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This study analyzes the role of regional cooperative banks in identifying and financing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from a proximity perspective. Access to finance is a major challenge for SMEs. Regional cooperative banks can remove this barrier based on cooperative bank's characteristics and geographic proximity to SMEs. Understanding the interplay between these financial actors and firms can contribute to a better support of SMEs development.

The results are based on a case study of eight SMEs located in southwestern France. Interviews were conducted with two regional cooperative funds and eight SMEs. The interview guide included questions related to the company, the projects financed and how financing was accessed.

Results reveal that a combination of three forms of proximity allows regional cooperative banks and SMEs to establish effective financing operations. They show that regional cooperative banks are key players in the existing financing mechanisms for SMEs. Such financing is often used to gain access to larger players at a later stage. The findings suggest the need for public policies that promote the integration of financing actors in regional ecosystems to advance SMEs' development.

This article examines how SMEs access financing, with a focus on regional cooperative banks, which have received little attention in the literature. Moreover, the relationships between these actors are studied through the lens of proximity. Regional cooperative banks are able to finance projects that may have been overlooked by traditional banks due to trust-building local dynamics.

Proximity is a crucial factor influencing innovation collaboration and performance. Most existing studies have primarily focused on the organizational level and been static in nature. Therefore, a further study on how proximity affects innovation performance is needed. This paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the organizational, cognitive and geographical proximity in China’s open regional innovation system.

This paper analyzes the data from 2010 to 2015 through path analysis.

The results reveal that geographical proximity has a direct positive effect on regional innovation performance in China’s regional innovation system. It also shows that organizational proximity exerts a negative impact on absorptive capacity, and through it adversely affects regional innovation performance. In contrast, cognitive proximity is found to have a positive effect on absorptive capacity, enhancing regional innovation performance.

Based on these findings, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of proximity in innovation collaboration and performance. By highlighting the importance of different proximity types, it provides insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to foster regional innovation.

This research aims to contribute to the literature on sustainable hospitality and tourism by applying social network analysis to identify sustainable tourism business networks and untangle the role of cognitive and geographical proximity in their formation.

Data mining and machine learning techniques were applied to data collected from the websites of tourism companies located in northeastern Italy, namely, the Veneto region. Specifically, the authors used Web scraping to extract relevant information from the internet.

The results support the existence of geographical clusters of tourist accommodation providers that are linked by strong cognitive proximity based on sustainability principles that are well communicated via their websites. This does not appear to be greenwashing because companies that have agreed on sustainability principles have also implemented concrete actions and tend to signal these actions through a variety of sustainability certifications.

The results may guide tourism managers and policymakers in developing tourism initiatives directed at the creation of fruitful collaborations between similarly oriented organizations and methods to support clusters of sustainable tourism accommodation. Identifying sustainable tourism networks may assist in the identification of potential actors of change, fueling a widespread transition toward sustainability.

In this study, the authors adopted an innovative methodology to detect sustainability-oriented tourism business networks. Additionally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to simultaneously explore the cognitive and geographical connections between tourism businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to verify how distributed cognition enhances collaborative problem-solving in the context of projects.

Using qualitative research and in-depth interviews, a sample of 32 project managers with experience in traditional and agile methods acting in Brazil and internationally participated in the research process. The analysis process, utilising coding techniques, involved stages: open, axial, coding and selective coding. These stages encompassed the evaluation of categories based on a hierarchy, in order to determine an appropriate level of abstraction that properly explains theoretical findings.

The results indicate that distributed team cognition is significant for collaborative problem-solving. The data from the interviews allowed the proposal of a model of cognition, and the identification of the elements that support it.

Understand how aspects of distributed team cognition can impact the behaviours of the project professional and contribute to problem-solving in the project environment.

The elements observed affects the collaborative problem-solving by presenting a model of distributed cognition, which is composed by directed communication, collective interaction, trust building and collaborative behaviour.

