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The purpose of this paper is to understand how Open Innovation Digital Platforms (OIDPs) can facilitate and support knowledge co-creation in Open Innovation (OI) processes. Specifically, it intends to investigate the contribution of OIDPs-oriented to successfully implement all the phases of interactive coupled OI processes.

The paper carries out an exploratory qualitative analysis, adopting the single case study method. The case here investigated is Open Innovation Platform Regione Lombardia (OIPRL).

The case study sheds light on how OIPRL supports knowledge co-creation through its processes, tools and services as a co-creator intermediary. In its launch stage, the platform simply aimed at giving firms a tool to “find partners” and financial resources to achieve innovative projects. Now, however, the platform has developed into an engagement platform for knowledge co-creation.

One limitation lies in the particular perspective used to perform the case study: the perspective of the digital platform itself. Future research should focus on the individuals engaged in the platform to better investigate the processes, tools and services used to implement the OI approach.

The paper suggests ways in which OIDPs could be used by firms for effective exploration, acquisition, integration and development of valuable knowledge.

The study conceptualizes the role of OIDPs in shaping knowledge co-creation, assuming that the platforms act as Open Innovation Intermediaries (OIIs). Specifically, OIDPs can be observed to function as “co-creator intermediaries” that define, develop and implement dedicated processes, specific tools and appropriate services for supporting knowledge co-creation activities.

This study aims to analyze the management and marketing literature on food buying and consumption behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic to shed light on how consumers reacted to this global crisis, to help interpret consumer reactions to possible future crises and to identify future research avenues.

This study adopts a systematic literature review as research methodology.

This study's outcomes reveal that, during the pandemic, people have deeply changed their food buying and consumption habits. The analysis identifies four main themes: food purchasing channel choice and buying behavior; food choices and consumption habits; food and “food-related” waste; and country influence on food buying and consumption.

This review uses only one database of records (Scopus). The Boolean modifiers chosen for extracting the papers may have influenced the type and number of retrieved publications. The analysis was limited to articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

While most examined investigations do not provide a comprehensive picture of consumers’ food-related responses to the pandemic and individually offer only a partial view focusing on one or just a few aspects of food consumer behavior, this study offers an overall description of consumers’ responses to the crisis and identifies important research issues to be addressed in the future.

Satisfaction in the tourism sector is a highly sensitive subject, and customer satisfaction (CS) has a significant impact on the choice of destinations made by tourists and on the decision to recommend them to friends or acquaintances. The purpose of this paper is to give empirical evidence of the dimensions of service quality (technical, functional and company image (CI)) and their connections in the sector of thermal tourism. It also aims at investigating the CI, seeking to understand whether some of the technical and functional service quality variables play a role in determining it.

An empirical survey was conducted by administering a structured research questionnaire in order to collect all necessary data, which was then elaborated to test the hypotheses using factor and multiple regression analyses.

The results of the survey confirm the direct impact of service quality dimensions (technical, functional and CI) on CS also in the thermal sector when considered individually. Moreover, when the CI was analyzed further, relational quality was found to be dependent on thermal employees’ capabilities, abilities, trustworthiness, availability, etc. Finally, when considered together, functional service quality and CI have a stronger effect on CS than technical service quality.

The originality of the present research relies on the following: a further contribution to the so-called “European perspective” of service quality; the study of service quality dimensions (technical, functional and CI) in the thermal sector; and evidencing the link between thermal employee characteristics and the relational quality factor of the CI, demonstrating that many aspects of this construct need further empirical investigation, in the wellness sector.

The purpose of this paper is to study the real role of historical satisfaction (HSat), i.e., satisfaction only deriving from past experiences, excluding the most recent, in B2C service contexts when services are experienced offline, while the actual services are purchased online through the service providers’ website.

The proposed conceptual framework was tested by focusing on a particular travel industry firm which is responsible for providing travel services as well as managing the website where these services are purchased. The study population included customers who had purchased at least two travel tickets during the last 12 months online. In order to reduce possible self-selection bias and to improve the generalizability of the web survey findings, post-stratification was applied. The measurement model was evaluated by using confirmatory factor analyses. The direct and indirect effects of HSat on encounter overall satisfaction (EOS) were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The direct effect of HSat on EOS was observed to be higher than its indirect effect through offline service dimensions and website dimensions. It was also observed that offline service dimensions have a direct impact on EOS, while they do not have an indirect impact since the website dimensions do not have a direct effect on EOS.

Historical satisfaction is really important in building EOS for services purchased previously online but experienced offline.

The results could provide managers with useful tools for allocating resources and also build an even higher level of EOS. They also shed light on how HSat molds offline service perception for services sold online.

To the authors’s knowledge, only one empirical paper focused on “historical satisfaction,” while no studies have taken into consideration the fact that service offline dimensions and e-customer satisfaction could be indirectly linked by website quality dimensions, the issue studied in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review to identify new avenues of research in line with the ongoing changes in quality and management required to firms, especially regarding customers.

