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The paper aims to clarify how an incumbent retail organisation explores digitalisation for its existing business.

The paper draws from an in-depth case study of home-furnishing retail giant, IKEA conducted with semi-structured interviews, participant observations and document analyses.

In the exploration phase of digitalisation, three major activities – interpreting, interrelating and integrating – illuminate how the exploration process can be organised in practice.

Although digitalisation ranks amongst the most significant ongoing transformations in retail businesses, research on how incumbent retail organisations have engaged in exploring digitalisation in practice has remained scarce. The paper contributes insights into digitalisation processes in retail businesses that may also apply to other trends affecting the retail industry.

The purpose of this paper is to identify integrated solutions business as the first generation of servitized offerings and modular solution offerings as the second development phase in servitization of original equipment manufacturers. This study examines how the servitized manufacturer, Kone, moves from integrated solutions to modular solutions business and develops the requisite capabilities to design, produce and implement modular solution offerings.

The paper reports a longitudinal case study of a provider of integrated solutions installed in buildings. During the ten years studied, the manufacturer implemented a strategic initiative to modularize its integrated solutions offering.

The firm’s transition to modular solutions progressed through three major capability development phases: solutions based on ad hoc integration, smart solutions based on modular design and through-chain modularity. The modular structure aims at fostering the efficiency of the solution offering and the associated production system.

Leveraging the benefits of modularity calls for an aligned combination of strategic, operational and technical capabilities contributing to the integration of resources in a modular production system for the solution providers’ competitive performance.

The study reports how a solution provider can develop the operational capabilities to integrate the core and peripheral components into the solution, and orchestrate the modular production system.

This study is a rare longitudinal analysis of how a manufacturer builds a modular offering, the solution platform and the required competitive capabilities to provide the solution.

This study aims to discuss how an online community interacts with a local community during the entrepreneurial process. By having a contextualized view of entrepreneurship, this study acknowledges the social and spatial dynamics of the process.

The inductive approach used in this study is empirically anchored in the case “the library revolt”. This paper analysed interviews conducted in a selected region in Sweden and followed a netnographic method to capture the social interactions online. By using qualitative modes of inquiry, this study attempts to illuminate the social aspects of the entrepreneurial process.

This study shows how social media works as a contextual element in entrepreneurship. By presenting interactions between an online community and a rural community, it is shown how entrepreneurial processes in rural areas can be shaped not only through local community relations but also by online interaction. It illustrates how an online context, where actors are located with their own unique set of resources, contributes to rural development. By being a part of an ongoing process of structuration, we can view the actors are gaining access to the resources online, which contributes to the change happening in a local community.

This study adds to the conversation of the role of context in entrepreneurship studies. Rural entrepreneurship largely discusses the local social bonds and actions, while this study includes the online social bonds as a part of the reality in which entrepreneurship is developed.

The use of third-party logistics (TPL) setups in construction has increased but is still a new phenomenon. The purpose was to increase understanding of how structural and management dimensions are related in CLSs by describing how CTPL setups are used.

Ten dimensions to describe and structure CLSs were identified from the literature and used to structure a cross-case analysis of 13 Swedish CLSs.

The main findings are: (1) there are three typical initiators of CLSs: municipalities, developers and contractors; (2) CLSs are drivers for service differentiation and modularization among TPL providers as construction specific services are required; (3) CLSs play a new role in construction by coordinating logistics activities between the construction project and the vicinity of the site.

The study is based on 13 cases in the Swedish construction context. Additional studies of CLSs in other countries are needed.

The ten dimensions can be used as a guide in designing a CLS and in determining the order of design decisions. The identification and structuring of CTPL services also exemplify the variety of service offerings.

This is one of the first cross-case analyses of CLSs enabling the characterization of CTPL setups. This study identifies how different services included in the setup relate to the roles of SCM and logistics in construction.

This study aims to systematically review the literature on the use of customer value for the evaluation of inter-organizational performance, with a wide perspective embracing different contexts and settings.

Searching within the Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases, a systematic literature review has been conducted analyzing 41 papers published between 1991 and 2020.

Categorization of customer value and inter-organizational performance measures were developed and the main differences among different settings were discussed.

The results presented in this study may be helpful for practitioners and managers who, in the completion of their activities, have to maintain strong and frequent relationships with other organizations. In fact, practitioners and managers interested in enhancing customer value and measuring inter-organizational performance may find an innovative perspective linking the two dimensions. They could find the categorizations presented in this study as a starting point for developing a performance evaluation framework suitable for evaluating their present business relationships. In fact, the categorizations provide a panorama of how scholars have measured until now inter-organizational performance through customer value, and therefore, they could choose the measures more appropriate for their situation.

No systematic literature review of the use of customer value for assessing inter-organizational performance has previously been undertaken, especially considering different settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a substantial organization gradually builds a management accounting system from scratch, changing its accounting routines by learning processes. The paper uses the experiential learning theory and the concept of learning style to investigate the learning process during management accounting change. The study aims to expand the domain of management accounting change theory to emphasize the learning-related aspects that can constitute it.

The paper provides an interpretation of management accounting change based on the model of problem management proposed by Kolb (1983) and the theory of experiential learning (Kolb, 1976, 1984). The study is based on a 14-year longitudinal case study (1994‐2007). The case examined can be considered a theory illustration case. Data were obtained from a broad variety of sources including interviews, document analysis and adopting an interventionist approach during the redesign of the costing system.

The paper contributes to two important aspects of management accounting change. First, it becomes apparent that the costing information change was not a discrete event but a process of experience and learning conducted through several iterations of trial-and-error loops that extended over the years. Second, the findings reveal that the learning process can alter management accounting system design in a radical or incremental way according to the learning style of the people involved in the process of change.

Because of the adopted research approach, results could be extended only to other organizations presenting similar characteristics. Several further areas of research are suggested by the findings of this paper. In particular, it would be of interest to investigate the links between learning styles and communication and its effect on management accounting change.

The paper includes implications for the management of learning during management accounting change, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this process.

This paper is one response to the call for an interdisciplinary research approach to the management accounting change phenomena using a “method theory” taken from the discipline of management to provide an explanation of the change in management accounting. In respect of the previous literature, it provides two main contributions, namely, the proposal of a model useful both to interpret and manage learning processes; the effect of learning style on management accounting routines change.