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Due to the limitations of conventional urban planning, it is essential to develop novel techniques of urban futruing. This paper aimed to use the scenario technique to create four plausible narratives of the future of Isfahan. Also, the authors described the problems of city foresight in the Global South.

This paper chronicles the Schwartzian steps taken to build explorative scenarios of Isfahan City in Iran in 2040. After using a STEEPV (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political, Value) analysis, the authors prioritized the collected variables by combining influence diagrams, the iceberg metaphor and an expert-based survey. Once the key uncertainties were derived, four scenarios were developed and discussed.

Through thematic analysis of the official visions of Isfahan’s future and the juxtaposition of these narratives with insight yielded in the scenario-development process, the paper concludes that the Northernness of the prevailing urban imaginaries, uncritical mimetic benchmarking, depoliticization of urban futures and the decorative reductionistic visions colonize urban futures in Isfahan/Iran. Critical/deconstructive city foresight and application of discomfort/ignorance criteria in the generation of scenarios can improve the rigor and quality of city foresight in the Global South.

The application of city foresight in the Global South has been limited. The paper is a step toward bridging this gap and providing some recommendations on how city foresight in the Global South might differ from its counterparts in the Global North.

This study aims to establish an assessment model to measure big data readiness in the public sector, specifically targeting local governments at the provincial and city/regency levels. Additionally, the study aims to gain valuable insights into the readiness of selected local governments in Indonesia by using the established assessment model.

This study uses a mixed-method approach, using focus group discussions (FGDs), surveys and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to establish the assessment model. The FGDs involve gathering perspectives on readiness variables from experts in academia, government and practice, whereas the survey collects data from a sample of selected local governments using a questionnaire developed based on the variables obtained in FGDs. The EFA is used on survey data to condense the variables into a smaller set of dimensions or factors. Ultimately, the assessment model is applied to evaluate the level of big data readiness among the selected Indonesian local governments.

FGDs identify 32 essential variables for evaluating the readiness of local governments to adopt big data. Subsequently, EFA reduces this number by five and organizes the remaining variables into four factors: big data strategy, policy and collaboration, infrastructure and human resources and data collection and utilization. The application of the assessment model reveals that the overall readiness for big data in the selected local governments is primarily moderate, with those in the Java cluster displaying higher readiness. In addition, the data collection and utilization factor achieves the highest score among the four factors.

This study offers an assessment model for evaluating big data readiness within local governments by combining perspectives from big data experts in academia, government and practice.

This paper is premised upon an analysis of 26 cities within the UK regarding their smart city projects. Each city was analyzed through news articles, reports and policy documents to ascertain the level of each city's development as a smart city. Each was coded by separating the projects into five types, which were ranked on a scale from 0 (no plans for use) to 5 (project type in use). The most common types are the provision of open data and the creation of business ecosystems as the primary driver of the smart city. However, many councils and enterprises proclaim smartness before the technology is actually in use, making it difficult to separate what is utilised and what is under development. Therefore, this paper further carried out an analysis of 20 cities and their intended plans to usher in the smart city, to observe the expected emergence of smart city technology. This was achieved by interrogating various roadmaps and policy documents produced by the respective cities. It was found that the most prevalent form of emergent smart city technology is the rollout of 5G and increased educational programmes alongside a proliferation of internet of things and electric vehicle usage.

This empirical chapter explores the case of Baltic Creative Community Interest Company (BC CIC), a creative hub that enabled and demonstrated intrapersonal entrepreneurial capitals (Pret et al., 2016) to adapt quickly and develop novel offers for their tenants during an unprecedented period of crisis and change in the wider ecosystem. BCCIC is a community-owned property development company established to regenerate an underused post-industrial area in Liverpool and support the Creative and Digital community. Over the past decade, they have become a creative hub where small, unique micro-businesses thrive alongside more established enterprises.

Using an organisational ethnographic approach, the authors highlight the complexity in the conversion of entrepreneurial capitals and how this has demonstrated resilience and adaptability in the CIC during the global coronavirus pandemic in the 2020s. During the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, The CIC responded swiftly to tenants by providing a wide variety of business support initiatives. Regular communications on sector-specific COVID-19 operational guidance and a support programme to help tenants apply for Liverpool City Council Small Business Support grants.

The establishment of this hub for creative entrepreneurs prior to the recent disruption proved invaluable. Although they were severely tested, emerging behaviours, such as agility, adaptability, and resilience during periods of crisis, were identified. This chapter offers key insights for scholars and those leading on creative hubs and cluster policy development and economic initiatives for creative sector support regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Diffusion of innovations, defined as the adoption and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, or services in health care, is both particularly important and especially challenging. One known problem with adoption and implementation of new technologies is that, while organizations often make innovations immediately available, organizational actors are more wary about adopting new technologies because these may impact not only patients and practices but also reimbursement. As a result, innovations may remain underutilized, and organizations may miss opportunities to improve and advance. As innovation adoption is vital to achieving success and remaining competitive, it is important to measure and understand factors that impact innovation diffusion. Building on a survey of a national sample of 654 clinicians, our study measures the extent of diffusion of value-enhancing care delivery innovations (i.e., technologies that not only improve quality of care but has potential to reduce care cost by diminishing waste, Faems et al., 2010) for 13 clinical specialties and identifies healthcare-specific individual characteristics such as: professional purview, supervisory responsibility, financial incentive, and clinical tenure associated with innovation diffusion. We also examine the association of innovation diffusion with perceived value of one type of care delivery innovation – artificial intelligence (AI) – for assisting clinicians in their clinical work. Responses indicate that less than two-thirds of clinicians were knowledgeable about and aware of relevant value-enhancing care delivery innovations. Clinicians with broader professional purview, more supervisory responsibility, and stronger financial incentives had higher innovation diffusion scores, indicating greater knowledge and awareness of value-enhancing, care delivery innovations. Higher levels of knowledge of the innovations and awareness of their implementation were associated with higher perceptions of the value of AI-based technology. Our study contributes to our knowledge of diffusion of innovation in healthcare delivery and highlights potential mechanisms for speeding innovation diffusion.

