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To further extend the understanding of the aggregating functions of an entrepreneurial business network, this paper attempts to explore the antecedents enabling the organisation of diverse entrepreneurs to engage in a collaborative inter-firm business network project. This paper also elucidates the development of the relational capabilities and performance of entrepreneurial business networks.

An explorative, longitudinal case study design is employed to analyse an Italian agricultural business network, which comprised a group of local small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using the network as the focus of analysis, the case study draws insights from key informants comprising the network management team and the entrepreneurs who make up the membership of the business network.

The results of the study provide critical factors for successful organisation of inter-firm engagement. Although these factors are not mutually exclusive, the results show that organising for inter-firm engagement in an entrepreneurial business network context positively influenced the network relational performance and entrepreneurs' innovation capabilities.

The paper extends current understanding of inter-organisational engagement and illuminates the antecedents enabling the development of network relational dynamics capabilities. The empirical results provide unusual insights into the aggregating roles of an entrepreneurial business network, giving practitioners practical insights into managing a successful inter-organisational collaborative project. Using the relevant theoretical frameworks, the study empirically tests the organisation solutions relevant to literature on inter-firm engagement in a business network context and addresses the organisation solutions' interrelationship and linkages to entrepreneurial network relational performance in terms of knowledge practice, information and resources sharing and innovation.

The purpose of this study is to identify the role of mediators in supporting value co-creation for vulnerable consumers in a service context. The authors propose that in transformative services, the roles of actor mediators facilitate control and empowerment for the vulnerable consumer – labelling these transformative service mediators (TSMs).

The authors develop a theoretical framework for the activities of mediators in value co-creation considering the interrelationships of vulnerability, structure and agency. The authors then use Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s DART (Dialogue, Access, Risk Assessment and Transparency) model as the integrating framework to describe the TSM roles in the context of the foster care service ecosystem.

The authors introduce a future research agenda regarding TSM roles in transformational service experiences and value co-creation with vulnerable consumers. Service researchers and providers are encouraged to explore effective training and motivation of TSMs.

Understanding value co-creation for vulnerable consumers is an emerging area in service research. The TSM concept introduces a new approach to explore how value co-creation and transformative outcomes can be enhanced in service contexts where consumers experience vulnerability.

This paper presents an agenda for future research. The outcomes of future research based on TSM roles may help guide service providers in identifying opportunities for enhancing well-being and reducing vulnerability in service delivery.

This paper suggests that exploring the role of TSMs in the service process offers new insights into reducing vulnerability in service relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to identify issues that are critical to developing complex, business‐to‐business products and discuss implications for vendor firms.

This paper employs the critical review approach to current complex product literature and draws from relevant literature streams in engineering, management, and marketing to propose a conceptual framework.

The critical review of the complex products research reveals the following as critical issues for research and practice in the development of complex products: definition, internal and external complexity, product and process complexity, standardized to customized complex products continuum, component and process modularity, and operant resources.

This paper identifies six specific operant resources that are critical to the development of complex products and proposes a conceptual framework. Clearly, more needs to be done in terms of theoretical and empirical research with reference to the development of complex, business‐to‐business products. For example, researchers could empirically test the proposed framework; identify other relevant operant resources; and critique the proposed framework and develop a new, more comprehensive framework.

Firms that develop complex products could focus on developing the six operant resources that can help them become competent in developing complex products; and developing organizational structures and policies and providing an organizational environment that is conducive to developing robust internal and external social capital.

The proposed conceptual framework provides a theoretical foundation for practitioners and researchers to build on.

The purpose of this study is to recognize the facilitators and inhibitors of value co-creation in the industrial service environment.

First, a systematic literature review (SLR) based on the systematic search flow (SSF) method was conducted, using six databases. Then, the content analysis proposed by Bardin (2011) was used to analyze the selected papers from SLR.

The authors identified a total of 11 facilitators and four inhibitors of value co-creation in industrial services. The findings show that concerning facilitators, the involvement of actors and synergy among participants reported a higher presence. As for the inhibitors, incompatibility among actors and actors' inexperience in the context of value co-creation were the ones that registered the most frequency.

Even though the SLR covered a large proportion of the studies available, this research may not have enabled a complete coverage of all existing peer-reviewed papers in the field of value co-creation in industrial services.

