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The purpose of this paper is to develop an original six-phase model describing entrepreneurial learning in the transition of place-based enterprises toward a sustainable exploitation of natural common resources (commons).

The six-phase model proposed by this study explains the learning processes involving place-based enterprises through two important existing theories: adaptive co-management and Lachmann’s evolutionary, embedded theory of entrepreneurship. The proposed model integrates these two theories on the basis of a longitudinal case study on the fishing enterprises in an Italian marine protected area (MPA).

In the case study, the success factors identified by the adaptive co-management literature proved important in enabling an embedded entrepreneurial learning process consistent with Lachmann’s view. The case analysis allowed the authors to cluster these learning processes around six phases. Further, even if traditional fishing is not knowledge-intensive, this case shows the transition to a sustainable business model required intense efforts of educated institutional work and scientific research. Interestingly, the key learning processes were enabled by the emergence of a larger, networked social entity (a network form of organization) including the community of fishermen, the MPA management and a network of scientists studying the marine area ecosystem.

This study is explorative and relies on a single case study. Despite this limitation, it opens up new research paths in the fields of entrepreneurship, institutional work, network organizations and adaptive management of the commons.

This study is strongly interdisciplinary; it proposes an original model based on a theoretical view that is highly innovative for organization and management studies; and addresses a relevant but overlooked issue with important societal implications.

The purpose of this paper is to promote a business process approach for developing and improving the efficiency of hospital service quality in order to reduce clinical risks and increase patients satisfaction. The problems healthcare facilities face are how to reduce waste and risk and improve quality. The adoption of a process-focused organization could reduce organizational errors which have a negative influence on performance.

The research is based on a case study methodology, analyzing a specific real-life case. It is shown a practical example in the surgery department of an Italian hospital, identifying, analyzing and managing critical situations, in terms of improvement. To this end, national and international contributions, public documents, institutional websites, conference papers, books, workshops and hospital websites have been analyzed. Moreover, other data were collected through questionnaires.

Results show how a comprehensive view of the processes may lead to improvement in operations by identifying different risks and bottlenecks, suggesting the rapid implementation of corrective policies and improvements, in terms of overall efficiency.

By implementing innovative organizational processes to identify and reduce bottleneck a healthcare system could achieve a competitive advantage.

Within the Italian healthcare system, limited attention has been paid to the design of healthcare facilities. Flexible solutions are necessary for lean management. The originality of this work lies in the analysis applied to a complex organization, through which hidden critical situations have been identified, and solutions to improve and provide better healthcare management have been suggested.

This study aims to investigate the intellectual capital (IC) dynamics in entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) by conceptualizing EEs as systems whose purposes include the (re)generation of the intangible resources needed for effective entrepreneurship. The study proposes a taxonomy of the key enablers of IC and develops a model that captures the unfolding interdependencies across the enablers of explorative and exploitative human, relational and organizational capital in EEs.

The authors purposefully selected a successful EE around an entrepreneurial university in Latin America as empirical case. Specifically, they investigated the IC dynamics of the EE in the context of a series of internationally awarded hackathons and related activities organized at the ecosystem level over three years (2019–2021). The research leveraged participant observations, in-depth interviews with multiple EE actors and archival documents. For the data analysis, this study combined the Gioia method with an abductive approach.

First, the study identified 27 operationalizable enablers of IC at the EE level clustered into human, relational and organizational capital and further differentiated these enablers considering the explorative and exploitative facets of IC. Second, it determined that the dynamic interplay across IC enablers is critical for an EE to flourish and evolve adaptively. This study concludes that assessing IC enablers and their dynamics can aid the understanding, evaluation and management of EEs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to conceptualize EEs as systems whose purposes include creating the conditions for an effective interplay of explorative and exploitative IC at the system level. The resulting taxonomy of IC enablers provides formative constructs that will benefit both scholars and practitioners investigating the crucial role of intangible resources in EEs and guide managers, entrepreneurs and policymakers in their decision-making processes.

This study investigates (1) the processes through which social enterprises develop resilient organizational logics and (2) the key resilience factors in the organizational logics of successful social enterprises. The organizational logic is conceptualized here as the dynamic system of roles, rules and social expectations that result from the organization's business model, impact model and organizational form.

This study adopts an inductive approach to identify emerging resilience factors and processes in an exemplary case of social entrepreneurship (a work integration venture). The longitudinal data collection on this case took place from 2011 to 2016, based on approximately 440 h of participant observation and 10 semi-structured interviews.

The inductive analysis suggests that social enterprises develop resilient organizational logics through multi-level recursive processes of bridging institutional work. These processes enable the development of an organizational logic that is internally robust while linking distant practices, needs and expectations. The authors conceptualize these characteristics into a novel construct, the organizational logic's bridging power, which is operationalizable through two dimensions (hybridity-based and cocreation-based bridging power) and five sub-dimensions.

Like in all inductive studies, further research is needed to validate the proposed model. The new proposed construct “organizational logic's bridging power” is, interestingly, a meta-theoretical concept encouraging cross-fertilization between the literature on institutional logics and that on value cocreation.

The process development model proposed by this study highlights the importance of network-level institutional work for developing cocreation-based resilience. Furthermore, this study shows how institutional theories could be complemented with other bodies of knowledge in order to understand social enterprise resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of globalization convergence (GC) and its components (social, economic, political, technological and ecological) on food production (FP).

