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The current research aimed to investigate the external enablement role of Digital Infrastructures (DI) in the interplay of entrepreneurial cognitions and innovation.

Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) were used for analyses. This yielded a sample of 8,601 Generation Z entrepreneurs operating in 25 European countries.

Applying hierarchical moderated regressions showed that socio-cognitive components of an entrepreneurial mindset (self-efficacy, risk propensity, opportunity identification) affect innovation among Generation Z entrepreneurs. More importantly, DI plays an external enablement role in the interplay of cognitions and innovation among Generation Z entrepreneurs.

This study contributes to the socio-cognitive theory of entrepreneurship by integrating an external enablement perspective into the study of cognitions and entrepreneurial outcomes (here, innovation). It contributes to the digital technology perspective of entrepreneurship by connecting the conversation about the socio-cognitive perspective of entrepreneurship regarding the role of cognitions in innovation to the conversation in information systems (IS) regarding technology affordances and constraints. This study extends the application of the external enabler framework to the post-entry stage of entrepreneurial activity and integrates a generational perspective into it.

This study investigates into how organizations enable the compatibility between intermediary role of conventional systems with disintermediary potentials of blockchain toward the coordination of multiple actors in operations management.

The data were collected from 31 interviewees of the case organizations. We conduct an in-depth case study of successful BC implementation in operations management, by using affordance-actualization (A-A) theory as the theoretical lens.

This study identifies the incompatibility between the affordances of conventional systems and blockchain in coordination/operations management and offers a process model in which a fusion phase enables the affordances to be compatible and then to be actualized. The fusion phase extends A-A theory by transposing and connecting in the context of operations management. The result also shows that blockchain technology has decentralized potentials to address the issues caused by centralized organizations or information systems, while not to replace the intermediary roles of centralized organizations or information systems.

This study makes important theoretical contributions to the literature on blockchain used in operations management, the roles of blockchain enablement and affordance-actualization theory. The findings can also help IT practitioners to implement BC-based applications effectively.

Multinational business deliver value via multiple sites with similar operational capacities. The age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) delivers significant opportunities for the deployment of digital tools for business optimization. Therefore, this study aims to study the Industry 4.0 implementation for multinationals.

The key objective of this research is multi-site systems integration using a reproducible, modular and standardized “Cyber Physical System (CPS) as-a-Service”.

A best practice reference architecture is adopted to guide the design and delivery of a pioneering CPS multi-site deployment. The CPS deployed is a cloud-based platform adopted to enable all manufacturing areas within a multinational energy and petrochemical company. A methodology is developed to quantify the system environmental and sustainability benefits focusing on reduced carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and energy consumption. These results demonstrate the benefits of standardization, replication and digital enablement for multinational businesses.

The research illustrates the ability to design a single system, reproducible for multiple sites. This research also illustrates the beneficial impact of system reuse due to reduced environmental impact from lower CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. The paper assists organizations in deploying complex systems while addressing multinational systems implementation constraints and standardization.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual entrepreneur cognitive characteristics contributing to social enterprise performance and recommended a framework for women's social entrepreneur development.

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study of 22 women founders of social enterprises using a semi-structured questionnaire. In-depth interviews were conducted, and the transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis.

This study found a significant impact of self-efficacy on the performance of social enterprises among the studied subjects. Social support in the form of material, information and emotional support enhanced the ability of women social entrepreneurs to better achieve business sustenance and continuance of operations. The business skills of the women social entrepreneurs led them to move from just social impact generators to becoming thought leaders. The strong prosocial motivation of the founders contributed to building their resilience in the face of adversity.

This study extended the existing theories on social entrepreneurship by bringing the dimensions of entrepreneurial resilience in driving social enterprise performance along with business skills. Thus, it provided an enhanced explanation to the existing body of knowledge on contributors to superior social enterprise performance.

This study gathered insights into the role of entrepreneurship education focused on business skills, especially for women social entrepreneurs in achieving superior performance for their social ventures. This also reconfirmed the role of social support and how structurally this could be provided by educational systems to aspiring women social entrepreneurs.

