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The car no longer serves simply as a means of transport but is at the core of a new concept of mobility. Car manufacturers are seizing opportunities to change the traditional business model of the auto business. Innovation in this business model has become vital to survival in today’s dynamic market conditions. This paper aims to find out what factors motivate and drive business model change and what the resulting business model innovation is.

This qualitative study is based on a single case, namely, BMW as an illustrative example of an advanced, highly innovative customer-centric service business model (BM). The study adopts a document analysis method to reveal the firm’s BMI process.

First, the study presents a conceptual framework for business model change with the factors –motivators and drivers – that impact on the process of change. BMW’s BMI and its impacting factors are discussed based on this model. The McKinsey 7 s Model framework, the elements of which are strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff and skills is used as an analytical tool to discuss new business model implementation. The study highlights the BM configuration of a traditional car manufacturer, the car as a product and the new car as a service concept.

This study reveals the BMI of BMW’s digital services and its key motivators and drivers. BMW mostly innovates in three key dimensions of the Business model. These are value creation, value delivery and value capture. Most of the elements in these dimensions are innovated.

The significance of smart mobility practices in shaping cities from a smart perspective has grown in recent years, influencing policies and the choices made by inhabitants. This transformation has led to the emergence of novel services and strategies, creating a new, vibrant and highly personalised urban environment that caters to the needs and preferences of both local residents and visitors. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of smart mobility practices on tourism flows in cities, considering the moderating effect of airport activities on this relationship.

Using a generalised method of moments estimation and focusing on 20 Italian cities over an eight-year period, the authors highlight the current relationship between smart mobility practices and tourism flows. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that the yearly advancement of airports positively moderates this relationship.

The findings indicate a significant relationship between smart mobility practices in modern cities and tourism inflows because they influence the development of tourism services and emerging trends such as smart tourism and smart destinations. Furthermore, airport activities as a proxy for city openness play a crucial role in this link. The study shows that airports have an incremental impact on tourism and on the relationship between tourism and sustainable practices.

The limitations of this quantitative approach include the focus on a single country, the challenge of measuring the development of smart mobility practices due to a lack of standardised variables and the need for future research to expand the sample to different countries in relation to tourism inflows.

This study has practical implications for policymakers and governance in their task of effectively coordinating internal smart mobility practices and managing incoming tourism flows.

This study has social implications, highlighting the need for policymakers and governance to address the societal impacts of smart mobility practices and tourism inflows, ensuring inclusive and sustainable outcomes for local communities.

This study contributes to the existing literature as one of the first attempts to examine the interplay between smart mobility practices in smart cities and tourism flows. Furthermore, it emphasises the role of airports in this relationship, highlighting how the interaction between these variables benefits both stakeholders.

Over recent years, firms have been implementing novel human resource practices. The purpose of this paper is to analyse four specific training practices to determine if and up to what extent the adoption of such practices affects innovation and financial performance.

A Spanish sub-sample of the European Manufacturing Survey is used to contain the responses of 162 manufacturing firms.

The positive relation between T&D practices and innovative performance was partially accepted, as new-to-the-firm products and new services had a significant relation with these practices. Conversely, the hypothesis stating that there is a positive relation between a new-to-the-market product and the aforementioned T&D practices was rejected. Furthermore, the positive relation between these and financial performance was partially accepted.

This research presents the following limitation: the small number of responses restricts the general reliability of the findings. The inclusion of other countries’ data using the same questionnaire would further enrich the analysis.

First, general training and development is not enough; thus, the present study evidences the positive results of specific training practices such as training and development for creativity and innovation (TD4CI) on firm performances. Second, it also reveals a relation between training practices and innovation by differentiating among the three dimensions of innovation (new product to the firm, new product to the market and new services). Moreover, the present research highlights the benefits of implementing these types of practices, not only for innovation performance but also for financial performance. This paper also suggests that not all the training practices have the same impact on firm performance. Consequently, the company should be clear about their main aim to obtain the highest performance. The third contribution is based on the Spanish context wherein training is not considered as an important organisational function. Thus, this study provides positive results showing that TD4CI might enhance firm performance. Last, the degree of detail of the different training practices analysed, the recent nature of the data related to their implementation and the link between implementation and organisation performance are also part of the contribution of the present analyses.

This research offers recent and relevant data about implementing novel T&D practices and their relation with firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to connect strategic agility and business model (BM) innovation, and to explore how capabilities underlying strategic agility fit the SME context.

Qualitative in approach, the paper develops a longitudinal, in-depth, single case study focussing on how BM renewal occurs in the dynamic and increasingly important sector of temporary work agencies.

The findings suggest a partial fit of the existing strategic agility framework for SMEs. Two of the proposed meta-capabilities (leadership unity and resource fluidity) seem inherent to SMEs because they apply easily to this context, although they need to be downscaled. One meta-capability (strategic sensitivity) is less natural and therefore more critical for an SME. An additional meta-capability (resourcefulness) arises as very important for SMEs to be able to overcome some of their size-caused limitations.

The contribution is limited by using a single case study from a specific sector and should be considered as exploratory and theory-grounding research in the field of SMEs’ strategic agility and BM renewal.

The originality of this paper is that it looks at the SME context in an industry with intensive change and dynamism, which is ideal for illustrating the objective. The authors contribute a model of strategic agility for SMEs.

Firms innovate and sophisticate their offerings to remain competitive. This sophistication often finds opportunities in servitization. Given that many customers expect the service offering from manufacturing companies, it is crucial to research what capabilities drive service offerings and their impact on performance. The purpose of this paper is to test the capabilities–service–performance chain.