Innovation ecosystems (IEs) have attracted the attention of policymakers and researchers because of their potential to positively affect territories, creating shared value. However, due to the fragmentation of IEs, how this happens in different IEs has been explored only partially. This research aims to bridge this gap, aiming to support policymakers in understanding how to foster shared value in diverse IEs.

The paper identifies, based on the literature, two “drivers of aggregation” of IE's actors as key dimensions characterizing shared value in IEs, namely physical proximity and dominant issue. If these are combined, three archetypes emerge: Hub- and Chain-Driven, Place-Driven, Competence- and Issue-Driven IEs.Then, elements useful for understanding shared value creation in these archetypes are framed and studied in real cases.

Results reveal that aggregation drivers affect shared value creation, which differ among archetypes: in Competence- and Issue-Driven IEs alignment is challenged by the low physical proximity, which in Place-Driven IEs is high, but not enough to grant shared value; in Hub- and Chain-Driven IEs, the hub is the orchestrator, representing both a driver and a risk.

Differences in shared value creation processes relate to the set-up of the IE, which has relevant implications for policy definition. In Competence- and Issue-Driven IEs, policies at diverse levels align in funding and promoting the IE; in Place-Driven IEs, policies support anchors' development on-site; in Hub- and Chain-Driven IEs, policies, sometimes absent, should foster partnerships for projects for the territory, IE's enlargement and resilience.

This study aims to examine how implicit distance (cognitive and social) impacts supply chain capabilities, and the roles of information technology (IT) utilization and supply chain flexibility in this process.

The authors designed a conceptual model including the implicit distance, supply chain flexibility, supply chain capability and IT utilization and verified the relationships among variables through a survey that collected data from 104 manufacturing enterprises in China.

The results show that cognitive and social distances positively and negatively affect supply chain flexibility, respectively. Furthermore, IT utilization strengthens the positive effect of cognitive distance and the negative effect of social distance on supply chain flexibility. Additionally, supply chain flexibility has a positive effect on supply chain capability and mediates the effects of cognitive and social distances on supply chain capability.

Enterprises should prioritize cooperation with different types of partners with whom the enterprises have established good collaborative working experiences. Moreover, if enterprises cooperate with new partners, enterprises should communicate and handle things face to face instead of frequently utilizing IT.

This study links the implicit distance between enterprises with supply chain capability and newly applies social network theory to explain the mechanism. Further, the authors' data confirm the moderating role of IT utilization in this process, supplementing the research on implicit distance. Moreover, this study employs dynamic capability theory to better understand how firms can improve supply chain capabilities.

Buying firms involve suppliers early in New Product Development (NPD) projects to benefit from their capabilities. The authors investigate the joint impact on project performance improvement, of the social capital established throughout the project, and the strategic preferred buyer/supplier statuses awarded prior to the project, from the buyer's perspective.

The authors propose a conceptual model underlining the complementary contribution to project performance of social capital dimensions and of preferred partners' statuses resulting from social exchange expectations. The model is analyzed with Partial Least Squares using 80 responses of purchasers and R&D managers involved in collaborative NPD projects with suppliers.

The relational capital built during the project has a positive central role, with a direct impact on NPD project performance and mediating effects through cognitive and structural capitals. The preferred partners' statuses have strong direct impacts on performance, and mediating effects that do not completely supplant the social capital's contribution.

The implications for the efficient management of supplier involvement are twofold. First, the authors encourage strategic investments of buying firms to acquire preferred buyer's status and to support preferred supplier programs. Second, the authors alert them on the importance of establishing trust and shared cognition during the project.

This study captures NPD project performance from the social angle of buyer–supplier relationship management. It demonstrates the complementarity of relationship management at the strategic and operational levels, before and during the project unfolding.