The practice of social entrepreneurship by women social entrepreneurs has been growing. Its importance in developing economies because of its ability to make grassroots changes at the lower levels of society was substantive. Women have shown more inclination toward social business with an affinity for prosocial contribution. By focusing on nurturing these social enterprises, governments as well as global agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum could accelerate social change. Furthermore, support for the current women social entrepreneurs as change-makers making a difference in society could be achieved.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research study was one of the first studies on women social entrepreneurs focusing on the factors of self-efficacy, social support and entrepreneurial resilience contributing to social enterprise performance. This study combined the social entrepreneurship intention theory with entrepreneurial resilience and business skills to understand the factors leading to successful social enterprise performance for women social entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a multistakeholder scale for assessing an excellent human resource (HR) function to demonstrate the extent to which it is focused on creating value from the perspective of its key internal and external stakeholders.

At the first stage, an in-depth literature review was conducted to extract the best practices for an excellent HR function. Then, to test the validation of the developed framework, it was sent to HR academics and practitioners in different countries. The survey responses were analyzed using the methods of the structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factorial analysis.

This study proposes an excellent HR multistakeholder assessment scale consisting of ten criteria based on the perceptions of internal and external HR stakeholders.

This study suggests a framework for assessing overall HR excellence based on the perceptions of key internal and external HR stakeholders. In addition, it is recommended that future researchers empirically test the developed scale across various industries and firm sizes.

HR managers, by using this framework, could continuously assess their HR excellence and compare their HR excellence with other companies’ HR excellence in the industry and then plan for continuous improvement in different HR areas to improve their stakeholders’ experiences.

This paper identifies the enablers and results of an excellent HR department and designs a multistakeholder feedback scale to better understand key internal and external HR stakeholders’ perceptions.

This study aims to develop an empathetic and user-centric customer support service design model. Though service design has been a critical research focus for several decades, few studies focus on customer support services. As customer support gains importance as a source of competitive advantage in the present era, this paper aims to contribute to industry and academia by exploring the service design model.

The study adopted a theories-in-use approach to elucidate mental models based on the industry’s best practices. In-depth interviews with 62 professionals led to critical insights into customer service design development, supported by service-dominant logic and theory of mind principles.

The ensuing insights led to a model that connects the antecedents and outcomes of empathetic and user-centric customer service design. The precursors include people, processes and technology, while the results are user experience, service trust and service advocacy. The model also emphasises the significance of the user’s journey and the user service review in the overall service design.

The model developed through this study addresses the critical gap concerning the lack of service design research in customer support services. The key insights from this study contribute to the ongoing research endeavours towards transitioning customer support services from an operational unit to a strategic value-creating function. Future scholars may investigate the applicability of the empathetic user service design across cultures and industries. The new model must be customised using real-time data and analytics across user journey stages.

The empathetic and user-centric design can elevate the customer service function as a significant contributor to the overall customer experience, loyalty and positive word of mouth. Practitioners can adopt the new model to provide superior customer service experiences. This original research was developed through crucial insights from interviews with senior industry professionals.

This research is the original work developed through the key insights from the interview with senior industry professionals.

Disruptive technologies are accelerating global growth. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the idea of delivering value to end users. On the other hand, the growth of Industry 5.0 has given rise to the concept of humanizing technology, and AI is a promising technology with the potential to contribute to business success. Nevertheless, the idea of value creation in the field of AI is novel, so it is necessary to define the meaning of value by understanding the context of AI applicability in different environments and industries. In this chapter, the author uses the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) procedure to conduct an SLR that provides interesting insights into the focus, industries, and methodologies and approaches used in existing research. Following the initial literature review on the state of the art of AI and value creation, the author also offers a reflection on the strategic implications of AI in the field of marketing, postulating a macrovalue creation framework that addresses the existence of implications on three different levels: emerging markets, Sustainable Development Goals, and adoption issues. Therefore, this chapter examines the value creation perspectives of AI to understand the current research focus and future directions.

