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The purpose of this paper is to summarize key interaction‐coordination attributes and the uniqueness of smart business networks.

The methodology analyzed is smart business networks, encompassing all three traditional business process life‐cycle stages between dynamically interacting enterprises. Emphasis is put on the business aspects and the related risks.

Smart business networks open the possibility to configure business processes and stakeholders on the fly. This implies some key paradigm changes, both of a technical and of a business nature, which are offered here for discussion via a set of propositions.

By economic and risk analysis, such as that summarized in this paper, one can progress towards the analysis of interacting heterogeneous enterprises.

The implementation involves, amongst others, the embedding of business logic specific to a network of business partners, inside the communications control networks. It also involves the definition of business protocols between these partners and the joint management of some common functions relying on open networking standards. Examples are given from the wireless communications industry.

As quick‐connect/quick‐disconnect business networks and processes become more prevailing based on unique resources or competences, the paper introduces the missing risk analysis this requires at an architectural and business level.

This paper explores the overlapping domains of business/firm and family. Suggests that the descriptor of “joint careers” is preferable to that of symbiotic careers. Describes what we term the primary career and auxiliary career which often go to make up a joint career. Both strands of career are a prerequisite for the resilience and success of the family business. The example of youth entrepreneurship is dealt with to show the possibility of an inversion of the traditional roles with the parents’ career becoming ancillary to that of their offspring. Empirical observations from New Zealand are drawn on to illustrate our discussion. It is hoped that ideas discussed in this paper will aid the understandings of further dimensions and properties of the “thread” of the theory of the boundaryless career and help move forward the research agenda on the united career trajectory.

Four management capabilities for successfully operationalizing open innovation are: strategy and culture, ecosystem capability, internal capability and technology enablement. Surveying more than 1,000 executives on current open innovation practices and capabilities, IBM IBV was able to identify how the different operating model capabilities interact and complement each other to drive better innovation and business performance.

To help organizations build and improve their open innovation capabilities, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) partnered with APQC to develop the Ecosystem-Enabled Innovation Maturity Model (EEIMM) - an open standards model encompassing four domain competencies required for successful open innovation. To assess the maturity and benchmark the performance of organizations’ open innovation capabilities, the IBV, in collaboration with Oxford Economics, used the EEIMM to survey over 1000 leaders responsible for open innovation at their organizations.

Four management capabilities for successfully operationalizing open innovation are: strategy and culture, ecosystem capability, internal capability and technology enablement. IBV analysis found that organizations that are more advanced in developing the four building blocks see significantly better performance across key financial and innovation metrics.

For every dollar of investment, the proportion of direct revenue attributed to open innovation is four times higher than for traditional innovation.

Leading organizations are embracing open innovation as a critical component of innovation strategy and investment. They recognize that adopting open innovation yields far greater returns than traditional innovation can. Recent research by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBM IBV) reveals, for example, that as many as 84 percent of executives now view open innovation as important for their organization’s future growth.

Ubiquitous commerce or u‐commerce is the combination of traditional e‐commerce and wireless, television, voice and silent commerce. U‐commerce implies ubiquity, universality, uniqueness and unison. It is not a replacement for other types of commerce, but an extension of them. While bringing many benefits, there are challenges and impediments to overcome. Research is needed to assess the value of u‐commerce and to address its related issues and challenges. Questions that need to be addressed are: What is the value of u‐commerce? What are the ways to maximize the benefits and value of u‐commerce? Is it the right technology and what directions need to be considered? What are the privacy issues and risks involved? What about trust and security? What are the strategies for businesses in utilizing and implementing u‐commerce? The research issues presented in this article will help create a better understanding of u‐commerce and prepare us for challenges facing it.

Multinational business deliver value via multiple sites with similar operational capacities. The age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) delivers significant opportunities for the deployment of digital tools for business optimization. Therefore, this study aims to study the Industry 4.0 implementation for multinationals.

The key objective of this research is multi-site systems integration using a reproducible, modular and standardized “Cyber Physical System (CPS) as-a-Service”.

A best practice reference architecture is adopted to guide the design and delivery of a pioneering CPS multi-site deployment. The CPS deployed is a cloud-based platform adopted to enable all manufacturing areas within a multinational energy and petrochemical company. A methodology is developed to quantify the system environmental and sustainability benefits focusing on reduced carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and energy consumption. These results demonstrate the benefits of standardization, replication and digital enablement for multinational businesses.

The research illustrates the ability to design a single system, reproducible for multiple sites. This research also illustrates the beneficial impact of system reuse due to reduced environmental impact from lower CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. The paper assists organizations in deploying complex systems while addressing multinational systems implementation constraints and standardization.

The purpose of the paper is to provide a business model design reference framework for mobile platform providers, the platform vendors and technology enablers of the mobile content market. The framework aims at identifying the most critical choices – i.e. design parameters – to be made at a business model design level for a MPP, and at explicitly assessing their strategic implications.

The research design integrates a twofold literature review on MPPs definitions and on business model design state of the art, with an in‐depth analysis of significant cases performed through a multiple case studies methodology: through 72 semi‐structured interviews to top managers, 24 companies were analyzed.