A conceptual model is proposed and the research hypothesis is tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) performed on a data set corresponding to 205 Spanish and Croatian manufacturing firms.

Using SEM, this research analyses the causal model between manufacturing, organizational and digital capabilities on base, intermediate and advanced services, and their impact on both service and financial performance.

This study has some limitations: the advanced service construct was mostly developed on case-based research. Some constructs have low convergent validity and reliability. The relative smallness of the data set used and its two-country provenance could raise issues about the international nature and generalizability of the findings.

Digital capabilities are important for the provision of all three groups of services in terms of using digital devices in data acquisition, helping to make the manufacturing company more agile.

The present study also contributes to the conceptual framework of servitization by providing a new and more up-to-date definition of capabilities and services, also considering digital capabilities, which are less explored. It also contributes to being the first to explore the entire manufacturing sector [nomenclature statistique des activités and économiques dans la Communauté éuropéenne (NACE) 10–31].

The article aims to focus on the debate around the interplay between product innovation and servitization. Two conflicting approaches characterize the debate, disagreeing as to whether product innovation and servitization are complementary or not.

The authors examine two competing models proposing a direct effect of product innovation on servitization and an indirect effect through digitalization, using the sample of 500 manufacturing firms of a country participating in the European Manufacturing Survey, 2018 edition.

The results reveal that product innovation has no direct effect on servitization. However, the authors found that digitalization capabilities mediate the effect of product innovation and servitization. The present findings reveal that product innovation has a substantial indirect effect on servitization through digitalization capabilities, supporting the approach proposing the complementarity between product innovation and servitization.

The data used in this paper correspond to a single country. The limited geographical sampling frame may likewise limit the generalizability of the findings. Researchers are encouraged to replicate the analysis with data from other countries, and to further enrich the analysis with complementary path options and resulting performance measures.

When applying a capabilities perspective, the authors find that product innovation capability is not directly related to servitization as capability. The present findings point toward the fact that if companies only have product innovation capability, this does not facilitate servitization. If companies have both product innovation capability and digitalization capability, such a situation facilitates servitization, a decision which often falls within managers’ responsibilities.

Existing studies focus on antecedents and/or outcomes of single issues, either product innovation, servitization or digitalization. Only some offer dual associations (product innovation and servitization, digitalization and servitization), and even less position simultaneously at the intersection of the three pillars. Herein lies the novelty of the present approach and analysis, which explains the extent to which product innovation, digitalization and servitization are related.

This paper aims to map the incidence of teamwork in European manufacturing industries and describe the process of teamwork diffusion over time. The impact of country, company size, manufacturing sector and other factors on teamwork diffusion is identified.

The study is based on data from 3,522 companies gathered by the European Manufacturing Survey covering ten European countries with a common survey tool.

Overall, six out of ten manufacturers with more than 20 employees have implemented teamwork in production. Furthermore, the authors show that implementation rates vary significantly by country, firm size and, to a lesser extent, sector of the company's activity. R&D expenditure, product complexity, innovation capability, strategy and to a lesser extent international competition and supply chain position create significant differences between firms opting for teamwork as a work organization practice and companies neglecting it.

The main limitations of the paper derive from the concept of EMS as a multi-purpose survey and the lack of adequate representation across European countries.

The value of this research is the ability to offer recent, international and relevant figures about teamwork implementation and diffusion. Furthermore the data set makes it possible for the first time to describe the process of teamwork diffusion over time.

The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the innovative effort of organizations increases or decreases over time, especially when the competitive environment is changing, as has been the case in the current economic downturn. For this reason, the objective of this article is to gauge the possible differences in innovative behaviour between family firms (FFs) and non‐family firms (NFFs) when the business environment becomes increasingly hostile.

The approach is a natural experiment study, which the authors use to analyse the possible differential behaviour of FFs in the recession context in contrast to the previous growth context. The empirical data for the present study were compiled through the Spanish sub‐sample of the European Manufacturing Survey's (EMS) 2006 and 2009 editions. To test the hypothesis the paper uses a matched‐pairs method that increases the comparability of the available data.

Family firms have a significant higher reduction of R&D in comparison to nonfamily firms. But contrary to some of the hypotheses, the other innovation dimensions have no significant differences, although most results indicate that family firms systematically and generally reduce their innovation more than NFFs.

This research contains two original features. First, the authors have been able to analyse the change in innovation behaviour of a comparable set of FFs and NFFs. The second relevant feature is the analysis of the specific interaction of FFs’ differential traits with the different types of innovation. The availability of detailed empirical data on innovation adoption enabled this study and is also one of its contributions. This research has also value since the results can be read as a challenge to existing approaches on the preferences and nature of FFs that have either a positive or negative effect on innovation.

Research on organizational innovation remains relatively scarce, particularly with respect to social structures and processes. In contrast to product innovation, organizational innovation relies more on informal processes and relationships among members of the organization than on formal processes. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of these processes at the micro level.

Building on a process model of organizational innovation, the authors study the case of a dermatology department of a large hospital in France and conceptualize organizational innovation as the outcome of a social system represented by networks of relationships, professional identities and formal structures.

The findings suggest that informal networks support the early phase of the invention and development of organizational innovation. However, the later phases depend more on the formal structure. A mismatch between professional identities and formal roles and positions can prevent the institutionalization and legitimation of organizational innovation in the final phases of the innovation process.

The study is limited to one case, a department in a French hospital. The authors call for future research to study different industry/country contexts.

Professional organizations such as hospitals should encourage better interactions between actors of different professional identities to support the development and implementation of organizational innovation. Reducing the perceived hierarchy of different professional identities may also be useful.

This study is the first to investigate micro-level processes in organizational innovation by combining the concept of professional identity and network analysis.