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The study aims to provide insights in the sensemaking process and the use of business analytics (BA) for project selection and prioritisation in start-up settings. A major focus is on the various ways start-ups can understand their data through the analytical process of sensemaking.

This is a comparative case study of two start-ups that use BA in their projects. The authors follow an interpretive approach and draw from the constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) for the purpose of data analysis, whereby the theory of sensemaking functions as the sensitising device that supports the interpretation of the data.

The key findings lie within the scope of project selection and prioritisation, where the sensemaking process is implicitly influenced by each start-up's strategy and business model. BA helps start-ups notice changes within their internal and external environment and focus their attention on the more critical questions along the lines of their processes, operations and business model. However, BA alone cannot support decision-making around less structured problems such as project selection and prioritisation, where intuitive judgement and personal opinion are still heavily used.

This study extends the research on BA applied in organisations as tools for business development. Specifically, the authors draw on the literature of BA tools in support of project management from multiple perspectives. The perspectives include but are not limited to project assessment and prioritisation. The authors view the decision-making process and the path from insight to value, as a sensemaking process, where data become part of the sensemaking roadmap and BA helps start-ups navigate the decision-making process.

Globally, there is a growing proportion of disabled people as a result of different circumstances. This growth generates attention and leads to ways to integrate the affected population into society. Addressing such disability and integration is particularly important at buildings level, enabling and expanding the scope of activities for people with disabilities (PWDs). The rising number of PWDs and the need to integrate them into society create a need for action to improve their living condition and integration into society. This study aims to examine the issue of accessibility for PWDs in higher education facilities in Qatar.

Addressing accessibility at buildings level is particularly important in higher education because it enables inclusion in training and education and increases the potential for productive engagement in society. The study aims to develop an objective tool to assess and measure accessibility in educational institutions. Five selected buildings were examined and evaluated at Qatar University based on proximity, multi-use, vertical and horizontal circulation availability. The survey respondents were randomly selected. An existing assessment method was used in surveying respondents, including those with and without disabilities.

A comparative study was conducted to explore the discrepancy between facility users with and without disability, indicating the gap in existing tools.

The developed tool generates the same outcome when conducted by different assessors, indicating the level of compliance and percentage met as a benefit, not a focus. It allows professionals and non-professionals with minimal experience to conduct the assessment.

This study aims to explore the use of a double diamond design method to engage the industry in a sector-wide response to the issues of food waste as constructed by consumers. This particular design method is achieved by an exploration of a collective intelligence-participatory design (CIPD) project to engage industry participants in understanding and responding to consumers’ perceptions of the role of packaging in reducing food waste.

Using the UK Design Council’s double diamond design method as a guiding conceptual principle, the project recruited industry participants from medium to large food businesses across various food categories. Two scoping workshops with industry were held prior to the initiation of a 12-stage project (n = 57), and then two industry workshops were held (n = 4 and 14). Eighty participants completed an online qualitative survey, and 23 industry participants took part in a Think Tank Sprint Series. The Think Tanks used participatory design approaches to understand barriers and opportunities for change within food industry sub-sectors and test the feasibility and acceptability of package designs to reduce consumer waste.

For CIPD to work for complex problems involving industry, it is vital that stakeholders across macro- and micro-subsystems are involved and that adequate time is allowed to address that complexity. Using both the right tools for engagement and the involvement of the right mix of representatives across various sectors of industry is critical to reducing blame shift. The process of divergence and convergence allowed clear insight into the long-term multi-pronged approach needed for the complex problem.

Participatory design has been useful within various behaviour change settings. This paper has demonstrated the application of the double diamond model in a social marketing setting, adding value to an industry-wide project that included government, peak bodies, manufacturing and production and retailers.

Australia appears to be encountering a crisis in the protection of certain heritage places, despite its strong reputation in heritage conservation built up since the 1970s. Consequently, this paper examines changes to national cultural heritage management policy over the last few decades to understand more about this crisis.

Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage) was selected as the key focus. This paper applies a cultural heritage management framework tested first in Hong Kong to measure Australian paradigm change over 45 years.

It found the 1990s shift away from the provision of independent technical advice on national heritage policy has had a major impact. This shift is based on a change in ethos away from the earlier Whitlam/National Estate broader vision of heritage responsibilities towards a narrower more conservative one at the national level. Also, it found that studies and policymaking should allow for Indigenous voices. More Indigenous input in heritage policy formulation at all levels of government would further decolonise Indigenous heritage governance to deal justly with Indigenous Australians and their heritage.

Resources did not allow for comparative studies of the non-Indigenous (historic) and natural heritage as part of the current study.

The study also included a consultation paper and an online conference presentation that have raised questions about the efficacy of current national policy on Indigenous places, on which a national conversation is urgently needed. The recent review of the National Heritage Strategy by the Australian Commonwealth Government based some of its proposed options on those listed in the consultation paper to initiate this conversation in a limited way.

