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The procurement and supply of crucial healthcare products in the early stages of the COVID-19 emergency were chaotic. To prepare for future crises, we must be able to describe what went wrong, and why, and map out ways to build agility and resilience. How can this be done effectively, given the highly complex and diverse network of actors across governments, care providers and supply chains, and the extreme uncertainty and dynamism in the procurement system and supplier markets? The purpose of this study was to capture learning from practitioners in “real time” in a way that could frame and inform capacity building across healthcare systems with varying procurement and supply management maturity.

This exploratory study involved interviews with 58 senior public procurement practitioners in central and regional governments, NGOs and leaders of professional organizations from 23 countries, very early in the COVID crisis. Following the first, inductive phase of analysis leading to five descriptive dimensions, the awareness-motivation-capability (A-M-C) framework was applied in a further round of coding, to understand immediate challenges faced by procurement practitioners, how the complex, multi-level procurement system that shaped their motivations to respond and critical capabilities required to face these challenges.

Developments across 23 countries and practitioners' learning about procurement and supply in the pandemic crisis can be captured in five overarching themes: governance and organization, knowledge and skills, information systems, regulation and supply base issues. Together these themes cover the strengths and gaps in procurement and supply capability encountered by procurement leaders and front-line personnel. They highlight the various facets of structure, resource and process which constitute organizational capability. However, to account better for the highly dynamic situation characterized by both unprecedented rivalry and cooperation, analysts must also pay attention to actors' emerging awareness of the situation and their rapidly changing motivations.

The application of the A-M-C framework is unique in the healthcare supply chain and disaster management literature. It enables a comprehensive overview of healthcare procurement from a system perspective. This study shows how increasing system preparedness for future emergencies depends both on developing critical capabilities and understanding how awareness and motivation influence the effective deployment of those capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an existing collaborative research methodology process (Sabri, 2018), contextualise it for application in humanitarian supply chains and test it empirically.

Building on collaborative research methodology and humanitarian supply chain literature, the Sabri’s (2018) collaborative research methodology process is further developed to comprise eight phases of collaborative research contextualised for the humanitarian supply chain domain. The process is applied in a collaborative research case of academia–practitioner knowledge co-creation in a humanitarian supply chain setting, focussing on environmental sustainability improvement. The collaborative case analysis suggests a number of refinements to the elements of the process. This study undertook two cycles of academia–practitioner collaborative research.

In testing the process, a noticeable improvement in the collaboration among different humanitarian stakeholders was observed, leading to improved stakeholder management. The implementation improved the sustainability awareness and social inclusion of the affected population. Rurality, remoteness, security issues and resistance of field staff against change were among the main challenges for supply chain researchers to engage in collaborative research in the humanitarian domain.

The paper addresses the rigour‒relevance‒reflectiveness debate in the humanitarian supply chain domain. A collaborative research methodology process derived from action research is further developed using humanitarian literature, and then it is applied in a humanitarian logistics case focussed on environmental sustainability. The present collaborative research process facilitates engaged scholarship among the humanitarian stakeholders, as the researchers’ roles move from observatory to participatory knowledge broker.

Suppliers are essential partners in innovation projects, as they own resources, knowledge assets and capabilities that complement those of buying firms. In today’s competitive environment, firms may choose to collaborate with suppliers beyond dyads, forming triadic or three-party relationships. Using the theoretical lens of the relational view (RV), this study aims to explore what type of triad configurations firms use to govern supplier relationships in collaborative innovation projects, how they choose to share resources and implications for project performance.

The authors use interview data from buyers and suppliers in six case studies of firms involved in ten collaborative innovation projects. The four constructs of the RV are used to observe how firms govern triadic relationships, combine complementary resources, invest in relationship-specific assets and manage information and knowledge exchange with and between suppliers in innovation projects.

Four archetypes of triadic relationships in innovation projects – labeled Triangle, A-frame, D-Frame and Line – are presented and characterized in terms of their structural and relational features. The authors discuss how each triad archetype is applicable to different innovation projects according to specific project characteristics.

This study is pioneering in its empirical examination of triadic relationships in collaborative innovation projects. It provides a novel typology of four archetypes of triad from the perspective of collaborative relationships with suppliers. Through applying the RV, it advances understanding of how triadic relationships are governed, how they invest in relationship-specific assets, how they combine complementary resources and how they exchange knowledge and information in each type of triad appropriate to different innovation project settings. To date, much of the extant literature has focused on dyads.

Takes a holistic view of supply chain management tracing supply chains ultimately to end customers. Describes findings from empirical research in European automotive aftermarket supply chains performed under the EC ESPRIT initiative in the CMSO (CIM for Multi‐Supplier Operations) project. The field research was carried out in non‐vertically integrated supply chains in the UK and Spain. The main findings are: chains in different territories exhibited different operational requirements; and position in the supply chain gave rise to different operational requirements. From these findings concludes that, in order to manage supply chains, we must identify each chain player’s role in contributing to satisfying end customer requirements, recognizing that these roles may differ depending on the international environmental context and position in the supply chain.

