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The purpose of microcredit is to offer small loans to people who are not covered by traditional financial channels. It can facilitate entrepreneurship, boosting local socio-economic development and improving environmental and political factors.

This paper aims to analyse microcredit in Italy, focusing on a project based in Rione Sanità, Naples. Rione Sanità is one of the poorest areas of Southern Italy, displaying high rates of criminality and unemployment, especially among youth, women, migrants and the vulnerable. The district is renowned for its fine and ancient handicrafts, food, trade and historical heritage – potential drivers for boosting tourism in the area. Qualitative methodologies were used to collect primary data through field visits and interviews with project bankers, local businesses, artisans, associations and religious representatives, project volunteers, as well as participation at local meetings. These data were corroborated by budget analysis based on the project's accounting.

The study shows encouraging results for the project and policy prospects. Despite the tiny starting numbers, there emerges a significant potential for microcredit to spread in the district, as in Southern Italy, providing an effective strategy to combat unemployment, usury and criminality, yielding community development and favoring broad societal challenges.

With this evidence, the paper attempts to shed some light and verify the potential of microfinance projects as a driver of sustainable development and ethical finance in poor areas of developed countries.

This study aims to explore the strategic decisions at innovation level implemented by firms to thrive and transform themselves during crises. This study also aims to provide insights to answer the question: Why do some firms decide to implement certain types of innovation during a crisis?

This research was carried out through a multiple case study involving 22 firms. The methods were implemented in three steps to increase rigor and the replication of the study: identification and selection of cases, data collection through interviews triangulated with online information and analysis based on aggregating themes and finding patterns.

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the companies analyzed focused their activities mainly on developing new features or functionalities for their products or services. Most of the firms implemented innovations across nearly all ten categories outlined by Keeley et al. (2013). Many of the implemented innovations involved personalized and superior service enhancements, process efficiency optimizations, channel diversification initiatives and new ways to collaborate to generate value. In general, the main drivers that led firms to decide to implement these innovations include reducing costs, enhancing operational efficiency, generating new revenue streams, augmenting sales and enhancing client relationships.

This research significantly advances the convergence of innovation, strategy and crisis in three impactful ways. First, it constructs a pragmatic and evidence-based framework, consolidating the primary catalysts, innovation categories and strategies adopted by firms in response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis. Second, it offers insights for guiding decision-making processes related to innovation, presenting actionable recommendations derived from the study’s findings. Thirdly, this study highlights critical perspectives that can guide governmental intervention, facilitating the formulation of more tailored and effective policies to assist companies during crisis periods.

This study centers on developing countries, specifically examining Colombian firms, considering their unique characteristics and priorities. Surprisingly, there is a scarcity of studies delving into the innovation and transformation of firms during the COVID-19 crisis in nations sharing cultural, economic and political similarities with Colombia.

This paper aims to examine the impact of intra-industry trade on business cycle synchronization within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). ECOWAS region is characterized by limited intracommunity trade and a low level of foreign direct investment.

First, this research uses the two-digit level harmonized system classification to measure intra-industry trade, which is straightforward to interpret and compute, making it suitable for countries with low trade intensity. Second, it uses the system generalized method of moments (system-GMM) to examine the dynamic relationship between variables and address endogeneity concerns.

The results obtained from the system-GMM estimation reveal a positive and significant correlation between intra-industry trade intensity and business cycle synchronization, as well as an inhibiting effect of economic freedom on the relationship between intra-industry trade and business cycle synchronization. These results highlight the need to implement policies aimed at reducing tariff barriers, improving financial integration and intensifying production.

This research analyze the link between intra-industry trade and business cycle synchronization within the ECOWAS. It also analyze the role of economic freedom on the link between intra-industry trade and business cycle synchronization.

Business analytics (BA) is a new frontier of technology development and has enormous potential for value creation. Information systems research shows ample evidence of its positive business impacts and organizational performance. However, there is limited understanding of how decision-makers or users of BA outcomes actually engage with data analysts in the process of data-driven insight generation and how they improve their understanding of business environments using BA outcomes. To aid this engagement and understanding, this study investigates the interaction between decision-makers and data analysts when they attempt to uncover data capacities and business needs and acquire business insights from BA tools.