Humane Entrepreneurship (HumEnt) is strongly purpose-oriented and characterized by a focus on inclusiveness and social and environmental sustainability, with attention to both internal and external stakeholders and their needs. In the attempt to provide new research in this field, this study aims to conduct an empirical investigation within the theory of HumEnt and, in particular, of the Human Resource Orientation (HRO) model among Italian Small and Medium-size Enterprises.

Based on quantitative data, this study used a deductive approach to investigate the relationship between the HumEnt model and firms’ relational embeddedness with different types of stakeholders (value chain stakeholders and societal stakeholders, respectively). More concretely, to investigate the relationships between the dimensions of the HumEnt model and firms’ relational embeddedness, partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied.

Findings of this study suggest that Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) directly contributes only to value chain embeddedness. However, the results also show that if EO is mediated by an HRO (i.e. companies with a high HRO), a high level of societal embeddedness is also present.

This study represents a first attempt to provide comprehensive empirical evidence about the different dimensions characterizing the HumEnt theoretical model, and to highlight their relevance in supporting companies’ relational embeddedness capacity with different categories of stakeholders.

Executive isolation, also known as workplace loneliness, its factors and impact are major issues for organizational development, future of work for leadership and learning culture. The purpose of this study is to examine the Executive isolation phenomenon where relationships between power distance, organizational culture and executive isolation of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are analysed on how it is considered by their teams. The same is contextualized through the inputs received through interviews conducted with CEOs and employee surveys.

The qualitative in-depth interviews of five CEOs, and survey across 34 of the 50 employees, were undertaken over the course of two phases of this study. The investigation focused on identifying executive isolation of CEOs and perspectives of employees that can impact the leadership and learning progress of organizations based on work culture, power distance and decision-making; awareness and experience of executive isolation; workplace friendliness and rejection; and management development initiatives to minimize the impact of executive isolation. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using MAXQDA 2022 (Verbi Software, Berlin, Germany), which is a qualitative data analysis software.

The findings highlight and expose the significant gap between understanding and analysing of the factors due to which the CEOs undergo executive isolation. It also extends to providing details related to the lack of awareness of the teams’ actions contributing to the CEOs’ isolation. It further highlights the fact that the difference of perspectives between the CEOs and teams leads to the organization slowing in its learning activities due to the leaders’ own challenges of executive isolation The findings also provide immense need of developing knowledge assets and management development initiatives for learning interventions, to help understand, analyse and mitigate executive isolation, in the interest of the organizational learning and development.

Earlier research work have contextualized the executive isolation impact on CEOs ability to be a leader. This study extends it to include the implications of leadership and learning culture on the teams that are affected by organization culture, power distance, decision-making and analysing the gap between the understandings about executive isolation of the CEOs. Eventually, it interprets how CEOs courting the executive isolation impacts the overall developmental culture of the organization. This will help in asserting the serious need of new learning frameworks needed to minimize the impact of CEO-level executive isolation.

The institutional conditions of primary care provision remain understudied in low- and middle-income countries. This study analyzes how primary care doctors cope with medical uncertainty in municipal clinics in urban India. As street-level bureaucrats, the municipal doctors occupy two roles simultaneously: medical professional and state agent. They operate under conditions that characterize health systems in low-resource contexts globally: inadequate state investment, weak regulation and low societal trust. The study investigates how, in these conditions, the doctors respond to clinical risk, specifically related to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).

The analysis draws on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Pune (2013–14), a city of three million, including 30 semi-structured interviews with municipal doctors.

Interpreting their municipal mandate to exclude NCDs and reasoning their medical expertise as insufficient to treat NCDs, the doctors routinely referred NCD cases. They expressed concerns about violence from patients, negative media attention and unsupportive municipal authorities should anything go wrong clinically.

The study contextualizes street-level service-delivery in weak institutional conditions. Whereas street-level workers may commonly standardize practices to reduce workload, here the doctors routinized NCD care to avoid the sociopolitical consequences of clinical uncertainty. Modalities of the welfare state and medical care in India – manifest in weak municipal capacity and healthcare regulation – appear to compel restraint in service-delivery. The analysis highlights how norms and social relations may shape primary care provision and quality.