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The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss an unconventional approach for developing organizational learning inside companies. The subject of this paper is the interactive mode of organizational learning – involving shared understanding and sense-making – which has proven useful in the current turbulent era and complex competitive environment.

The paper is based on an inductive and phenomenon-driven approach. The data collection method consists of interviews with involves informants. The empirical context of the research is Open Factory – the largest open-door event for industrial manufacturing in Italy.

Companies participating in Open Factory gained several benefits in terms of interactive learning. In particular, intra-organizational knowledge sharing, staff motivation, and more focused organizational identity were reported as the most relevant advantages.

Companies eager to enhance their interactive mode of organizational learning should seriously consider taking part in events such as Open Factory or should strive to create a similar event.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to describe and analyze open-door events for manufacturing companies as a source of organizational learning.

This paper aims to answer the call for greater humanization of the corporation, introducing aphorisms as a new tool for developing management awareness, creativity, and multiple-perspective mind-set.

The paper elaborates on a theoretical base to suggest a new tool for management development.

A firm is not only a technical system but rather a community of people, and due to increasing environmental complexity, humanities can provide managers with great help. In this line of thought, aphorisms are an under-considered literary genre that can prove helpful in humanizing the corporation.

Aphorisms can assist management in several ways: they help to understand what the organization stands for and to focus organizational values; they contribute to define corporate identity to people inside and outside the organization; they favor open-minded examination of problems from multiple perspectives, giving way to unexpected possibilities; and they generate critical dialogue within the management team about strategic decisions.

Although several arts and disciplines have already been considered in management literature, as far as the authors know, this is the first paper attempting to introduce aphorisms in the management toolbox.

This study expands the debate on the reasons that wine producers adopt sustainable, organic wine production. It aims to ascertain the enabling factors facilitating behavioral intention regarding such an adoption and whether these factors can be combined in a conceptual, measurable model.

A sample of 157 Italian winery companies was used. Results were analyzed through the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model, various quantitative methods and a multi-regression model.

Gender, age, role, experience in the sector and company existence do not affect behavioral intention. Conversely, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influences, facilitating conditions, attitude and self-efficacy strongly affect behavioral intention, whereas the determinant anxiety has a negative effect. Further, four factors account for most of the variability in behavioral intention.

The research is limited to Italian wine producers, and the discussion is based on quantitative results alone. Qualitative data would probably produce a richer, more comprehensive understanding of some phenomena.

Managers and entrepreneurs intending to invest in organic wine production can gain a detailed understanding of factors that affect the behavioral intention toward these technologies by comparing their attitudes with those of Italian producers.

Several studies have focused on wine consumers' behavior, but very few have investigated wineries' intention to adopt organic wine technology and the likely driving factors.

This paper aims to examine the content dimensions and methods of accelerating the entrepreneurial learning (EL) triggered by participating in learning events, such as factory tours. It particularly focuses on the Italian case of Open Factory – an open-doors event of industrial manufacturing culture.

This study adopted a qualitative approach using the “Gioia” methodology. Data were mainly collected through semi-structured interviews with firms participating in and organising Open Factory.

The dimensions of EL are learning from critical reflection, experience and external sources, while the enablers of EL (factors that accelerate learning) are varied and connected to organisational learning in the form of individual-, team- and institutional-level learning. Based on these results, this paper proposes a model for developing EL triggered by participating in learning events.

This research suggests developing appropriate organisational conditions inside firms, especially by entrepreneurs. These conditions are connected to sharing organisational values to foster learning, such as trust, commitment, involvement, awareness, sharing of experiences, exchange, autonomy and freedom. In addition, this study suggests ways that the EL model proposed in this research can be adapted to other learning events.

This is the first study to connect factory tours to learning events and EL. It highlights the ways that participating in the Open Factory event created the chance to develop learning across organisational levels inside firms.

The aim of the paper is to consider whether constant product innovation is compatible with the ethical management of a business. The question arises out of observations of two pressures exerted by global competition, i.e. the speed of change, which pushes in the direction of continuous innovation, and the determining power of demand, which wishes to see business conduct itself ethically.

With a theoretical approach, the paper highlights how these two pressures are both exerted on business, the advantages for business as well as for the consumers, deriving from the tendency of companies to innovate at all times and in ever shorter times, and the sins that an enterprise may commit when involved in a “competition vortex” created by the pressure of the speed of change.

What can a business imprisoned in this vortex do to escape when the fear of being “left behind” blinds it to seeing any other courses open to it? The paper proposes a possibly controversial, and at least challenging, model that can be seen as swimming against the tide, by adopting “slowness” and harmony, and a cluster of related concepts, as its basic tenets.

For this very reason the model proposed is already potentially valid, in a context where complexity and uncertainty give value to the original and the new. The paper is seen to be useful for managers and scholars of management, with particular focus on business ethics and product innovation.