The findings allow to infer that some key business model parameters described by the existing literature – in particular, Osterwalder and Ballon – can be applied to MPPs' business model design process, while other original and actor‐specific building blocks emerge; furthermore, a first taxonomy of three noteworthy business models currently adopted by MPPs – “pure play”, “full asset” and “platform & content management” – is identified, associated respectively to three underlying strategic patterns: “stay on core”, “grow, wait and see”, and “aggressive downstream”.

The research presents a firm‐specific reference framework, which, however, does not focus on the potential different performances coming from alternative design parameters selection. Future works may concentrate in developing comparative or “benchmarking” analysis among the different business models depicted through the taxonomy, in order to explain any differential in firms' performances originated by alternative design parameter choices.

The findings can support a wide set of stakeholders – either first movers or newcomers in the mobile industry – in their strategic and business model design choices.

The paper's value for researchers can be brought back to its descriptive, normative and validating contribution to value network and business model design theories, with specific reference to the rising role of mobile platform providers. Value for practitioners lies in the creation and provisioning of a “reference framework” capable of supporting the decision making process concerning business model design, as it presents strong ties between business model parameters and strategic implications.

From lack of focus to competency gaps and other causes, good strategies can be saved with preventive actions. The business news is filled with stories of corporate failure. From the recent dot‐com busts to the once‐powerful companies whose fortunes have slipped, these unhappy endings are often the result of one thing: good strategies gone bad. And the underlying cause is usually poor execution.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual entrepreneur cognitive characteristics contributing to social enterprise performance and recommended a framework for women's social entrepreneur development.

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study of 22 women founders of social enterprises using a semi-structured questionnaire. In-depth interviews were conducted, and the transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis.

This study found a significant impact of self-efficacy on the performance of social enterprises among the studied subjects. Social support in the form of material, information and emotional support enhanced the ability of women social entrepreneurs to better achieve business sustenance and continuance of operations. The business skills of the women social entrepreneurs led them to move from just social impact generators to becoming thought leaders. The strong prosocial motivation of the founders contributed to building their resilience in the face of adversity.

This study extended the existing theories on social entrepreneurship by bringing the dimensions of entrepreneurial resilience in driving social enterprise performance along with business skills. Thus, it provided an enhanced explanation to the existing body of knowledge on contributors to superior social enterprise performance.

This study gathered insights into the role of entrepreneurship education focused on business skills, especially for women social entrepreneurs in achieving superior performance for their social ventures. This also reconfirmed the role of social support and how structurally this could be provided by educational systems to aspiring women social entrepreneurs.

The practice of social entrepreneurship by women social entrepreneurs has been growing. Its importance in developing economies because of its ability to make grassroots changes at the lower levels of society was substantive. Women have shown more inclination toward social business with an affinity for prosocial contribution. By focusing on nurturing these social enterprises, governments as well as global agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum could accelerate social change. Furthermore, support for the current women social entrepreneurs as change-makers making a difference in society could be achieved.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research study was one of the first studies on women social entrepreneurs focusing on the factors of self-efficacy, social support and entrepreneurial resilience contributing to social enterprise performance. This study combined the social entrepreneurship intention theory with entrepreneurial resilience and business skills to understand the factors leading to successful social enterprise performance for women social entrepreneurs.

Major public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure or Google, offer seamless experiences for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). With the emergence of the public cloud's vast usage, administrators must be able to have a reliable method to provide the seamless experience that a public cloud offers on a smaller scale, such as a private cloud. When a smaller deployment or a private cloud is needed, OpenStack can meet the goals without increasing cost or sacrificing data control.

To demonstrate these enablement goals of resiliency and elasticity in IaaS and PaaS, the authors design a private distributed system cloud platform using OpenStack and its core services of Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Horizon and Glance on a five-node deployment.

Through the demonstration of dynamically adding an IaaS node, pushing the deployment to its physical and logical limits, and eventually crashing the deployment, this paper shows how the PackStack utility facilitates the provisioning of an elastic and resilient OpenStack-based IaaS platform that can be used in production if the deployment is kept within designated boundaries.

The authors adopt the multinode-capable PackStack utility in favor of an all-in-one OpenStack build for a true demonstration of resiliency, elasticity and scalability in a small-scale IaaS. An all-in-one deployment is generally used for proof-of-concept deployments and is not easily scaled in production across multiple nodes. The authors demonstrate that combining PackStack with the multi-node design is suitable for smaller-scale production IaaS and PaaS deployments.

The Employee Provident Fund Organization (EPFO), established by the Government of India is one of the World's Largest Social Security Organizations. The purpose of EPFO is to ensure social security for Industrial workers and their dependents. EPFO maintains more than 15 crore accounts of its members. Traditionally EPFO had been functioning as a legacy organization, administered and managed by Indian bureaucracy. Operational processes were riddled with over emphasis on rules and regulations, but were weak on transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency. The 120 EPFO offices established all over the country operated in silos. Consequently, the very purpose of social security and welfare of the industrial employees suffered, while all other stake holders enjoyed significant controlling power. Recent interventions at EPFO were focused on process reengineering and ICT enablement to make EPFO more customer-centric. The case documents the transformation of EPFO from a bureaucratic, opaque organization to a customer centric, stakeholder friendly, transparent and accountable organization through IT enabled operations.