This study assists managers in enhancing the performance of the value co-creation process. This is because, by knowing both the facilitators and inhibitors, managers can have an improved understanding of this process, thereby pondering these elements on the elaboration of their strategies and decision-making.

This study is one of the first attempts to recognize both the facilitators and inhibitors of value co-creation in industrial services.

Recent technological advances have enabled consumers and citizens to contribute to organizational processes through co-production and co-creation in ways that challenge traditional co-production. However, the practices and capabilities for value co-creation are less understood, particularly in an increasingly networked social government ecosystem. The purpose of this research is to examine the enablement of new digital co-production practices in social media platforms (SMPs) and theorize SMP-enabled digital co-production vis-à-vis traditional co-production for public sector.

Primarily using principles of interpretivist approaches, a qualitative content analysis of communication practices (i.e. genres) observed within Australian government Facebook pages was carried out to examine the salient digital forms of co-production practices.

SMPs enable new practices in digital co-production for public sector (information dissemination, Q&A, feedback and co-creation), ranging from lower to higher intensity in terms of resource integration, scale of contributions, engagement and extent of relationship vis-à-vis traditional co-production.

This research is bounded by its geographical emphasis on Australian Federal government. Hence, the results may not be readily transferable to other contexts.

Our framework offers an array of choices for digital co-production strategies to suit agency's focus and goals for engagement in the Facebook Pages. As agencies progress to reach higher intensity co-production, public engagement and impact increases.

The paper contributes to co-production in social government ecosystem by increasing the theoretical and practical understanding of new form of SMP-enabled digital co-production defined as “small-scale, repetitive, user-driven co-production that is flexible, durable, ad-hoc, and sporadic, where many hands make light work”. The proposed “co-production to co-creation” framework provides valuable guideline for enhancing public service provision via SMPs.

In the past few decades, relationship management (RM) theory and RM strategies in business-to-business (B2B) contexts have evolved tremendously, driven by constant innovation. Hence, the purpose of this study is to understand the trends and evolution of RM and relationship quality (RQ) in B2B contexts and empirical insights on RM and RQ in B2B, which in turn would provide insights into trends and future research directions.

Grounded on the industrial marketing and purchasing group, this study adopts a critical systematic literature review to provide a comprehensive analysis of the past, current and future trends in empirical research insights of RM and RQ in B2B markets.

This study provides some novel insights into RM in B2B context by using a multidimensional approach to RM and RQ and analyzing prior marketing research from three perspectives: the evolution of RM and RQ in B2B context; prior empirical research; and practical business insights. Overall, these perspectives inform the development of an evolving side of RQ in B2B contexts, leading to some predictions regarding the future of RM in B2B markets.

The exploratory results of this study shed light on the key factors that drive RQ and the importance of RM in B2B markets in the digital age where customers still long for human interaction regardless of the prevalence of advanced technology.

In the wake of advanced technologies and particularly, B2B companies had to turn to virtual platforms and embrace digital transformation to establish and manage their customer relationships. Yet, managing relationships via digital channels has its own challenges for both B2B practitioners and scholars. This indicates that there is still a huge need for attuned RM strategies that align with the changing environments – mainly driven by technological advancement – in B2B markets.

This work proposes that a multi-national service company (MNSC) needs to develop dynamic customer-oriented relational capabilities (DCRC), constituting dynamic service customization (DySC), dynamic customer integration (DyCI) and dynamic timeliness of service delivery (DyTSD) capabilities, to gain competitive advantage and performance in its internationalization efforts.

For empirical validation of the framework, developed through qualitative interviews, this study includes multi-cross-sectional data from twelve countries, four each in the category of underdeveloped (Africa), developing (Asia) and developed economies (Europe). Covariance-based structural equation modelling is used to test the hypotheses.

The study supports that DySC, DyCI and DyTSD capabilities have a significant positive influence on firm competitive advantage and performance across economies. The levels of competition intensity and regulatory restrictions, an outcome of the type of economy, have negative intervening effects, with varying intensities across economies.

This work guides the internationalization service managers to leverage DCRC across national borders keeping the state of the economy into consideration.

