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This study investigates how firms’ awareness of sustainability affects the revision of their internationalization strategy. Adopting a resource-based view (RBV) approach, the authors argue that sustainable-oriented firms have a higher propensity to de-internationalize (i.e., to go back to their home country) when confronted with the need to relocate foreign manufacturing subsidiaries, as the shortening of value chains would allow the reduction of transportation emissions and enhanced corporate image as green-oriented entities. Furthermore, the authors explore the role exerted by a stringent regulatory setting in the home country on the likelihood of de-internationalization. The empirical test conducted on a sample of relocations performed across European nations in 2002–2014 reveals that multinational enterprises (MNEs) – regardless of their sustainability orientation – have a higher probability to de-internationalize when their home countries have strict institutional contexts in place.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.

The purpose of this study is to comprehend how AI aids marketers in engaging customers and generating value for the company by way of customer engagement (CE). CE is a popular area of research for scholars and practitioners. One area of research that could have far-reaching ramifications with regard to strengthening CE is artificial intelligence (AI). Consequently, it becomes extremely important to understand how AI is helping the marketer reach customers and create value for the firm via CE.

A detailed approach using both systematic review and bibliometric analysis was used. It involved identifying key research areas, the most influential authors, studies, journals, countries and organisations. Then, a comprehensive analysis of 50 papers was carried out in the four identified clusters through co-citation analysis. Furthermore, a content analysis of 42 articles for the past six years was also conducted.

Emerging themes explored through cluster analysis are CE concepts and value creation, social media strategies, big data innovation and significance of AI in tertiary industry. Identified themes for content analysis are CE conceptualisation, CE behaviour in social media, CE role in value co-creation and CE via AI.

CE has emerged as a topic of great interest for marketers in recent years. With the rapid growth of digital media and the spread of social media, firms are now embarking on new online strategies to promote CE (Javornik and Mandelli, 2012). In this review, the authors have thoroughly assessed multiple facets of prior research papers focused on the utilisation of AI in the context of CE. The existing research papers highlighted that AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants offer real-time interaction capabilities, swiftly addressing inquiries, delivering assistance and navigating customers through their experiences (Cheng and Jiang, 2022; Naqvi et al., 2023). This rapid and responsive engagement serves to enrich the customer’s overall interaction with the business. Consequently, this research can contribute to a comprehensive knowledge of how AI is assisting marketers to reach customers and create value for the firm via CE. This study also sheds light on both the attitudinal and behavioural aspects of CE on social media. While existing CE literature highlights the motivating factors driving engagement, the study underscores the significance of behavioural engagement in enhancing firm performance. It emphasises the need for researchers to understand the intricate dynamics of engagement in the context of hedonic products compared to utilitarian ones (Wongkitrungrueng and Assarut, 2020). CEs on social media assist firms in using their customers as advocates and value co-creators (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Sawhney et al., 2005). A few of the CE themes are conceptual in nature; hence, there is an opportunity for scholarly research in CE to examine the ways in which AI-driven platforms can effectively gather customer insights. As per the prior relationship marketing studies, it is evident that building relationships reduces customer uncertainty (Barari et al., 2020). Therefore, by using data analysis, businesses can extract valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviour, equipping them to engage with customers more effectively.

The rapid growth of social media has enabled individuals to articulate their thoughts, opinions and emotions related to a brand, which creates a large amount of data for VCC. Meanwhile, AI has emerged as a radical way of providing value content to users. It expands on a broader concept of how software and algorithms work like human beings. Data collected from customer interactions are a major prerequisite for efficiently using AI for enhancing CE. AI not only reduces error rates but, at the same time, helps human beings in decision-making during complex situations. Owing to built-in algorithms that analyse large amounts of data, companies can inspect areas that require improvement in real time. Time and resources can also be saved by automating tasks contingent on customer responses and insights. AI enables the analysis of customer data to create highly personalised experiences. It can also forecast customer behaviour and trends, helping businesses anticipate needs and preferences. This enables proactive CE strategies, such as targeted offers or timely outreach. Furthermore, AI tools can analyse customer feedback and sentiment across various channels. This feedback can be used to make necessary improvements and address concerns promptly, ultimately fostering stronger customer relationships. AI can facilitate seamless engagement across multiple digital channels, ensuring that customers can interact with a brand through their preferred means, be it social media, email, or chat. Consequently, this research proposes that practitioners and companies can use analysis performed by AI-enabled systems on CEB, which can assist companies in exploring the extent to which each product influences CE. Understanding the importance of these attributes would assist companies in developing more memorable CE features.

This study examines how prominent CE and AI are in academic research on social media by identifying research gaps and future developments. This research provides an overview of CE research and will assist academicians, regulators and policymakers in identifying the important topics that require investigation.

This study aims to investigate purchasing manager’s core competencies during supplier collaboration and explain the mechanism through which these competencies can affect purchasing firm’s innovative performance.

The authors conducted 22 semidirective interviews with managers in diverse functions such as purchasing, supply-chain management and product development across industries and across nations (mostly India and France), which allow to formulate the propositions.

Through open coding, the authors identify three path-dependent, causally ambiguous and socially complex core competencies of purchasing managers: relational and emotional, communicational and creative and cognitive competencies; and through axial coding, the authors explain how these intangible core competencies support implementation of market orientation. To provide supporting arguments for the propositions, the authors use the resource-based view of the firm and dynamic capability theory.

The first theoretical contribution of this study is focusing on the impact of competency–capability dyad in terms of performance. The second theoretical contribution of this study is to identify market orientation as a flexible and dynamic managerial capability.

