of institutional distance and institution-specific cross-border acquisition experience in emerging markets on cross-border acquisition performance.

The sample consists of 874 transactions involving targets across 37 emerging markets by 484 different acquirers from 45 developed and emerging markets. The authors decompose institutional distance and acquisition experience along their cultural, administrative, geographic and economic dimensions.

The authors find that cultural, administrative and geographic distance have a negative impact on acquisition performance. In contrast, economic distance does not appear detrimental to acquisition performance across markets. The study provides evidence that a company may apply learnings from previous transactions in similar cultural and economic emerging market environments to elevate the likelihood of a successful acquisition.

This study offers a more fine-grained perspective of the distance concept by decomposing the concepts of institutional distance and acquisition experience along different institutional dimensions. The research across 37 emerging markets sheds light on which of the similarities and differences between these markets are relevant concerning acquisition experience and performance.

This study aims to explore how firms can enhance their innovation processes by effectively utilizing external knowledge and employing digital technologies. Specifically, it emphasizes the role of absorptive capacity (ACAP) in external knowledge acquisition and assimilation (potential ACAP), as well as transformation and exploitation (realized ACAP), highlighting the necessity of equipping firms with digital technologies to support ACAP activities.

To achieve the research purpose, we conducted a structured literature review of academic papers sourced from Scopus-Elsevier.

The key findings encompass the identification of common digital technologies supporting ACAP and explore how these technologies contribute to knowledge acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation. The main results show that social media and online communities are the most studied technologies in relation to ACAP activities. Research predominantly centres on potential ACAP – with acquisition activity more studied than assimilation – rather than realized ACAP – with only social media and online communities demonstrating full support for transformation and exploitation activities.

This research represents a pioneering joint study of ACAP and digital technologies, advancing understanding beyond organizational perspectives and expanding open innovation literature by integrating ACAP role in technology collaborations. A call for qualitative investigations into the relationship between digital technologies and ACAP emerged.

The findings offer valuable guidance to innovation managers, aiding them in selecting appropriate digital technologies to strengthen ACAP activities.

This work’s uniqueness lies in bridging the gaps between open innovation, ACAP and digital technologies, which are often studied in isolation.

The primary objective of this investigation was to explore how employees’ utilization of social media for work-related purposes impacts their service innovation behavior, both directly and through the intermediary mechanisms of knowledge management and employees’ risk-taking.

In developing its conceptual framework, this study has drawn upon the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. To test its hypotheses, this study has surveyed 241 financial analysts from ten Iranian financial companies and has employed variance-based structural equation modeling (specifically, PLS-SEM) with the assistance of “WarpPLS 8.0 software.”

The findings revealed that employees’ work-related use of social media positively influences their service innovation behavior using knowledge management, encompassing knowledge sharing and acquisition capability as well as employee risk-taking. However, this influence is not directly significant.

To the best of our knowledge, this study marks the first instance in which the effect of work-related use of social media on employee service innovation behavior directly and through the mediating roles of knowledge management and risk-taking has been investigated through the lens of the SOR paradigm, especially in the financial sector.

The banking industry, which is one of the most significant industries when taking into account both deposit sizes and employment statistics in Turkey, is one of the country's primary economic drivers. In this regard, it is highly important to evaluate banks as it is necessary to present to what extent they use their resources efficiently. The main purpose of the study is to analyze the efficiencies of Turkish banks by the two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist productivity index (MPI).

The authors aim to analyze both the efficiency and productivity of Turkish banks by two-stage DEA and the MPI, which enable decomposing into sub-sections of production processes. Hence, more detailed insight into the Turkish banking system can be presented through two-stage efficiency and production approaches.

DEA results indicate that two out of three state-owned banks achieved resource efficiency while none of the investigated banks performed profit efficiency throughout the investigated period. Besides, average resource efficiency is found higher than average profit efficiency in Turkish banks. MPI results reveal that both technological and technical improvement prospects exist for Turkish banks.