This article proposes a conceptualisation for supply strategy – an explanation for how organisations arrange and conduct themselves within modern economic environments, in order to satisfy markets in the long and short terms. After an explanation of the emerging global environment within which organisations must compete, the previous approaches to explaining this area of business are explored and found to be insufficient for the new context. There follows a conceptualisation and an account of new, supporting research – a Delphi survey, conducted to test, extend and validate some of the features of the concept. Finally, some suggestions are made for the further development of supply strategy as a useful subject area for managers and researchers.

The purpose of this paper, using an evidence‐based management theoretical lens, is to examine research impact to provide guidance to supply chain management academics in evidencing and exploiting the outputs, outcomes and impact of their research.

Evidence‐based management theory is examined and applied to types of academic research impact. The distinction between academic and non‐academic impact is developed into a supply chain framework of research outputs, transfer, outcomes, impact and national/international benefits. Impact of supply chain management research is explored through a case study in the English National Health Service. Future opportunities and challenges for supply chain management researchers arising from increasing demand for and supply of evidence are discussed.

Author academic impact and citations are found to be increasingly important building blocks of evidence‐based evaluations of individual academics, journals, research quality assessments of groups and universities, and global rankings of universities. Supply chain management researchers can compare their impact with other areas of academia. Non‐academic impact of research has been assessed by funders of research projects and has spread to research quality assessments of universities.

Bibliometrics provide evidence of author and journal impact that can be used in human resource decisions, research quality assessments and global rankings of universities; this availability enables a debate on appropriate use of academic impact evidence. Supply chain management academics evidencing non‐academic research impact on business, society and economy will enable governments and funders of research to evaluate value for money return on their investment.

This perspective of evidence‐based evaluation of research impact and its implications might encourage debate on academic and non‐academic impact and encourage supply chain researchers to consider evidencing impact in their research design and methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the risks managers and individual supply chains perceive from e-business.

This research takes a long-term, staged view of the risks managers and individual supply chains perceive from e-business. By taking a two-stage approach, investigating four supply chains at a three year interval, the research considers perceived risks from e-business and the extent to which these risks obtained.

E-business has the potential to deliver substantial benefits, but it also involves new and different risks. This research finds that small firms (SMEs) adopted a “watching brief” rather than implemented e-business. Between the two studies it emerges that e-business can support rather than detract from inter-organisational relationships. Global forces are in evidence in terms of low cost competition, but low cost competitors are not e-enabled.

Limitations, pragmatism and opportunism in the sampling is acknowledged. For example, the work and concepts that led to the expectation of e-business dominating and decimating industrial supply chains may have been based in chains more open to external forces than the ones examined here. Further research is required that identifies the minimum critical mass necessary to retain national manufacturing capacity at a chain or sector level, and empirical work is needed on the suggested link between supply chain stability and certainty of payment. The cases here are based on four UK supply chains, so various chain forms are likely to have been excluded.

This research, by taking a staged approach and going back to the same chain and reviewing perceived risks, identifies how the build up of numerous – but small – events, for example factory closures, can aggregate over time to be just as significant as high profile, headline-worthy risks. Methods that produce a snapshot such as a one-off survey may be inadequate for fully exploring an area such as risk. Especially if the risks are hard to assess and are biased toward high profile events – catastrophic risks rather than accumulations of smaller, less noticeable risks.

The articulation of supply networks, as an extension of supply chains, seeks to accommodate and explain the commercial complexity associated with the creation and delivery of goods and services from the source of raw materials to their destination in end‐customer markets. In place of the simplistic, linear and unidirectional model sometimes presented for supply chains, the supply network concept describes lateral links, reverse loops, two‐way exchanges and so on, encompassing the upstream and downstream activity, with a focal firm as the point of reference. A review of classifications of supply networks reveals that none of the existing approaches appears adequate for managers facing the practical problems of creating and operating them on a day‐to‐day basis. This research identifies differing emphases that may be required for managing within supply networks, according to the nature of the products for which they are created. Taking an established categorisation of supply chains as its starting point, the research first develops the conceptual basis, using strategy literature, and then tests the resultant initial model in 16 case studies. Finally, a new categorisation for supply networks is presented, using the type of product as a differentiator.

The objective of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the impact of context on the adoption of e‐commerce in supply chains.

A literature review, 45 semi‐structured interviews in four different supply chains in the UK healthcare sector, involving 16 different organisations, and additional documentation is used in this study.

The adoption of e‐commerce in supply chains is simultaneously affected by two contextual meta‐variables: external pressure, which is influenced by supply chain structure, demand and industry characteristics; and internal readiness, which is influenced by IT, organisational and buying need characteristics. Different combinations of these two main variables lead to four different trade‐off situations affecting adoption or non‐adoption.

The empirical research has been undertaken in the specific context of the UK healthcare supply chains. It would be useful to test our findings in other sectors and countries.

The paper helps to understand the contextual factors that affect e‐commerce adoption and concludes with a framework that differentiates four situations that can improve managers' and researchers' understanding of e‐commerce adoption in the future.

The contribution of this paper is the recognition that the adoption of e‐commerce is affected by factors in both an organisational and a supply chain context, which simultaneously lead to trade‐off decisions. Also, unlike most other studies which refer to supply chains and are limited to an organisational perspective or at most a dyadic perspective, this paper builds up a supply chain picture of context by including perspectives from multiple actors in a chain.