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Cultural landscapes are no more considered only as territories of cultural interest but also as integrated systems of cultural, social, and economic values. The adjustment of this consideration with the modern paradigms of collective governance and management necessitates investigations on challenges of management of cultural landscapes for valorizing their resources toward sustainable development. In this framework, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the state of participatory governance and management in cultural landscapes, focusing on the case of Takht-e Soleyman World Heritage Site (WHS) in Iran.

The paper presents the results of a study based on a theoretical analysis, accompanied by in-depth interviews with the key actors in the cultural heritage governance and management sectors, and large-scale surveys of the local population through the circulation of questionnaires.

This paper debates the reasons behind and the way forward to make governance and management approaches consistent with international theories and national policies. The analysis focuses on rural cultural landscapes and accordingly the Takht-e Soleyman WHS is deeply investigated.

The policies for participatory governance and management of rural cultural landscapes have been raised in the literature. However, more attention has to be paid to the strategies and mechanisms based on local features for their implementation. The study detailed in this paper makes a contribution to the debate on the design and implementation of participatory governance and management systems in this field by examining the actual extent of successful implementation of theoretical values and national policies in the case of Takht-e Soleyman WHS.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the consistence of an ecosystem framework within the cultural sector and investigate the potential role of intellectual capital (IC) in cultural ecosystems.

The paper presents the results of an empirical research carried out within a specific Italian area, the Po Delta. It was based on sound theoretical analysis and group interviews focusing on three main discussion topics.

The research validated the consistence of ecosystem frameworks in relation to the cultural sector and the key role played by IC in their design, creation and implementation. It also highlighted the idea that this perspective is part of a broader rethinking process of the cultural field.

The research was carried out within a specific geographical area. The results, however, indicate the need for further research on the potential of IC in cultural ecosystems, in light of both a comparative and international perspective.

The research highlights the emergence of new frameworks and highlights the role of IC in new governance models in the cultural sector.

The analysis underlines the need for new governance systems based on a bottom-up approach, multi-level and multi-stakeholder frameworks, and potentially bringing important societal changes.

The concept of IC ecosystems remains a relatively unexplored field within the cultural sector. This paper could make a valuable contribution to the debate on new governance systems in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to point out whether Italian cultural organizations recognize, measure and manage intellectual capital (IC).

An empirical research on the subject of (IC) in cultural organizations has been carried out. Interviews have been realized with directors of Italian cultural organizations and a questionnaire submitted to a sample of 100 individuals involved in the Italian cultural sector.

Italian cultural organizations recognize the importance of IC, but they do not measure IC. Nonetheless, they claim to manage IC, even if they do not measure it through numerical indicators. A non‐metric approach for the visualization of IC has been rejected, as well. Controversial and ambiguous statements are discussed.

There is a gap between the directors' statements and their organizational behaviour. Most of them declare the need for IC numerical indicators, but only in one case is an overall IC performance measurement system in place.

The usefulness of the paper is that practitioners may reflect on the obstacles to the implementation of an IC measurement system in cultural organizations.

Cultural organizations are “unknown terrain” in terms of research into IC and may therefore suggest an innovative path for the analysis of IC. In this context, the paper discusses the need for either a metric approach or a non‐metric approach for the representation – and then the management – of IC.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the identification, evaluation and treatment of risks, as well as the appetite and corporate maturity in relation to enterprise risk management in the urban bus market of the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

A qualitative case study was formulated in two stages: the first one includes an interview with a bus market specialist and the second stage comprehends eight interviews with executives from bus chassis and coachwork manufacturers and bus fleet operators of this market.

The results show that larger companies tend to manage their risks in a more structured way when compared with smaller ones, although there are some exceptions. The most critical risks evaluated concerns to the political type followed by the economic/financial, strategic, environmental, social, operational, technological, image and ethical types; and the risk appetites are generally consistent with the risks criticality level.

This case study of an important sector in the economy can be emblematic for the adoption of good practices of risk management by managers.

Risk appetites are generally consistent with criticality and the main forms of treatment are to reduce, share and follow, linked to participation in representative associations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why entrepreneurial universities choose a particular business strategy focussing on diversification and multi-nationalisation, and the role of intellectual capital (IC) in supporting such strategies.

The research question is answered through an exploratory case study of the University of Bari, Italy. Data were collected from strategic plans, annual reports, national evaluation reports and semi-structured interviews with the university’s board members and analysed using Secundo et al.’s (2016) collective intelligence framework.

The authors show how contingency factors, such as economic and historical reasons, justify both the diversification and internationalisation strategies, and how they both rely on IC.

The results of this study can be used by managers to support the development of entrepreneurial university strategies.