This work proposes a model of DCRC, based on the Intangibility, Heterogeneity, Inseparability and Perishability (IHIP) service framework, that enables firms to derive competitive advantage and performance across economies with varying environmental conditions.

This paper aims to build and empirically test a multilevel framework integrating transaction cost economics and a resource-based view into a value co-creation ecosystem perspective to explain the chain- and firm-level effects of transaction-specific investments (TSIs) on supplier performance.

This paper investigates cross-level network effects using survey data from the List of Taiwanese Central Satellite Production Systems. A total of 34 buyers (hub firms) and 106 suppliers (satellite firms) from 34 supply chains responded to the survey.

Findings confirm that individual firms’ TSIs can foster co-specificity at the supply chain level, thereby improving supply chain integration (SCI). SCI can have a positive cross-level moderating effect on the TSI–performance relationship.

These two key concepts, value co-creation and co-specificity, extend the theoretical application of transaction cost theory and the resource-based view to cross-level study by contributing to the research on the TSI–performance relationship.

This study’s framework is a counter to the buyer–supplier–supplier relationships in which each actor who may have different goals can create value jointly and share benefits from their TSIs.

Owing to high co-specificity, being embedded in a well-integrated supply chain can be a threat when the environment is turbulent; for losing strategic flexibility, co-specificity and embeddedness may result in a collective adaptation concern. High degrees of SCI may slow the reaction to environmental turbulence for both buyers and suppliers.

Individual firms’ TSIs can foster co-specificity at the supply chain level, subsequently enhancing SCI. An integrated supply chain can be a collective asset that facilitates value co-creation. Individual firms can benefit from the sharing of collective value. SCI can also increase switching costs, thus reducing the likelihood of individual firm engaging in opportunistic behavior and cost safeguarding.

Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, this study aims to analyze solution providers’ strategic capabilities that facilitate above-average returns.

The study applies a qualitative comparative case method. In addition to an extensive set of secondary data, the results are based on interviews with 35 executives from nine leading industrial solution providers, their strategic customers and suppliers. The analyzed solution providers were identified based on quantitative survey data.

By observing six distinctive resources and three strategic business processes, the present study identifies seven strategic capabilities that occur in different phases of solution development and deployment: fleet management capability, technology-development capability, mergers and acquisitions capability, value quantifying capability, project management capability, supplier network management capability and value co-creation capability.

The study develops a generic model for the strategic capabilities of servitization. Application of the developed model to different contexts would further validate and enhance it.

Managers can use the developed model to benchmark, identify, build and manage solution providers’ strategic capabilities and associated practices.

The study develops a valuable conceptual model based on the comparative case data. Case firms were selected for the study based on a representative quantitative data set. The results were verified and triangulated with external data.

As inter-company cooperation and competition grow, orchestration capability plays an increasingly important role. This paper aims to present an overview of orchestration capability in the business and management field, identify the current state and explore future research trends.

This literature review is based on 132 papers collected from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection data (1997–March 2021). HistCite was used to analyze the year of publication, leading scholars, influential articles, key journals, top countries and institutions. Research streams were identified from analysis of co-citation, bibliographic coupling and keyword co-occurrence by HistCite and VOSviewer.

This paper finds that Hitt MA is the most prolific scholar, and the Strategic Management Journal is the most dominating publication among the orchestration capability publications. The USA and Texas A&M University are the most influential countries and institutions, respectively. Three major clusters are identified based on citation mapping, bibliographic coupling analysis of documents and keywords co-occurrence analysis: dynamic capability and resource-based view, resource orchestration and network orchestration. Based on the three clusters, the authors analyze how resource orchestration and network orchestration research develops over time and summarize the evolutionary path of orchestration capability literature.

This article builds on data from WoS Core Collection, and some new but important articles may not be analyzed, since bibliometrics consider high citation as an indicator to select influential articles.

With the rapid development of the digital economy, the frequent interactions between companies pose many challenges for businesses. Enterprises can take orchestration actions effectively and efficiently from various perspectives and continuously improve their orchestration capabilities in collaboration with partners to achieve and sustain competitive advantages.

This paper provides a systematic review of orchestration capability using bibliometric analysis, which has not been employed in previous studies. Besides, this article presents a broad understanding of how scholars have researched the subject over the years.