The methodological approach adopted is based on a quantitative approach, using a static panel data analysis with relevant data from five European countries within five time intervals (2013–2017).

The results indicated that three components of globalization (social, technological and ecological) could significantly contribute to the food industry, while two other components of globalization (economic and political) are negatively correlated with FP.

This study contributes to the theoretical recognition of the role of globalization in influencing FP in multidisciplinary interactions. Meanwhile, this study's main limitation lies in the statistical method of panel data analysis, since temporal and spatial changes have not been investigated.

Despite the literature on globalization's effect on FP, each globalization component's effect has not been investigated appropriately within cross-countries studies. Hence, the present study addresses a gap in the extant literature by examining the globalization effects on the food industry to promote globalized food security, opportunities and solutions in the study areas.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how the intellectual capital (IC) approach and concepts could be fruitfully adapted to study the smart city phenomenon from a managerial point of view.

This study is based on a long-term, in-depth ethnographic exploration of the vast global community, which is created around the smart city movement.

The analysis suggests that, in order to effectively analyse a smart city context through the IC lens, the traditional IC framework needs to be extended for: expected outcomes, which should also include sustainability, resilience and quality of life; categories of key resources, which should also include institutional capital and environmental capital; units of analysis, which should also include territorial systems, such as transportation or waste; and key managerial challenges implied. As a final result, a smart city intellectual capital (SC-IC) framework is proposed.

Most of the cases analysed in this study are European; further studies are advisable to better investigate non-European smart city contexts.

The paper suggests that the knowledge management, project portfolio management and network management approaches are crucial to better support managerial practices in smart city organizations.

The SC-IC framework allows for a clear definition of the smart city organization, as a new knowledge-based, project-oriented, network-shaped type of organization. Therefore, the SC-IC framework provides smart city research with a consistent rooting in management studies. Further, this paper contributes to the fourth stage of IC research.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how the relational capital of the information technology (IT) department creates value in organizations. In addition, the paper presents a multi-dimensional scale to measure and manage relational capital in the IT department.

In the first, explorative phase of the study, interviews and focus groups were conducted in order to develop a new measurement scale, which was subsequently tested through a survey questionnaire (212 respondents).

This research suggests that the relational capital of the IT department is a very important resource for the creation of strategic value. The statistical analysis conducted for this study confirmed the validity and reliability of the novel scale developed to measure this resource. Finally, thanks to factor analysis, five dimensions for the scale were identified.

Data were collected in northern Italy only. Further studies are advisable to confirm the validity of the constructs and scale.

The questionnaire presented in this study can be used to monitor the effectiveness of the interactions between the IT department and the other key actors involved in IT-enabled innovation. The adoption of this scale and its possible adaptation to specific, evolving business contexts may enhance the practitioner’s understanding of the role of relational capital in the value creation process.

The paper contributes to the “third stage” of intellectual capital research by concentrating on an intra-organizational level of analysis, which has been overlooked in the literature to date.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between intellectual capital (IC) and sustainability using practitioners’ perspectives and by developing an analysis of comments and practices published in 1,651 blog posts in one of the leading sources of sustainability research: CSRwire.com.

A total of 1,651 posts, containing more than 1.5 million words, published by experts in the field of sustainability are analysed using Leximancer and content analysis.

The results reveal IC and sustainability to be complex topics under active discussion by practitioners, and several links to the IC literature are identified and compared. The findings focus on the managerial practices applied by leading companies, as discussed by practitioners, that show IC and sustainability influence each other in answering a plurality of demands or logics.

First, the authors identify the need to study the managerial practices proposed by practitioners, rather than their company reports. Second, the authors propose developing a trading zone for IC researchers and practitioners. Third, the authors reflect on the role of new communication tools, such as integrated reporting, to connect IC and sustainability. Finally, the authors conclude that the relationship between IC and sustainability could benefit from a fifth stage of IC research that considers justifications of the worth of IC and sustainability practices.

The paper is novel because it addresses concerns about the relationship between IC and sustainability by examining messages posted by practitioners, rather than examining company disclosures. This leads to an understanding of the impact of practices rather than the desires motivating practice. The results support the view that it is time to remove the boundaries of IC research and work towards reconciling the worth of IC to different people in different contexts. The authors argue that practitioners require scholars to reduce the ambiguity between IC and its expected results. This would open the door to a potentially productive way of understanding IC and the complexity of economic, social, and environmental value. In short, researchers should change their research questions from, “What is IC worth to investors, customers, society, and the environment?” to “Is managing IC a worthwhile endeavour?”

This paper empirically tests the relationship between food heritage, familiness, and clan culture, thus, highlighting the pivotal role of familiness in building robustly competitive food firms based on clan culture and food heritage.

The methodological approach adopted is based on a quantitative analysis with data from one eco-tourist city in Iran (Torqabeh). In this regard, we developed a structured questionnaire surveying 98 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in the food industry. We then used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to carry out the analysis.

The results indicate the significant positive relationship between food heritage and clan culture, and highlight the role of familiness as a strong mediator, which is also associated with a strong relationship between food heritage and clan culture.

In the present study, the main limitation was linked to the small sample size and data collection, which took place in only a single city; however, further research could overcome this limitation by investigating SMEs from a heterogeneous geographical context.

The value of this research relates to studies that have examined food heritage as a possible antecedent of familiness. Moreover, the novelty of this research is to study the concept of familiness in improving resource-based views and organizational theories.