One finding is that attention to heritage policy and protection must be ongoing at all levels of government and inclusive of First People's human rights, particularly those concerning their heritage. In regard to Australia, most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander respondents in this study would like to see targeted funding return for more than just iconic Indigenous places and for the creation of a more independent heritage body that allows them more self-determination in the care of their heritage.

The paper's value is that it investigates the Australian Heritage Commission's impact in the development of Australian cultural heritage management and associated national policy. Also, it provides insights for other postcolonial or New World settler societies dealing with the same issues or any decision-makers considering establishing a national independent body to oversee heritage protection and policymaking.

In this research, the initial list of internal capabilities in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) leading to success in international markets has been extracted. Then, the most relevant capabilities to international SMEs under servitisation and hybrid offerings have been screened. Next, the selected capabilities have been classified, and ultimately the relationship amongst the capabilities has been analysed. The conceptual model for SMEs participating in international markets with hybrid offerings has been illustrated.

A literature review has been employed to extract the initial list of internal capabilities to address the research objectives. Then, a novel hesitant fuzzy Delphi (HFD) method has been developed to select the most relevant capabilities for SMEs for hybrid offerings in international markets by using the experts opinions. Subsequently, a novel hesitant fuzzy interpretive structural modelling (HFISM) has been developed to classify the capabilities, design a level-based conceptual model and present the relationship amongst the prominent capabilities.

After the literature review, sixteen internal capabilities leading to success in the international market via hybrid offerings have been extracted. Then, eight selected capabilities were chosen for further investigation by applying 15 expert opinions and via the HFD approach. According to HFISM results, a level-based conceptual model was emanated, and “ability to take advantage of international opportunities”, “financial strength”, “technology level” and “efficient innovation management” were considered as the most fundamental capabilities resulting in successful hybrid offerings in international markets.

Alongside the multi-layer decision-making approach developed in this manuscript to analyse the internal capabilities roles in hybrid offering success towards international markets, to the best knowledge of the authors, the hesitant fuzzy approaches developed in this article have not been previously presented by any other scholar. A novel HFD approach has been designed for consensus amongst the experts under uncertain circumstances. Furthermore, a novel HFISM has been suggested and employed in this research to comprehend the relationship amongst the internal capabilities.

The study aims to identify and discuss influential aspects of corporate environmental disclosure (CED) literature, including key streams, themes, authors, keywords, journals, affiliations and countries. This review also constructs agendas for future CED research.

Using a bibliometric review approach, the authors reviewed 560 articles on CED from 215 journals published between 1982 and 2020.

The authors' insights are three-fold. First, the authors identified three core streams of CED research: “legitimization of environmental hazards via environmental disclosures,” “the role of environmental accounting in achieving corporate environmental sustainability” and “integrating environmental social and governance (ESG) reporting into the global reporting initiatives (GRI) guidelines”. Second, the authors also deployed a thematic map that classifies CED research into four themes: niche themes (e.g. institutional theory and environmental management system), motor themes (e.g. stakeholder engagement), emerging/declining themes (e.g. legitimacy theory) and basic/transversal themes (e.g. voluntary CED, environmental reporting and corporate social responsibility). Third, the authors highlighted important CED authors, keywords, journals, articles, affiliations and countries.

This study assists researchers, journal editors and consultants in the corporate sector to comprehensively understand various dimensions of CED research and practices and suggests potential emerging research areas. Although this paper appears to have been thoroughly conducted, using authors' keywords to identify themes was a key limitation. Thus, the authors call upon using a more comprehensive data mining technique that uses keywords in abstracts, titles and the whole body of papers and then identifies inclusive trends in CED literature.

The authors contribute to the extant accounting literature by investigating the organizational-level CED, both mandatory and voluntary, using a systematic and bibliometric literature review model to summarize the key research streams, themes, authors, journals, affiliations and countries. By doing so, the authors construct a future research agenda for CED literature.

The purpose of this study is to develop a model for investigating the sharing of harmful messages by employees using social media using the conspiracy theory from a socio-legal perspective. This study also examines the moderating role of different demographic parameters such as age, gender and education toward sharing harmful messages using social media.

Using the conspiracy theory and social impact theory as the foundation of this study, the authors developed theoretical model and validated it using the structural equation modeling technique with 342 participants from various organizations across Europe and Asia. The study also used different statistical measures to understand the demographic impacts toward sharing harmful messages.

It was found that epistemic, existential and social motives significantly and positively influence employees’ inappropriate message-sharing and seeking behavior, which in turn influences them to share harmful messages on social media. The study also indicates that there are some moderating impacts of employee demography toward sharing harmful messages using social media platforms.

This study investigates the antecedents of sharing harmful messages using social media by employees. The present study could be useful for the organizations leaders as well as policymakers and legal fraternity. The study uses a limited number of feedback to validate the model. Also, this is a cross-sectional study which is another limitation of this study.

