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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the possibility for firms to consider institutional settings to systematically direct dispersed individual efforts of discovery and invention towards objects (products or processes) of their interest in order to enhance their value creation capacity.

The authors conduct a comparative analysis of the different institutional settings within which software products are invented and produced – closed producer-centred model, open user-centred model, and hybrid interactive producer-user model.

The authors draw indications regarding the possibility to design institutional settings for value creation and the potential pitfalls tied to these strategic tools.

A theoretical framework is elaborated in order to understand the different ways in which institutional contexts influence and direct value creation processes. The model analysed shows the firms’ deliberate attempt to stimulate a dynamic process of social interaction and communication which may foster higher levels of creativity and innovation. In order to guarantee the necessary accessibility and to sufficiently motivate external programmers towards the perception of a new code, the firm has to surrender the traditional source through which it appropriates value: barriers to the accessibility of the code developed through IPRs. The adoption of an institutional setting which facilitates dynamic value creation processes suggests, therefore, the need to turn to dynamic mechanisms for value appropriation in parallel.

The motivations behind co-branding alliances, the differences in performance between the paired brands and the emergence of “spillover effects” have been pillars of the marketing research agenda for almost three decades. We observe an extensive number of studies on co-branding alliances, combined with multiple theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches informing extant literature. The purpose of this paper is to summarize of the state of the art of this research.

The authors offer a systematic literature review of 190 papers on co-branding alliances. The authors portray a picture of the theories informing co-branding research and build a conceptual framework that summarizes the concepts and variables used in this literature. Finally, 11 interviews with managers and consultants of European firms help to reveal potential problems in practice and needs that are not captured by previous studies.

The authors develop a map of theories used to investigate co-branding alliances and build a conceptual framework linking motivations, co-branding alliance implementation and outputs. Finally, the authors propose a structured research agenda.

The main implication relies on the structured research agenda.

Practical implications include the identification of the variables and dimensions involved in a brand alliance to exploit the strengths and moderate the weaknesses of a brand.

This paper highlights how co-branding is embedded in different contexts and dimensions regarding both firms and consumers. The two maps presented in this study underscore the interdependence among such dimensions. The authors interview marketing experts to validate the conceptual framework and to help us extract the managerial implications that stem from it.

This paper takes into consideration the main views underlying the theory of the resource based firm within strategy studies, underscoring their fundamental monotemporal nature and proposing a way to elaborate a multi‐temporal view of the firm. By analyzing the link between the time concepts used as bases for the formulation of studies within the strategy field and the types of actor behavior implicitly (or explicitly) entailed by such time concepts, the paper shows the inadequacy of any one of the two monotemporal views of the resource‐based firm to encompass all of the main actor behaviors on which the firm's survival and success increasingly rests. The paper draws on the Austrian process view in economic studies to formulate a methodological framework which consents the elaboration of a multi‐temporal view of the resource based firm, in which different time concepts are bridged and in which all main actor behaviors crucial for prolonged firm success are encompassed. Finally, the paper shows how the multi‐temporal view of the firm consents with the re‐interpretation and maintenance of both the static and the dynamic concepts elaborated within the strategy literature and, eventually, also expands the causal relationships between strategic management and a number of other areas of inquiry in the management field, such as time‐space relationships, the relationship between strategy and entrepreneurship, and the relationship between the former and the evolutionary perspective.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the vertical disintegration of the bank loan origination value chain. This paper conducts a study on the credit information market from the perspective of the bank’s decision to vertically disintegrate the loan origination value chain. The main aim is to identify the relevant drivers of the decision to vertically disintegrate the credit assessment phase in the lending business.

Transaction cost economics and information asymmetry are the typical perspectives of analysis of the vertical scope of business value chains.

This paper argues that in order to capture the drivers underlying the dynamic evolution of the vertical scope of bank loan origination business models, the above perspectives must be combined and integrated further with a resource-based view and the modularity perspective. Combining managerial and financial perspectives, this paper offers an examination of the drivers of vertical disintegration in the lending value chain and, specifically, in the credit assessment phase.

Although the existence of substantial research on value chain vertical integration/disintegration in the literature, none has directly focussed on the credit assessment value chain. It leaves a gap that the paper aims to overcome. The value chain disintegration has deep managerial and financial implications at firm and industry levels, and the comprehension of the rational underlying it is critical to maintaining competitive business model configurations in the bank lending industry.