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The paper aims to discuss the role of innovation labs as innovative management models to foster digital and continuous innovation practices within organisations of the digital ecosystem. A meta-model resulting from the analysis of the case study is proposed to describe the key phases and the relevant issues for the effective management of innovation labs as catalysts of digital innovation.

The paper combines theoretical insights with the empirical evidence gathered from a case study. The case study concerns the analysis of an innovation lab engaged in fostering innovation capacity and supporting digital transformation in a regional tourism ecosystem.

The study advances theoretical and practical knowledge about how to effectively design and manage innovation labs. Furthermore, the research provides scholars and practitioners with useful insights and implications for the elaboration, development and assessment of the managerial initiatives aimed at supporting organisations in facing the severe challenges of digital transformation, as well as in increasing organisations’ innovation capacity and continuous innovation attitudes.

The originality and value of the paper reside in enriching the empirical base for a later theory building on management issues of innovation labs, as well as in the proposal of a grounded-theory-based model for their successful management. In doing so, the study fills a relevant gap emerging in the current literature such as the lack of studies dealing with management models for the implementation of digital innovation strategies to manage digital knowledge, foster continuous innovation and based on innovative approaches and methodologies.

This paper aims to investigate the role of design as a knowledge translation mechanism in R&D-oriented open innovation. In particular, the paper intends to look at how design can be used as a means of knowledge transfer among various stakeholders who speak different languages and have divergent needs and interests in a process where knowledge openly flew across the boundaries of a high number of organizations.

The paper combines the insights from theory with the empirical evidences gathered by adopting an extreme case study approach: the detailed analysis of a case study related to an R&D project funded by the European Commission and aimed to investigate and produce innovative serious games in the area of healthcare. The project gathered a large number of stakeholders and deliberately adopted design to support an open innovation approach.

The paper provides insights into the use of design outputs such as artifacts, sketches, visual representations or prototypes to translate ideas, theoretical and technical requirements, documents and outputs into formats that can be more easily understood and appreciated by various stakeholders. This supports and favors coordination in open innovation projects where many different stakeholders are engaged in.

Although the adoption of an extreme case study approach offers important implications to understand the role of design in R&D-oriented open innovation, the use of a single case study represents the basis both to explore hypothesis and to provide first evidences that need to be further tested with other qualitative and quantitative analysis.

The paper offers practical implications about how design can help individuals and organizations involved in R&D activities to better communicate and share knowledge among various stakeholders by aligning their different needs, interests and languages along the various phases of their project development.

The originality of the paper lays at the intersection of three different fields: open innovation, knowledge management and design for innovation, thus integrating mature, but so far isolated, research streams. It provides insights for theory building by explaining the use of design as knowledge translational mechanism as well as it informs the practice by highlighting the power of design as a mean to support knowledge flows into open innovation-based R&D projects.

What is the role of managing knowledge within organizations? This is one of the fundamental research and practical questions which has animated and moved forward the rich scientific debate around the management of knowledge resources. This article aims to introduce the focus of the special issue. Its fundamental premise is that organizations invest their scarce resources only if these investments are capable of enhancing the business value creation capacity. Thus managers are interested in managing knowledge not for the sake of knowledge management, but because the planning, design, assessment and revision of the organizational knowledge resources and processes can support the business performance improvements.

The selection of the articles collected in this special issue is largely based on the work of the conference “International Forum on Knowledge Assets Dynamics – IFKAD” which took place in June 2011 in Tampere, Finland. IFKAD gathers leading experts in the field of the strategic knowledge‐based development of micro and macro organizations paying great attention to the knowledge dynamics affecting organizational value creation capacity.

Knowledge represents one of the fundamental constituent parts of any organization and it can be incorporated into people's abilities or ingrained into structural and technological capital. Thus management of knowledge is at the core of organization's business growth. In the light of this reflection this special issue pays attention to two main perspectives. First, recognizing that knowledge, likewise any other organization's resource, needs management means to support its allocation and development, the frameworks and tools aiming to identify, manage and assess the critical knowledge resources for growth are focused on. Second, acknowledging that the translation of knowledge into business outcomes requires management mechanisms, and then considering the knowledge processes grounding the improvement of performance.

