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Customer feedback is believed to provide an important retailer metric. Notwithstanding, customer retention still presents a challenge in today’s increasingly digitalised business environment. The insurance industry has recently begun its digitalisation process and is struggling with customer retention. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the recurrent trends in the academic discourse surrounding this topic.

This narrative review has documented journal publications from January 2000 to February 2018, using the PRISMA statement. The Web of Science and SCOPUS databases were examined for prior studies of digitalisation and customer loyalty in an insurance setting.

The most recurrent themes were those deemed to be of most interest to the wider academic community and in greatest need of additional research. Expressed as a “conditional statement” this is summarised as: “IF [most recurring] THEN [need for further research]”. Most articles were published in UK-based journals, with most first authors listed in the USA as their country of origin. The articles most commonly discussed the need for “Proactive retention”, i.e. taking pre-emptive action to secure customer loyalty. This exposes a gap with extant theories on customer loyalty/customer retention, which favours customer feedback as an important metrics.

The articles investigated were not ranked beyond mentioning the number of publications found in each respective journal, as to determine any distinguishable patterns of publication.

The need for studies on “Proactive retention” is likely desirable also in other areas than insurance.

The study exposes a gap in extant theory, which mostly discusses retention from a posteriori knowledge. However, most examined literature is actually calling for a priori knowledge.

The theory of complex adaptive systems (CASs) represents an interesting perspective to study the characteristics of circular supply chains (CSCs). In this regard, the current literature lacks evidence regarding coordination and integration mechanisms, characteristics of the environment and emerging system properties of CSCs. This paper aims to fill this gap and focuses on how and why companies design (i.e. configure and coordinate) their CSCs and what value these design choices help to create across different industries.

The authors use a multiple case study approach and analyze data collected from a sample of five sustainable start-ups operating in the fashion and construction industries in Italy to better understand how these companies design (i.e. configure and coordinate) their CSCs.

Results reveal that in the two industries under investigation, the design of CSCs built around open and closed–loop logic is triggered by the intention to solve a negative sustainability impact. The sustainability impact determines whether the value is restored within the same supply chain, in another, or inside or outside the same industry. Interestingly, start-ups appear to coordinate other CSC actors with three leading roles: (1) orchestrator, (2) integrated orchestrator and (3) circular manufacturer. The coordination role of the start-ups differs in each supply chain configuration based on the level of vertical integration of manufacturing activities.

From a theoretical perspective, the authors' results expand previous supply chain management (SCM) literature by presenting an empirical analysis of the configuration and coordination of CSCs, and discussing the drivers for creating such circularity from a CAS perspective. From a managerial perspective, the authors offer a practical experience to entrepreneurs on how to transform circular and sustainable business model aspirations into CSC practices.

Based on social influence theory, this paper aims to explore the influence of academic entrepreneurs on team innovation activities. The innovation behavior of academic team members is the key behavior in academic entrepreneurial activities. As a special entrepreneurial group, academic entrepreneurs' political skills play an important role in stimulating team innovative behaviors.

This paper adopts a multi-level study design and takes as samples the paired data of 91 academic entrepreneurial teams (n = 475). Based on team cognition, it constructs a model of the influence mechanism of academic entrepreneurs' political skills on team innovation behavior and explores the mechanism of transactive memory system in this influence effect. The authors use HLM and PROCESS macro to test our multilevel model.

The results show that academic entrepreneurs' political skills positively impact team innovation behavior, and a transactive memory system plays a mediating role between them. Team psychological safety significantly enhances the positive relationship of both academic entrepreneurs' political skills and a transactive memory system with team innovation behavior. Moreover, with enhanced perceptions of team psychological safety, academic entrepreneurs' political skills are more likely to improve team innovation behavior through the transactive memory system.

The study explores the influence of transactive memory system on the relationship between academic entrepreneurs' political skills and team innovation behavior, with the team cognitive perspective derived from social influence theory. This provides authors with new insights on the complex dynamics at place in the team innovation process and offers implications for how we can fruitfully manage this process.

In recent years, the penetration of digital technologies in the financial industry determined the arising of Fintech, which generated a dynamic and rapid change that business operators and supervisory authorities in the banking industry are struggling to follow it. This is especially due to issues affecting financial intermediaries and customers, and potential risks of stability of the financial system. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of Fintech in the banking industry thus to update the knowledge about technology innovation in the banking sector, identify the major trends in the domain and delineate future research directions.

The study reviews 377 articles indexed on Scopus from 2014 to 2021 that focus on Fintech and the banking industry. The methodology adopted is structured in two steps: the keywords selection and the analysis of the documents extracted. The first step identified “Fintech” and “bank” as keywords to be searched within the title, abstract or keywords of documents indexed on Scopus; whereas the second step combined R and VOSviewer to provide a descriptive analysis of the dataset and the analysis of keywords and occurrences, respectively.

Results achieved in the study allow providing a systemic view of the Fintech in the banking industry, including the emergent phenomenon of digital banking. In particular, it is provided with a general overview and descriptive information on the entire sample of documents analyzed, their authors, the keywords used and the most cited works. Besides, a deepening on the model of digital banking is provided, by delineating the six dimensions of the key effects generated by the digital bank model.

Two main elements of originality characterize this study. The first one is related to the fact that few review studies have been published on Fintech in the banking industry, and the second one concerns the multiple dimensions of the impact of Fintech in the banking sector, which includes customer, company, bank, regulation authority and society.