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Although conformable devices are commonly designed to couple with the human body for personalized and localized medicine, their applications are expanding rapidly. This paper aims to delineate this expansion and predict greater implications in diverse fields.

Today’s device technologies continue to face fundamental obstacles preventing their seamless integration with target objects to effectively access, evaluate and alter self-specific physical patterns, while still providing physical comfort and enabling continuous data collection. Due to their extreme mechanical compliance, conformable devices permit the query of signals occurring at interfaces so as to decode and encode biological, chemical and mechanical patterns with high resolution, precision and accuracy. These unique and versatile capabilities allow for a marked change in the approach to tackling scientific questions, with the ability to address societal challenges at large.

Here, this study highlights the current state of these devices in a wide range of fields, such as interactive teaching, textiles, robotics, buildings and infrastructure, agriculture, climate and space, and further forecasts essential features of these devices in the near future.

This study justifies conformable devices’ growing utility through a novel quantitative analysis methodology that indexes peer-reviewed journal articles based on specific keywords, whereby this study tracks keyword frequency over time across specific fields in conjunction with conformability-like topics. The resulting trends’ trajectories provide the foundation for this study’s future projections. This study concludes with a perspective on the possible challenges concomitant with a ubiquitous presence of these technologies, including manufacturing, wireless communication, storage, compression, privacy and sharing of data, environmental sustainability, avoidance of inequality and bias and collaboration between stakeholders at all levels of impact.

This paper aims to illuminate the diverging approaches to marijuana-related drug enforcement at the federal and state levels in the USA, which have facilitated a boom in the US medical cannabis industry (i.e. the “Green Rush”). It further sheds light on how the USA’ aggressive extraterritorial approach to anti-money laundering (AML) enforcement might simultaneously suppress the banking of cannabis-related businesses in Jamaica due to the lingering fear of de-risking.

An international and comparative legal and policy analysis was conducted of the nexus among shifting drug enforcement policies, AML laws and the banking of cannabis-related businesses.

This study found that the constitutional relationship between the US federal government and states has created a de facto comparative advantage for the US medical cannabis-related businesses that benefit from limited access to financial services. This was found to pose far-reaching implications for the banking and development of the Jamaican cannabis sector due to the dependence of the country’s financial institutions on correspondent banking relationships with the US banks that are regulated by federal AML statutes.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first of its kind to examine the extraterritorial regulatory risks to the banking of cannabis-related businesses in Jamaica.

This paper aims to map key strategic concerns that Commonwealth Caribbean States will face in combating economic crimes and strengthening financial integrity in the post-pandemic era.

Horizon scanning was used to conduct a qualitative policy analysis of key regulatory developments in international anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFTP) and tax governance, from the perspective of Commonwealth Caribbean countries.

This paper finds that the COVID-19 pandemic might widen several fault lines, along the Global North/South axis, in international AML/CFTP and tax regulatory governance. These include the “sustainable development” gap in AML/CFTP norm-making; making the Financial Action Task Force fit-for-purpose; renewed campaigns against “harmful tax competition”; and international commitment to scaling up technical assistance to combat economic crimes in developing countries. It questions the sustainability of the prevailing “levelling the playing field” regulatory approach to AML/CFTP and tax matters and whether serious consideration ought not to be given to mainstreaming “differential treatment” in international AML/CFTP and tax standards, for resource-strapped Caribbean countries.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to assess the strategic policy risks and challenges that will arise from balancing economic recovery and fighting economic crimes by small and vulnerable Commonwealth Caribbean States in the post-pandemic era.

This paper aims to examine the effect of technological, organizational and environmental factors on the level of innovation outcomes in manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Drawing on the technology-organization-environment theory this paper conducts a discriminant analysis of firms’ innovation level based on a data set of manufacturing SMEs.

The results show that low- and high-innovative firms can be distinguished in terms of information technology (IT) knowledge and infrastructure, commitment-based human resources (HR) selection practices, exploitative innovation and organizational capital.

The study findings support the idea that innovation is a complex phenomenon explained by multiple factors. As a consequence, firms need to devote extra efforts to develop IT knowledge and infrastructure, commitment-based HR selection practices and organizational capital because these are crucial for obtaining greater innovation outcomes. In addition, the identification of exploitative innovation as a strong discriminant variable highlights that the most effective way to be a highly innovative SME is through incremental innovation, which permits the firm to capitalize as much as possible on previous exploratory efforts.