This study employs an interpretive field study with thematic analysis. The authors conducted interviews with 31 participants who all relied on BA in their daily decisions. The study participants were engaged in different BA roles, including data analysts and decision-makers. They validated the applicability and usefulness of our findings through a focus group with eight practitioners, including decision-makers and data analysts from the same companies.

This study proposes a process model of data-driven sensemaking and sensegiving based on Weick’s sensemaking framework. The findings exhibit that decision-makers are engaged in sensemaking by identifying areas of focus, determining BA scope, evaluating generated insights and turning BA into action. The findings also show that data analysts engage in sensemaking by consolidating data, data understanding, preparing preliminary outcomes and generating actionable reports. This study shows how sensemaking processes and sensegiving activities work together over time through immediate enactment, selection and decision cycles.

This study is a first attempt to understand interactions in the context of BA using the perspective of sensemaking and sensegiving.

The authors study how cloud adoption decision making unfolds in organizations and present the dynamic process leading to a decision to adopt or reject cloud computing. The authors thus complement earlier literature on factors that influence cloud adoption.

The authors adopt an interpretive epistemology to understand the process of cloud adoption decision making. Following an empirical investigation drawing on interviews with senior managers who led the cloud adoption decision making in organizations from across Europe. The authors outline a framework that shows how cloud adoptions follow multiple cycles in three broad phases.

The study findings demonstrate that cloud adoption decision making is a recursive process of learning about cloud through three broad phases: building perception about cloud possibilities, contextualizing cloud possibilities in terms of current computing resources and exposing the cloud proposition to others involved in making the decision. Building on these findings, the authors construct a framework of this process which can inform practitioners in making decisions on cloud adoption.

This work contributes to authors understanding of how cloud adoption decisions unfold and provides a framework for cloud adoption decisions that has theoretical and practical value. The study further demonstrates the role of the decision-leader, typically the CIO, in this process and identifies how other internal and external stakeholders are involved. It sheds light on the relevance of the phases of the cloud adoption decision-making process to different cloud adoption factors identified in the extant literature.

This paper aims to explore the perception of successful entrepreneurs and resource providers regarding the minimum operational time necessary to legitimize an enterprise as an established company, as well as the tactics used by the entrepreneurs to minimize the distrust of society during this initial period of the life cycle of the organization.

Data collection from two groups: (i) interviews with 62 entrepreneurs and founders of established companies; and (ii) a questionnaire completed by 77 sales managers of companies that provide businesses with resources (they practice business-to-business). Regarding analyses: (i) to analyze information, this study applied the content analysis technique; and (ii) for data, this study applied the one-sample t-test, mean comparison t-test, Pearson’s correlation test, chi-square test of association, Mann–Whitney U test and correspondence analysis technique.

In this study, a period of 42 months was identified for the legitimization of enterprises by society, in other words, the time necessary for enterprises to be recognized as an established company and a company of low risk by customers and resource providers. A set of managerial and behavioral actions practiced by successful entrepreneurs to face the difficulties they experience during the legitimization period was also identified.

In addition to establishing a period of 42 months for the legitimization of an enterprise in the eyes of society, a set of 15 strategies used by successful entrepreneurs was identified to combat the prejudice associated with the youthfulness of their companies. Of these, 12 are linked to managerial actions and 3 to the entrepreneur’s behavior. It should be highlighted that eight of these strategies are innovative and have yet to be addressed in the literature on mitigating risks associated with the liability of newness principle.

The authors discuss the legitimization of enterprises based on the perception of actors who play a fundamental role regarding entrepreneurial action: resource providers for companies, customers and successful entrepreneurs. This is a triangulation of sources, as well as a triangulation of collected data and qualitative and quantitative techniques, which sought to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information that resulted from this analytical process.