This study has proposed and validated a theoretical model by using the conspiracy theory as well as the social impact theory which is unique. Moreover, this study adds value to the existing literature on the harmful impacts of social media and its societal impacts. Besides, the validated model of this study has a high explanatory power which is another uniqueness of this study.

This study aims to contribute to the academic disciplines of entrepreneurship and management by developing a new theory that explains Founder-CEOs’ succession in family and non-family firms. Many scholars failed to generate a specific theory to describe the succession of Founder-CEOs. Family firms remain complex enterprises comprising interconnectedness of cultural interests in which corporate governance occurs by families, Founder-CEOs and sometimes a board of directors.

This study’s design/methodology/approach reflects post-modernist epistemological and ontological perspectives for conducting systematic literature reviews. To identify relevant studies in the review, the several databases (Australian Business Dean’s Council Journal Quality List; EBSCO Database, including PsycINFO and Psych studies; Web of Science) and a mix of ranked journals from entrepreneurship, management and psychology were used.

The findings and results in this paper reflect the purpose, methodology and literature analysis culminating in 1,582 peer-reviewed studies. A total of 182 peer-reviewed studies met the criterion for review. Throughout the research process, a systematic literature review uncovered management literature gaps overlooked for decades during the theory-building process. Hence, developing a theory of Founder-CEOs succession used a combination of systematic, inductive, comparative and interactive approaches.

A Theory of Founder-CEOs Succession explains the strategic process of replacing a founder systematically. The promotion of, and incentives for, internal executives have been topics of great interest and deliberation among scholars and practitioners for a long time. This study contributes research implications for theory building in the academic disciplines of entrepreneurship and management by offering scholars and practitioners a theory that does not exist to describe Founder-CEOs’ succession encompassing both strategic successes and failures. By incorporating successes and failures, this study provides realistic reflections of Founder-CEOs.

The study directs attention to the psychological conditions experienced and knowledge management practices leveraged by faculty in higher education institutes (HEIs) to cope with the shift to emergency remote teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. By focusing attention on faculty experiences during this transition, this study aims to examine an under-investigated effect of the pandemic in the Indian context.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis is used to analyze the data gathered in two waves through 40 in-depth interviews with 20 faculty members based in India over a year. The data were analyzed deductively using Kahn’s framework of engagement and robust coding protocols.

Eight subthemes across three psychological conditions (meaningfulness, availability and safety) were developed to discourse faculty experiences and challenges with emergency remote teaching related to their learning, identity, leveraged resources and support received from their employing educational institutes. The findings also present the coping strategies and knowledge management-related practices that the faculty used to adjust to each discussed challenge.

The study uses a longitudinal design and phenomenology as the analytical method, which offers a significant methodological contribution to the extant literature. Further, the study’s use of Kahn’s model to examine the faculty members’ transitions to emergency remote teaching in India offers novel insights into the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on educational institutes in an under-investigated context.

This paper aims to assess the impact of digital financial innovation on financial system development in Common Market for eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). This paper evaluates the dynamic relationship between digital financial innovation measures and financial system development using time series data from COMESA countries for the period 1997–2019.

A dynamic autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) was adopted and the mean group (MG), pooled mean group (PMG) and dynamic fixed effect (DFE) of the model were estimated to evaluate the short- and long-run impact. In addition, the dynamic generalized method of moments (DGMM) was adopted for a robustness check. The Hausman test results show PMG to be the most consistent and efficient estimator, while the coefficient of lagged dependent variable of different GMM is less than the fixed effect coefficient, and, as such, suggests system GMM is the most suitable estimator. Data for the study were sourced from World Bank Development Indicator (WDI, 2020), World Governance Indicator (WGI, 2020) and World Bank Global Financial Development Database (GFD, 2020).

The result shows that digital financial innovation significantly impacts financial system development in the long run. As such, the evidence revealed that automated teller machines (ATMs), point of sale (POS), mobile payments (MP) and mobile banking are significant and contribute positively to financial system development in the long run, while mobile money (MM) and Internet banking (INB) are insignificant but exhibit positive and inverse relationship with financial development respectively. Further investigation revealed that institutional quality and a stable macroeconomic environment including their interactive term are significantly imperative in predicting financial system development in the COMESA region.

Researchers recommend a cohesive and conscious policy that would checkmate the divergence in the short run and suggest a common regional innovative financial strategy that could be pursued to incentivize technology transfer needed to promote financial system development in the long run. More so, plausible product and process innovations may be adapted to complement innovative institutions in the different components of the COMESA financial system.

Digital financial innovation services if well managed increase the inherent benefits in financial system development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents new background information on digital financial innovation that may stimulate the development of the financial system, particularly in the COMESA region. It also exposes the relevance of digital financial innovation, institutional quality and stable macroeconomic environment as well as their interactive effect on COMESA financial system development.