The paper is novel because it provides theoretical justification to strategy development in a university setting. Additionally, the findings contribute to the fourth stage of IC research by showing how IC can be used to support diversification and internationalisation in a university and support third mission goals. Finally, the paper provides an empirical application of the Secundo et al.’s (2016) model for understanding IC in universities.

In the New Public Governance (NPG) paradigm, citizens play a vital role in the decision-making of public organisations and are fundamental to aligning their expectations with service delivery. Citizen engagement could be realised in the budgeting process by adopting participatory budgeting (PB) even if previous literature on PB does not focus on this tool design issue. Therefore, this study aims to understand which PB institutional design arrangements help enhance citizen participation.

A deductive content analysis and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis were carried out on the PB regulations of 100 Italian municipalities.

The results suggest that the PB design can be elaborated in different ways that do not always guarantee the involvement of citizens. Virtuous municipalities engage citizens from the start of the process and in the most relevant discussion and deliberation phases. A simple legislative provision does not guarantee a real introduction of participatory governance.

This study theorises citizen participation in PB and examines it through empirical evidence to define relationships between PB design arrangements and citizen engagement.

The development of innovations in all the research and development (R&D) fields is leading to a huge increase of patent data. Therefore, it is reasonable to foresee that, in the next future, Big Data-centered techniques will be compulsory to fully exploit the potential of this kind of data. In this context, network analysis-based approaches are extremely promising. The purpose of this paper is to provide a contribution to this setting. In fact, the authors propose a well-tailored centrality measure for evaluating patents and their citations.

The authors preliminarily introduce a suitable support directed network representing patents and their citations. After this, the authors present the centrality measures, namely, “Naive Patent Degree” and “Refined Patent Degree.’” Then, the authors show why they are well tailored to capture the specificities of the patent scenario and why classical centrality measure fails to fully reach this purpose.

The authors present three possible applications of the measures, namely: the computation of a patent “scope” allowing the evaluation of the width and the strength of the influence of a patent on a given R&D field; the computation of a patent lifecycle; and the detection of the so-called “power patents,” i.e., the most relevant patents, and the investigation of the importance, for a patent, to be cited by a power patent.

None of the approaches proposing the application of centrality measures to patent citation networks consider the main peculiarity of this scenario, i.e., that, if a patent p_i cites a patent p_j, then the value of p_i decreases. So, differently from classical scientific paper citation scenario, in this one performing a citation has a cost for the citing entity. This fact is not considered by all the approaches conceived to investigate paper citations. Nevertheless, this feature represents the core of patent citation scenario. The approach has been explicitly conceived to capture this feature.

Some universities have a commitment to both academic education and sustainable development, and the sustainable development goals can support several sustainable actions that universities may take as principles and attitudes. From this perspective, the purpose of this study is to present environmentally sustainable practices at a federal university in Brazil and to analyze and discuss the potential environmental impacts associated with an environmentally sustainable practice implemented using life cycle assessment (LCA) and its benefits for the university’s decision-makers.

To accomplish that, the study combines a description of environmentally sustainable practices at the 13 campuses of the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR) in terms of education, water and electricity consumption, waste management and emissions. As a result of this analysis, one campus identified that a high volume of disposable plastic cups were being disposed of, for which the use of reusable plastic cups was introduced. In addition, an LCA study (ISO 14040:2006 and 14044:2006) quantified the benefits of the introduction of said reusable plastic cups.

The results show that the university is working on environmentally sustainable initiatives and policies to become greener. At the same time, using a systematic LCA made it possible to measure that replacing disposable plastic cups for reusable ones reduced waste generation but increased water consumption on the campus. Faced with this, a sensitization was carried out to reduce water consumption. Finally, the current study provides lessons on the environmental performance to universities interested in sustainable practices, fostering perspectives for a better world. The findings of this study encourage organizations to accomplish environmental actions toward greener universities. The study shows that institutions need to be reflective and analytical about how even “greening” measures have impacts, which can be mitigated if necessary.

The sustainable practical implications were reported, and an LCA was conducted to assess potential environmental impacts of reusable plastic cups. It was identified that raw material production is the phase that generates most environmental impacts during the life cycle of the product, along with the consumer use phase, due to the quantity of water used to wash the reusable cups. In addition, the practical contributions of this study are to provide insights to institutions that aim to use environmental actions, i.e. suggestions of sustainable paths toward a greener university.

This is one of the first studies to investigate and discuss sustainable practices at UTFPR/Brazil. The study assessed one of the practices using a scientific technique (LCA) to assess the impacts of reusable plastic cups distributed to the students of one of the 13 campuses. Although there are other studies on LCA in the literature, the value of this study lies in expanding what has already been experienced/found on the use of LCA to assess environmental practices in university campuses.