Although many studies have highlighted that innovation is more challenging for SMEs than for their larger counterparts, the vast majority of studies has been conducted in large companies. This paper extends prior literature by analyzing the discriminant variables that may distinguish between low- and high-innovative manufacturing SMEs.

Mesh Parameterization is central to reverse engineering, tool path planning, etc. This work synthesizes parameterizations with un-constrained borders, overall minimum angle plus area distortion. This study aims to present an assessment of the sensitivity of the minimized distortion with respect to weighed area and angle distortions.

A Mesh Parameterization which does not constrain borders is implemented by performing: isometry maps for each triangle to the plane Z = 0; an affine transform within the plane Z = 0 to glue the triangles back together; and a Levenberg–Marquardt minimization algorithm of a nonlinear F penalty function that modifies the parameters of the first two transformations to discourage triangle flips, angle or area distortions. F is a convex weighed combination of area distortion (weight: α with 0 ≤ α ≤ 1) and angle distortion (weight: 1 − α).

The present study parameterization algorithm has linear complexity [𝒪(n), n = number of mesh vertices]. The sensitivity analysis permits a fine-tuning of the weight parameter which achieves overall bijective parameterizations in the studied cases. No theoretical guarantee is given in this manuscript for the bijectivity. This algorithm has equal or superior performance compared with the ABF, LSCM and ARAP algorithms for the Ball, Cow and Gargoyle data sets. Additional correct results of this algorithm alone are presented for the Foot, Fandisk and Sliced-Glove data sets.

The devised free boundary nonlinear Mesh Parameterization method does not require a valid initial parameterization and produces locally bijective parameterizations in all of our tests. A formal sensitivity analysis shows that the resulting parameterization is more stable, i.e. the UV mapping changes very little when the algorithm tries to preserve angles than when it tries to preserve areas. The algorithm presented in this study belongs to the class that parameterizes meshes with holes. This study presents the results of a complexity analysis comparing the present study algorithm with 12 competing ones.

New sustainability certification schemes (SCS) with different scope, governance structure and operating practice are fast emerging. This rapid growth and divergence in metrics has resulted in questions about the effectiveness of such schemes. Although this practice has been growing fast, to date, there are no reviews comprehensively synthesising the literature regarding SCS’ main flaws, challenges and improvement opportunities. This paper aims to identify what are the key components affecting effectiveness of SCS, highlighting their benefits, flaws and improvement opportunities.

An integrated literature review was conducted to identify and assess recent studies related to the benefits, flaws, effectiveness and improvement opportunities of SCS worldwide.

Key components affecting the effectiveness of SCS were identified (sustainability awareness; market access; management systems and productivity; social, environmental and economic impacts; monitoring outcomes; competition, overlapping and interoperability; stakeholder participation; and accountability and transparency). The authors argue that SCS to succeed have to be effective; provide accountability about their goals and achievements; and manage stakeholders’ expectations. Civil Society’s awareness of the scientific underpinnings of sustainability issues also contributes to the existence and improvement of such schemes.

The limitations of this study are associated with the secondary material that was publicly available for our literature review.

This paper fulfils an identified need to explore the key components affecting effectiveness of SCS, their benefits, flaws and improvement opportunities. Such a synthesis also identifies the key areas where interoperability between SCS should be pursued by corporations and governments.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) enable firms to improve their processes to remain competitive and profitable in today’s market. These demands not only value economic results but also social impact and environmental care. In other words, firms must achieve sustainable performance. However, to take on these new sustainability challenges, firms must have dynamic capabilities to take advantage of highly changing technology. Thus, this study aims to examine the mediating role of dynamic capabilities in the relationship between ICT and sustainable performance.

This study was empirical, associative and explanatory, following a latent variable design. The sample of the study consisted of partners, founders, executives and promoters from 102 Colombian new technology-based firms selected through purposive non-probabilistic sampling. Variance-based structural equation modeling or partial least squares was used for the statistical data analysis.

A higher-order model was tested, corroborating that ICT was composed of two dimensions (use and acquisition), dynamic capabilities were composed of three dimensions (absorption, innovation and adaptation), while sustainable performance showed a unidimensional structure. As for the research hypotheses, all the direct effects were supported, as well as the mediating effect of dynamic capability in the relationship between ICT and sustainable performance, this being a complementary mediation.

This study highlights the importance of dynamic capabilities for firms today, especially those working with high levels of technology. Also, considering the results obtained, firms must implement better strategies in the acquisition and use of technology to improve their sustainable performance in dynamic and uncertain environments.