This study uses a systematic review of the literature contained in the three databases Ebsco, JSTOR, and Springerlink and on the search engine Google Scholar.

An analysis of the literature identifies three different clusters of papers: “identification” papers, which show that customer focus has gained importance in recent times; “implementation” papers, which highlight that a general or shared model or scale to successfully implement total quality management (TQM) does not yet exist; and “impact-on-performance” papers, which show that few studies have considered the relationship between TQM and the issues of both marketing and performance, underlining the most significant gap in the TQM literature.

This study is limited by the small number of databases and search engines used and by the restricted number of keywords used in searching these sources.

This work highlights a gap in the existing research and thus an incomplete consideration of the interplay between management, marketing, and quality issues, all centered on customers and other stakeholders. Researchers and firms are thus advised to adopt a wider view that considers the role of the quality process to support the firm’s engagement of customers in activities that enhance both the customer role and customer satisfaction.

This study uses a systematic literature review to review all critical factors of TQM and identifies new research avenues and different approaches to implementing TQM, focusing on the central role that customers play in achieving firm success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance evolution of enterprises in Italian industrial districts. In particular, economic performance indicators are analysed for Arezzo goldsmith enterprises, to highlight: differences in the goldsmith local systems performances; the role played by firm size in the evolution trajectories; and the emergence of a medium‐sized nucleus of firms with better performance.

The paper first conducts a brief literature review on medium‐sized firms in Italian industrial districts. Then it examines the economic‐financial indicators of 183 Arezzo goldsmith firms to evaluate firm performance in comparative terms both with other Italian industrial districts and with firm size. Finally it focuses its attention on 15 medium‐sized firms or groups, carrying out a statistical analysis by organizational model comparing the aggregate data of the Arezzo goldsmith district.

The results regarding the Arezzo experience show: a reduction of competitive capabilities compared with other industrial districts; considerable difficulties for both small enterprises and the historical large firm leader; and the emergence of a medium‐sized firm nucleus which seems better able to manage a changing competitive environment.

The main implication for researchers and SME (small to medium‐sized enterprises) consultants is that the selection process currently in play among Italian industrial districts and local enterprises appears to reward only certain entrepreneurial categories. Findings of this exploratory study need future research both at an inter‐industry level and with international comparative analysis.

Medium‐size firms represent a new area of research on SMEs. Empirical evidence supports the research hypothesis.

The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the drivers for the use of Industry 4.0 technologies by investigating (1) what motivates companies to consider using I4 technologies and (2) what enables (or hinders) the intention to use I4 technologies to translate into their actual use.

The study uses survey data collected from a sample of export-oriented manufacturing companies with more than 10 employees. Final analysis is conducted on 124 companies.

The results show that companies are proactively approaching I4. Only efficiency motives and expected competitive advantage have a positive effect on the intention to use I4 technologies, which in turn positively influences their actual use. The external, legitimacy-based, motives do not play a significant role in explaining the intention to use. With respect to I4 technology enablers, employee competency positively moderates and availability of finance negatively moderates the relationship between intention to use and actual use.

The work extends the existing knowledge base on I4 technology drivers in companies that are not major global trendsetters but are heavily embedded in the value chains of companies from the most industrially developed economies. The study is limited to manufacturing companies in a small European economy and should be retested in other contexts.

The study can help managers implement I4 technologies in their companies more successfully.

We take a novel research approach by proposing a framework that clearly distinguishes between motives and enablers for the use of I4 technologies.

This study aims to analyze four text-mining studies of quality management (QM) to illustrate and problematize how the research on quality has informed the quality paradigm since the 1980s. By understanding history, one can better manage current developments.

The findings are based on a meta-analysis of four text-mining studies that explore and describe 11,579 research entries on quality between 1980 and 2017.

The findings show that the research on quality during the past 30 years form a research paradigm consisting of three operational paradigms: an operative paradigm of backend quality orbiting around QM, total QM (TQM) and service quality; an operative paradigm of middle-way quality, circling around the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), business excellence frameworks (BEFs) and quality awards; and an operative paradigm of frontend quality, revolving around reliability, costs and processes. The operative paradigms are interconnected and complementary; they also show a divide between a general management view of quality and a hands-on engineering view of quality. The findings indicate that the research on quality is a long-lived standalone paradigm, supporting the notion of quality being a genuine academic entity, not a fashion or fad.

The empirical basis of the study is four text-mining studies. Consequently, the results and findings are based on a limited number of findings.

Text-mining studies targeting research on quality are scarce, and there seem to be no prior models that depict the quality paradigm based on such studies. The perspectives presented here will advance the existing paradigmatic discourse. The new viewpoints aim to facilitate and deepen the discussion on current and future directions of the paradigm.