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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.

In the current era of fake news, illusions, manipulations and other artificial attributes of virtuality and reality, authenticity is a virtue that people highly appreciate. This study aims to examine the influence of the personal brand authenticity of top football players on loyalty to the football discipline in general, via the mediation of personal brand identification.

Based on data collected from a convenience sample of 562 respondents from Poland via an electronic survey and analyzed using the structural equation modeling method, this study explored, first, the influence of top football players’ personal brand authenticity on consumers’ identification with these football players, and second, how this identification may lead to enhancing loyalty to the football discipline. Finally, it verified how the loyalty effect (attitudinal and behavioral) varies across different categories of spectators.

Personal brand identification with authentic football stars is a focal factor enabling the creation of loyalty (attitudinal and behavioral) to the whole discipline. Consumers’ perceptions of the authenticity of the personal brands of football players play a role in increasing identification with these personal brands. This identification is essential in achieving loyalty to football as a sports discipline via football celebrities.

Football players perceived as authentic are evaluated more positively, leading to consumer identification with these players, which, in turn, increases consumers’ loyalty to football. Thus, the presence of authentic, skilled players is important for football, but the actual loyalty effect from authenticity can be achieved only by identification. Therefore, football requires exceptional, strong stars who reflect a set of desired personal values. Further research is needed to identify the desired set of values that leads to identification with football stars.

This study presents evidence that the personal brand authenticity of a football star is a driver of loyalty towards football discipline in general if the spectators’ identification with this superstar occurs. Moreover, this study proves that loyalty to football driven by the personal brand authenticity of football stars differs between spectators’ categories.

This study focuses on memorable customer shopping experience design in the sporting goods retail setting. It aims to identify the phygital customers' needs and expectations that are satisfied through in-store technologies and to detect the in-store strategies that use these technologies to make the store attractive and experiential.

This exploratory study adopted a qualitative research methodology, specifically a multiple-case study, by performing semi-structured interviews with sporting goods store managers.

Sporting goods retailers use various in-store technologies to create a phygital customer shopping experience, including devices, mobile apps, wireless communication technologies, in-store activations, support devices, intelligent stations, and sensors. To improve the phygital customer journey and the phygital shopping experience, retailers meet customers' needs for utilitarian, hedonic, social, and playfulness experiences. Purely physical or digital strategies, as well as phygital strategies, are identified. This research also proposes a model of in-store phygital customer shopping experience design for sporting goods retailers.

Sporting goods managers can invest in multiple technologies by designing a physical environment according to the customers' needs for utilitarian, hedonic, social, and playful experiences. In addition, they can improve the phygital customer shopping experience with specific push strategies that increase customer engagement and, in turn, brand and store loyalty.

This study highlights how the phygital customer experiential journey can be created through new technologies and improved with specific reference to the sporting goods stores.

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 purpose of this paper is to tackle the grand issue of climate change in a managerial perspective by proposing a new type of management.

Climate change has now been debated for many years, and in spite of different viewpoints, analyses and opinions, is a phenomenon that is accepted by all. There are thousands of studies on the nature of climate change and its consequences on the planet Earth and its inhabitants. However, there are few studies investigating the consequences of climate change on the founding tenets and practices of management. This paper aims to contribute to this facet of the issue. In the first part, it examines the main facts about climate change, their impact on businesses and proposes an adapted model of management for agriculture, industry, services and supply chains. In the second part, it advocates a shift in paradigm from the “maximization of profit” to the “maximization of well-being” as the foundation of a new managerial philosophy that can both address climate change and sustainability.

Companies and managers are in a much better position than politicians and consumers to find a solution to climate change problems for the very reason that they are not stupid in Cipolla's (2011) sense. Companies and managers do have the power to rewrite the rules of the game in order to get to a firm and management metamorphosis. Starting from a return to company ownership by and for the company itself (not just external shareholders), a switch in purpose from profit-seeking to people's well-being, fair remuneration of stakeholders, progress as a measure of success and long-term orientation are suggested as new tenets in management.

Although this paper has several limitations (it may be too wide in scope, utopian, its ideas may sound unachievable and even sometimes naïve in their arguments), its starting point is very clear: the authors, as management scholars, must do something to try and stop the crash of economies and businesses in an ecological disaster. And its logic is very clear and straightforward as well: if people want things to change, then they have to change the foundations of management thinking, both in theory and in practice. The authors do not claim their solution is the only one or the best: avenues for future research aimed at providing better solutions are wide open from this point of view, and the authors genuinely encourage colleagues to continue in this direction and contribute to this work. What matters most, however, is to stop looking for precise answers to “wrong, well-defined, narrow problems” and to start looking for “approximate answers to important problems” (Brown et al., 2005) as the authors tried to do here.