The first managerial contribution is that the authors have identified and described three sets of a purchasing manager’s core competencies during supplier collaboration that affect the firm’s performance: relational and emotional, communicational and creative and cognitive competencies. The second managerial contribution relates to the mechanism through which purchasing managers’ core competencies during supplier collaboration affect firms’ outcomes.

The value of the results is in the explanation of the mechanism, i.e. market orientation dynamic capability, through which the competencies of purchasing managers can affect purchasing firm’s innovative performance.

Even though sustainability appears to be a relevant driver for the relocation of production, this has only to a limited extent been studied as an independent motive or a result of backshoring. This study explores the literature on backshoring and sustainability and discusses some empirical cases to shed light on the connection between sustainability and backshoring. This study argues that sustainability issues may require a broader perspective than the dominant economic logic framing previous studies on backshoring. Institutional theory is suggested as a theoretical framework for analyzing how sustainability can play a role in companies’ backshoring decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected service small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), increasing the importance of understanding how these businesses can become more resilient and how service innovation can be an effective strategy to increase their adaptive capacity and survival. This study aims to examine the role of dynamic capabilities in service innovation as a factor explaining the resilience of SMEs in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic during the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on service innovation. Additionally, the authors assess whether service innovation has a significant impact on value cocreation in these businesses.

This study used a quantitative method by surveying 118 SME owners in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The data were analyzed using partial least-squares structural equation modeling.

The results reflect important theoretical contributions by analyzing resilience from an innovation perspective instead of a retrospective approach, which is an area that has not been analyzed in the literature. Additionally, theoretical contributions to marketing services in SMEs are discussed, which is an underresearched topic. The results advance by discussing the role of service innovation through the reconfiguration of resources and how this can be an effective strategy to increase value cocreation with customers during crises.

This study is original in that it analyzes resilience from the perspective of innovation, and not from a retrospective approach. It offers a vision in response to the need for studies that provide a clearer conceptualization of resilience in small businesses. This highlights the importance of considering regional differences and service innovation as effective strategies to enhance resilience and value cocreation with customers.

This systematic literature review aims to identify the main areas of study related to co-creation and innovation in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), as well as the main external and internal stakeholders with whom co-creation is made.

The empirical approach is based on 258 articles selected from the Web of Science (WoS), Clarivate Analytics and Scopus, Elsevier databases, with analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords following a research protocol. VOS viewer and CitNetExplorer software were used, with the twin aim of identifying publications with a higher number of citations and designing maps of reference word co-occurrence.

The analysis led to three clusters being identified: Cluster 1. Management and transfer of knowledge from HEIs to companies; Cluster 2. Co-creation and innovation in HEIs through cooperation between universities and companies; and Cluster 3. Universities’ third mission and their role in developing entrepreneurship education. The results of the literature clusters analysis led to proposing a conceptual model of analysis.

Despite only employing two databases and the content analysis criteria, the three found clusters are linked, recognising the interplay between co-creation and innovation in HEIs, knowledge transfer to enterprises and the influence on HEIs' third goal.

This systematic literature review highlights and gives a picture of the state-of-the-art in co-creation and innovation in HEIs, as well as presenting a model of co-creation and innovation in HEIs that can contribute to reinforcing the University-Industry-Community ties.

This study can lead to a better knowledge of the issue of co-creation and innovation at HEIs, as well as a deeper analysis of the sorts of relationships between HEIs and their stakeholders, as well as its impact on surrounding areas and influence.

The research highlights the interaction between HEIs and their stakeholders on a basis of value co-creation and innovation, providing mutual benefits for all involved, as well as greater development and recognition of HEIs and their surrounding regions’ image andreputation. A future research agenda is also presented on the topic of co-creation and innovation in HEIs.

This study investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on corporate innovation. We selected the listed nonfinancial firms of South Asian Economies. The sample of the study comprised a total of 426 listed manufacturing firms of South Asian Countries for period spans 10 years from 2012 to 2021. In this study, descriptive statistics, multicollinearity diagnostic tests, correlation analysis and two-step dynamic panel system generalized method of moments (GMM) were applied to analyze the data. CSR measured with three proxies' social indicators, environmental indicators, and CSR composite index of social and environmental indicators. However, corporate innovation is captured with number of citations received in a year and number of patents filed in the year. Overall, findings of the study using all measures of CSR shows that CSR significantly and positively related with corporate innovation. Our results find support for CSR-innovation view with all measures of CSR. The findings suggest that the current study is helpful for managers, regulators, policymakers, and researchers. For managers, the study helps them to make the CSR and innovation decision. The policymakers should take appropriate innovative decision while considering factors such as CSR. This study can also be extended by considering this study for developed and emerging economies sample.

An in-depth analysis of how senior managers in a large multinational corporation interpret their social and environmental responsibilities revealed that, notwithstanding formal corporate interpretations, discrepancies persisted in their interpretation of what was expected of them and how to implement it. Two fault lines emerged: (1) an instrumental versus a normative interpretation of corporate societal responsibilities, and (2) a focus on ‘doing less/no harm’ versus ‘doing more good’. This chapter introduces a theoretical framework that combines these fault lines to form four quadrants that each represent a different set of challenges managers face as they commit to improving their organisation’s impact on society. Rather than adjudicate between them, a holistic interpretation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes all four types into account. But the four types of challenges differ considerably in nature and thus in the strategic approach that is necessary to deal with them. In this chapter, each quadrant is discussed in detail. What characterises the issues in this quadrant, what mindset, and what strategy are necessary to address them? The chapter concludes with the observation that the framework, and the taxonomy of types of CSR challenges that it brings to the fore, creates greater awareness of how industries are confronted with different sets of challenges and thus need different strategic approaches. A better understanding of these differences may lead to more support, in particular for those managers who work in industries that face a disproportionate share of one particular type of challenges, the ‘nasty trade-offs’.