Process mining (PM) has emerged as a leading technology for gaining data-based insights into organizations’ business processes. As processes increasingly cross-organizational boundaries, firms need to conduct PM jointly with multiple organizations to optimize their operations. However, current knowledge on cross-organizational process mining (coPM) is widely dispersed. Therefore, we synthesize current knowledge on coPM, identify challenges and enablers of coPM, and build a socio-technical framework and agenda for future research.

We conducted a literature review of 66 articles and summarized the findings according to the framework for Information Technology (IT)-enabled inter-organizational coordination (IOC) and the refined PM framework. The former states that within inter-organizational relationships, uncertainty sources determine information processing needs and coordination mechanisms determine information processing capabilities, while the fit between needs and capabilities determines the relationships’ performance. The latter distinguishes three categories of PM activities: cartography, auditing and navigation.

Past literature focused on coPM techniques, for example, algorithms for ensuring privacy and PM for cartography. Future research should focus on socio-technical aspects and follow four steps: First, determine uncertainty sources within coPM. Second, design, develop and evaluate coordination mechanisms. Third, investigate how the mechanisms assist with handling uncertainty. Fourth, analyze the impact on coPM performance. In addition, we present 18 challenges (e.g. integrating distributed data) and 9 enablers (e.g. aligning different strategies) for coPM application.

This is the first article to systematically investigate the status quo of coPM research and lay out a socio-technical research agenda building upon the well-established framework for IT-enabled IOC.

Authorities have set up numerous security checkpoints during times of armed conflict to control the flow of commercial and humanitarian trucks into and out of areas of conflict. These security checkpoints have become highly utilized because of the complex security procedures and increased truck traffic, which significantly slow the delivery of relief aid. This paper aims to improve the process at security checkpoints by redesigning the current process to reduce processing time and relieve congestion at checkpoint entrance gates.

A decision-support tool (clearing function distribution model [CFDM]) is used to minimize the effects of security checkpoint congestion on the entire humanitarian supply network using a hybrid simulation-optimization approach. By using a business process simulation, the current and reengineered processes are both simulated, and the simulation output was used to estimate the clearing function (capacity as a function of the workload). For both the AS-IS and TO-BE models, key performance indicators such as distribution costs, backordering and process cycle time were used to compare the results of the CFDM tool. For this, the Kerem Abu Salem security checkpoint south of Gaza was used as a case study.

The comparison results demonstrate that the CFDM tool performs better when the output of the TO-BE clearing function is used.

The efforts will contribute to improving the planning of any humanitarian network experiencing congestion at security checkpoints by minimizing the impact of congestion on the delivery lead time of relief aid to the final destination.

This paper aims to explore the use of digital technologies in enabling circular ecosystems. We apply supply network (SN) configuration theory and a novel resource pooling lens, more typically used in financial systems, to identify inventory pools, information repositories and financial exchange models among network actors.

Five in-depth circular SN case studies are examined where digital technologies are extensively deployed to support circularity, each case representing alternative SN configurations. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews to map SN and resource pooling configurations across each circular ecosystem, with cross-case analysis used to identify distinct pooling and digital strategies.

Results suggest three digitally enabled circular ecosystem archetypes and their related governance modalities: consortia-based information pooling for resource recovery, intermediary-enabled material and financial pooling for remanufacturing and platform-driven information, material and financial pooling for resource optimisation.

Drawing on SN configuration and resource pooling literature, we recognise distinct configurational, stakeholder and resource pooling dimensions characterising circular ecosystems. While this research is exploratory and the identified archetypes not exhaustive, the combination of resource pooling and configuration lenses offers new insights on circular ecosystem configurations and the critical role of resource pools and enabling digital technologies.

We demonstrate the utility of the resource pooling and configuration approach in the design of digitally enabled circular ecosystems. These archetypes provide practitioners and policymakers with alternative design frameworks when considering circular SN transformations.

This paper introduces a resource netting and pooling configuration lens to circular ecosystems, analogous to financial systems, where cyclical flows and stock are critical and enabled through digital technologies.