Developing a new management operating model and foundations able to keep companies alive while not compromising mankind survival on planet Earth.

This paper addresses the Tourish (2020) challenge for purposeful research in management by providing some fresh ideas about the way companies and management principles and practices should change to prevent irreversible environmental damages.

This paper proposes adequate strategies that companies, public administrators and organisations in the education industry can undertake to successfully face the challenges of digital transformation in a regional innovation system. This research considers stakeholders that operate in the Tyrol–Veneto macroregion (the Tyrol, South Tyrol and Veneto areas), a significant case of moderately innovative European macroregion.

This study undertakes explorative research based on a qualitative method. It adopts a place-based multi-stakeholder approach to emphasise the role of three categories of stakeholders (companies, educational system and regional governments) in facing digital changes. More precisely, interviews with 60 stakeholders from the Tyrol–Veneto macroregion were conducted and examined via both text mining analysis and content analysis. First, correspondence factor analysis was performed using IRaMuTeQ software to identify homogeneous subsets of concepts (pillars–i.e., macroareas of strategic actions). Second, two coding phases were implemented using NVivo software to detect strategic fields of action and specific strategic actions undertaken to address the challenges of digital transformation.

The results highlight that digital transformation is a pervasive challenge of regional innovative system that requires a multifaceted set of strategic actions falling into three main pillars. The first pillar, named “culture and skills”, includes three strategic fields of action as follows: digital education, talents and digital culture. The second pillar, named “infrastructures and technologies”, points out the need of information, interaction and artificial intelligence as key strategic fields of action. The third pillar, named “ecosystems”, highlights the importance of investing in medium- to long-term visions, partnerships and life quality. In brief, this study shows that standalone interventions are insufficient to tackle digital transformation from a systemic perspective. Moreover, this study outlines the potential contribution of each category of stakeholder to foster the digitalisation of the Tyrol–Veneto macroregion.

This study highlights the importance of developing digital culture and skills before investing in digital infrastructure and technology in a moderately innovative macroregion. Companies should alter their vision before reconfiguring their business models, invest in smart working and establish contacts with start-ups. In addition, this study recommends that public administration should mainly invest in digital education and partnerships, while, in terms of education and training organisations, it suggests providing digital skills to several cohorts of both students and workers. Policy implications call for the creation of new occasions of cooperation among stakeholders by fostering “table talks” as strategic and policy actions and by making more financial resources available to encourage the digital transformation processes.

The results of this study may be adapted to the characteristics of other regional innovative systems and used as a reference point in terms of the improvement of business, market and local development.

This paper explores how digitalization affects the academic research publication process by taking into account the perspective of management scholars. It provides an overview of the digital professional services dedicated to academic research, and investigates academics' awareness of, the impact on the publication process of, and scholars' expectations regarding digital services and software.

This explorative study adopted a qualitative approach by performing direct observations of websites regarding digital professional research services and in-depth interviews with national and international management scholars.

The multiple digital professional services dedicated to academic research enable authors to develop a scientific paper independently or with the support of professionals. The scholars' awareness regarding the digital services and software was limited, because of both the plethora of options on the market and the frequent use of the same digital tools over time. In impact terms, these tools enable scholars to improve research quality and to increase productivity. However, the negative effects led scholars to express different expectations about how they can be improved and what difficulties should be overcome to favor the publication process.

The results of this study provide suggestions both for scholars who engage in academic research and digital services and software providers.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the ongoing development of digitalization in support of the research publication process from the perspective of academics.

The intent of this paper is to discover whether practical examples of new forms of business enterprise are to be found in the real world and what the peculiarities of any such experiments are.

The research conducted is of an eminently explorative nature. The research operations are fundamentally based on direct observation and use is also made of secondary sources – especially publications and the contributions of independent web‐based agencies.

The number of companies that the research conducted made it possible to identify is not actually very high. Indeed, at present the list counts nine such firms. What should be underlined is that these are not enterprises that have decided to adopt a corporate social responsibility or corporate citizenship approach while still leaving their basic nature substantively unchanged. They are, rather, firms that can be termed “anomalous”, given that, in one way or another, they operate outside the conventional rules on the way business is conceived and practised.

Research limitations are primarily in the short number of case studies considered, second in the lack of any contact with the firms examined and, by consequence, in the use of sole company web site information or secondary sources. Starting from the collection of firms which in turn show one or more peculiar features in their structure or behaviour, research implications stem from the opportunity to reason around a new firm's model credibly enough, as such a reasoning relies on some empirical evidence.

The paper's value lies in its effort of documenting the existence of firms going, one way or another, out of the box in their way of doing business and in focusing on some peculiar features far from “conventional managerial wisdom” but which do not compromise these firms' competitiveness.