The original contribution of this paper is to employ two-stage DEA and the MPI, which reflect both the static and dynamic performance of the Turkish banking sector. In this regard, this study aims to be a pioneer by both reflecting the static and dynamic performance analysis of Turkish banks.

Taking into consideration the current human need for agricultural produce such as rice that requires water for growth, the optimal consumption of this valuable liquid is important. Unfortunately, the traditional use of water by humans for agricultural purposes contradicts the concept of optimal consumption. Therefore, designing and implementing a mechanized irrigation system is of the highest importance. This system includes hardware equipment such as liquid altimeter sensors, valves and pumps which have a failure phenomenon as an integral part, causing faults in the system. Naturally, these faults occur at probable time intervals, and the probability function with exponential distribution is used to simulate this interval. Thus, before the implementation of such high-cost systems, its evaluation is essential during the design phase.

The proposed approach included two main steps: offline and online. The offline phase included the simulation of the studied system (i.e. the irrigation system of paddy fields) and the acquisition of a data set for training machine learning algorithms such as decision trees to detect, locate (classification) and evaluate faults. In the online phase, C5.0 decision trees trained in the offline phase were used on a stream of data generated by the system.

The proposed approach is a comprehensive online component-oriented method, which is a combination of supervised machine learning methods to investigate system faults. Each of these methods is considered a component determined by the dimensions and complexity of the case study (to discover, classify and evaluate fault tolerance). These components are placed together in the form of a process framework so that the appropriate method for each component is obtained based on comparison with other machine learning methods. As a result, depending on the conditions under study, the most efficient method is selected in the components. Before the system implementation phase, its reliability is checked by evaluating the predicted faults (in the system design phase). Therefore, this approach avoids the construction of a high-risk system. Compared to existing methods, the proposed approach is more comprehensive and has greater flexibility.

By expanding the dimensions of the problem, the model verification space grows exponentially using automata.

Unlike the existing methods that only examine one or two aspects of fault analysis such as fault detection, classification and fault-tolerance evaluation, this paper proposes a comprehensive process-oriented approach that investigates all three aspects of fault analysis concurrently.

This study aims to investigate the influence of inventors’ abilities to acquire external knowledge, provide broad and professional knowledge and patenting output (i.e. different types of inventors) on the formation of structural holes.

The authors collected 59,798 patents applied for and granted in the USA by 33 of the largest firms worldwide in the pharmaceutical industry between 1975 and 2014. A random-effects tobit model was used to test the hypotheses.

The inventors’ ability to acquire external knowledge contributes to the formation of structural holes. While inventors’ ability to provide broad knowledge positively affects the formation of structural holes, their ability to provide professional knowledge works otherwise. In addition, key inventors and industrious inventors are more likely to form structural holes than talents.

The results identify individual factors that affect the formation of structural holes and improve the understanding of structural hole theory. This study is unique in that most scholars have studied the consequences of structural hole formation rather than their antecedents. Studies on the origin of structural holes neglect the effect of inventors’ knowledge abilities and patenting output. By addressing this gap, this study contributes to a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of structural holes. The results can guide managers in managing structural holes in accordance with inventors’ knowledge abilities and patenting outputs, which optimize the allocation of network resources.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the construct of phygital experiences and provide ideas that may spur future research on phygital consumer experiences in relation to consumer well-being using qualitative research methods.

With the increase in consumers’ online and offline interactions, there is a greater need for marketers to prompt integrated consumer experiences (i.e. integrated customer experiences through online and offline interactions). The authors developed this essay based on a literature review of phygital experiences and consumer well-being.

This commentary provides suggestions on how to expand the conceptual boundaries of phygital experiences by examining the effects of consumer phygital experiences in relation to consumer need satisfaction, consumer happiness and benefits to the firm. The commentary also includes several methodological suggestions that can guide future qualitative research.

The value of this commentary involves insights about research methods stimulated by the current research on consumer well-being.