Innovation management in the healthcare sector has undergone significant evolutions over the last decades. These evolutions have been investigated from a variety of perspectives: clusters, ecosystems of innovation, digital ecosystems and regional ecosystems, but the dynamics of networks have seldom been analyzed under the lenses of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). As identified by Cao and Shi (2020), the literature is silent about the organization of resource allocation systems for network orchestration in EEs. This article investigates these elements in the healthcare sector. It discusses the strategic role played by entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) in resource allocation and elaborates on the distinction between sponsored and nonsponsored ESOs in EEs. ESOs are active in network orchestration. The literature explains that ESOs lift organizational, institutional and cultural barriers, and support entrepreneurs' access to cognitive and technological resources. However, allocation models are not yet discussed. Therefore, our research questions are as follows: What is the resource allocation model in healthcare-related EEs? What is the role played by sponsored and nonsponsored ESOs as regards resource allocation to support the emergence and development of EEs in the healthcare sector?

The article offers an explanatory, exploratory, and theory-building investigation. The research design offers an abductive research protocol and multi-level analysis of seven (sponsored and nonsponsored) ESOs active in French healthcare ecosystems. Field research elaborates on semi-structured interviews collected between 2016 and 2022.

This article shows explicit complementarities between top-down and bottom-up resource allocation approaches supported by ESOs in the healthcare sector. Despite explicit originalities in each approach, no network orchestration model prevails. Multi-polar coordination is the rule. Entrepreneurs' access to critical technological and cognitive resources is based on resource allocation modalities that differ for sponsored versus nonsponsored ESOs. Emerging from field research, this research also shows that sponsored and nonsponsored ESOs manage their roles in different ways because they confront original issues about organizational legitimacy.

Beyond the results listed above, the main originalities of the paper relate to the instantiation of multi-level analysis operated during field research and to the confrontation between sponsored versus nonsponsored ESOs in the domain of healthcare-related innovation management. This research shows that ESOs have practical relevance because they build original routes for resource allocation and network orchestration in EEs. Each ESO category (sponsored versus nonsponsored) provides original support for resource allocation. The ESO's legitimacy is inferred either from the sponsor or the services delivered to end-users. This research leads to propositions for future research and recommendations for practitioners: ESO managers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers.

This study aims to explore the interplay between community dynamics and knowledge production using the quantum computing research field as a case study. Quantum computing holds the promise of dramatically increasing computation speed and solving problems that are currently unsolvable in a short space of time. In this highly dynamic area of innovation, computer companies, research laboratories and governments are racing to develop the field.

After constructing temporal co-authorship networks, the authors identify seven different events affecting communities of researchers, which they label: forming, growing, splitting, shrinking, continuing, merging, dissolving. The authors then extract keywords from the titles and abstracts of their contributions to characterize the dynamics of knowledge production and examine the relationship between community events and knowledge production over time.

The findings show that forming and splitting are associated with retaining in memory what is currently known, merging and growing with the creation of new knowledge and splitting, shrinking and dissolving with the curation of knowledge.

Although the link between communities and knowledge has long been established, much less is known about the relationship between the dynamics of communities and their link with collective cognitive processes. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present contribution is one of the first to shed light on this dynamic aspect of community knowledge production.

Although business incubators are a widely recognized form of entrepreneurial support, this paper aims to challenge the assumption that incubation is necessarily beneficial for early-stage entrepreneurs, and considers cases where, due to variability in the motives and behaviours of entrepreneurs, incubation may be unwarranted or even undesireable.

This study presents a theoretically derived typology of incubated entrepreneurs, based on their entrepreneurial competence and capacity for learning, which asserts that incubation may be unwarranted or even undesireable for three of the four proposed entrepreneur types. Qualitative data from interviews with entrepreneurs and managing directors from 10 business incubators is used to illustrate the existence of these types.

The data provides evidence of entrepreneurial types whose incubation may be counterproductive to the goals and objectives of their host incubators.

Implications for incubator management (intake screening and ongoing monitoring of portfolio) are developed and aimed at improving the outcomes of business incubation for stakeholders.

The paper contributes to the incubation typology literature by challenging a widely held assumption that entrepreneurs have the potential to benefit from incubation and by reconceptualizing incubators as “crucibles” that perform a critical function in distinguishing high-potential entrepreneurs.