Resilience has evolved as a dynamic process in the entrepreneurship field. The purpose of this paper is to outline a comprehensive structure to analyse the patterns and trends in the publications of the existing literature at the junction of entrepreneurship and resilience. With the help of bibliometric and network analysis, this study offers insights into the topic that have not been evaluated and assessed by previous reviews.

A computerised search of 104 papers was performed using the Scopus database, and graphical visualisation of the bibliographic material was developed using VOSviewer software.

This comprehensive bibliometric mapping helps in the graphical visualisation of publication evolution of the domain along with identifying present research trends and possible future directions. There is not much collaborative research in the field, as most prolific thinkers work in isolation or in pairs. Hence, there are limited publications in top-rated journals. Future researchers need to work collaboratively to produce high-quality papers. Developed nations make a sound contribution to the field. The exact significance of resilience in entrepreneurship is yet to be determined due to a wide variety of themes that reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of the domain.

Uncovering the trends and developments of the field, this study provides a global perspective and potential themes lying at the junction of resilience and entrepreneurship. Hence, this study provides a robust roadmap for future researchers interested in this area.

Alain Bouchard was born in 1949. He bought his first convenience store in 1978, when he was almost 30 years old. By then, he already had nearly 10 years of experience in the sector. He had already been involved in the start-up of more than 200 convenience stores. He understood that if he was to transform his newly acquired store into a chain and build something big, he needed to set up a team of people with complementary skills to help him make acquisitions.

In 2023, there are roughly 15,000 convenience stores operating under the Circle K/Ingo/Couche-Tard banners, employing 130,000 people in more than 30 countries. Annual sales are more than US$60 billion. Alain Bouchard officially retired from his position as President and CEO in 2014 and became Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board. He continues to be a major shareholder. He is still actively involved in strategic orientations and in identifying potential acquisitions. He has become a ‘Chief Culture Officer’ involved in executive leadership mentoring. He has never stopped communicating the importance of innovative, creative and intrapreneurial behaviour at all levels of the enterprise.

This case study presents Alain Bouchard, the man and the entrepreneur. It shows how he learned and mastered the craft of starting, acquiring, managing and developing convenience stores. It looks at how he encouraged the people around him to act as facilitators and intrapreneurs. It describes his values, how he works and learned to live with risk.

The objective of this paper is to examine the ways in which tourism can be regarded as a catalyst for positive change, benefiting both people and the planet. The authors consider the integral role of community engagement as a tangible component within the governance frameworks of destination management organizations (DMOs).

Originating from the authors' professional experience and academic expertise in managing and marketing tourist destinations, both at the local and regional levels, the article explores the pressing requirement for reevaluating policies and strategies. It aims to emphatically underscore and reiterate the role of tourism as a pivotal driver for enhancing peoples' quality of life and ensuring the sustainability of tourist destinations. This effort involves not only maintaining equilibrium among the four widely recognized pillars of sustainability but also pondering the significance of an equally crucial aspect of destination management – the political sustainability of the governance framework of tourist destinations.

Current realities encourage the authors to contemplate and act, guided by the unfolding of tourism's swift regenerative influence. It is anticipated that people have gleaned vital lessons from the collective pause people underwent during the pandemic, coupled with the stark realization of being unable to partake in the favourable contributions of tourism in everyday life. This article highlights the urgency of implementing DMO models that are capable of conceptualizing and operationalizing a human-centred tourism development policy and the resulting sustainability strategies, enhancing representation and guidance for the satisfaction of stakeholders.

It is neither a widespread practice, nor are there many prior studies that tackle the potential of forecasting the comprehensiveness of governance and management models for tourist destinations that encompass stakeholders who represent the direct interests of local communities within the tourism system. Supported by a literature review, analysis of secondary data and the first-hand experience of the authors, it becomes apparent that the operational landscape of most organizations functioning as tourist destination managers is predominantly at the regional and local tiers. These very organizations are the ones that have been progressively evolving, displaying a readiness to introduce innovation in this realm. Implementing these models would represent an approach to governance more inclined towards a bottom-up style, thereby posing a challenge to the more rigid and commonly employed strategies that emanate from a centrally structured national framework.

Using a real-time road network combined with historical traffic data for Al-Salt city, the paper aims to propose a new federated genetic algorithm (GA)-based optimization technique to solve the dynamic vehicle routing problem. Using a GA solver, the estimated routing time for 300 chromosomes (routes) was the shortest and most efficient over 30 generations.

In transportation systems, the objective of route planning techniques has been revised from focusing on road directors to road users. As a result, the new transportation systems use advanced technologies to support drivers and provide them with the road information they need and the services they require to reduce traffic congestion and improve routing problems. In recent decades, numerous studies have been conducted on how to find an efficient and suitable route for vehicles, known as the vehicle routing problem (VRP). To identify the best route, VRP uses real-time information-acquired geographical information systems (GIS) tools.

This study aims to develop a route planning tool using ArcGIS network analyst to enhance both cost and service quality measures, taking into account several factors to determine the best route based on the users’ preferences.

Furthermore, developing a route planning tool using ArcGIS network analyst to enhance both cost and service quality measures, taking into account several factors to determine the best route based on the users’ preferences. An adaptive genetic algorithm (GA) is used to determine the optimal time route, taking into account factors that affect vehicle arrival times and cause delays. In addition, ArcGIS' Network Analyst tool is used to determine the best route based on the user's preferences using a real-time map.