The special issue explores the phenomena integrating the organizational, group and individual perspectives. This integration overcomes some limitations about the understanding of the issues under investigation.

The creative process through which the territorial resources, knowledge and culture are used, exploited and configured to match needs and to achieve congruence with the changing business environment has become a crucial process for competitiveness. This is even more relevant for economies of developing countries which are continuously struggling to reap the benefits of globalisation, as well as to grasp the new opportunities for competitiveness. As such, this paper aims to try to concentrate on the dynamic perspectives of the creative economy of countries by distinguishing between the potentialities and performance. The paper tackles the influence that creativity capacities might have on performance of countries.

The methodology consists in identifying creative economy indicators from a diverse data set of the World Economic Forum and distinguish them between potential and performance indicators.

Data reveal as good progress and emphasis is being devoted to increasing the level of creativity; however, the Balkan countries still holdup in their capacity to boost innovation.

The paper provide a new focus of research on creativity measurement that is significant for understanding what creative capacities territories possess and the ability to make proficient use for growth and innovation.

This paper proposes a new operational framework for measuring and interpreting the creative economy indicators by identifying not only indicators that gauge the potentialities of a country, but also indicators that are linked with the performance dimension, as well as the relationship amongst them.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the articles presented in the special issue “Entrepreneurial learning dynamics in knowledge-intensive enterprises.” The special issue is inspired by recent research on entrepreneurial learning dynamics in knowledge-intensive enterprises literature. The aim is to extend and consolidate this emerging research area exploring entrepreneurship as a never-ending dynamic learning process, as well as, to cross-fertilize entrepreneurship and organizational learning studies.

The paper is based on a literature and published document review, experiential reflections and argument.

The paper reveals an integrative framework to highlight the breath of entrepreneurial learning research according to different level of analysis: the context where learning happen, the different typologies of entrepreneurial learning processes, the ontological levels at which learning can occur and the different typologies of entrepreneurial learners. Continuous learning processes allow entrepreneurs to develop and grow, as well as, enable knowledge-intensive enterprises to engage in strategic renewal processes.

Although, entrepreneurial learning research so far has focused on applying existing theories in the entrepreneurial context, more research is needed to broaden the perspective and understanding how entrepreneurial learning can help to face key entrepreneurship’s challenges in different context.

The paper presents an holistic approach of current entrepreneurial learning research and encourages researchers to explore how different learning types come into play in different entrepreneurial contexts (start-up initiatives, strategic renewal in incumbent enterprises, ventures development and growth).

Despite the abundance of research in open innovation, few contributions explore it at inter-organizational level, and particularly with a focus on healthcare ecosystem, characterized by a dense network of relationships among public and private organizations (hospitals, companies and universities) as well as other actors that can be labeled as “untraditional” player, i.e. doctors, nurses and patients. The purpose of this paper is to cover this gap and explore how knowledge is transferred and flows among all the healthcare ecosystems’ players in order to support open innovation processes.

The paper is conceptual in nature and adopts a narrative literature review approach. In particular, insights gathered from open innovation literature at the inter-organizational network level, with a particular attention to healthcare ecosystems, and from the knowledge transfer processes, are analyzed in order to propose an interpretative framework for the understanding of knowledge transfer in open innovation with a focus on healthcare ecosystem.

The paper proposes an original interpretative framework for knowledge transfer to support open innovation in healthcare ecosystems, composed of four main components: healthcare ecosystem’s players’ categories; knowledge flows among different categories of players along the exploration and exploitation stages of innovation development; players’ motivations for open innovation; and players’ positions in the innovation process. In addition, assuming the intermediary network as the suitable organizational model for healthcare ecosystem, four classification scenarios are identified on the basis of the main players’ influence degree and motivations for open innovation.

The paper offers interpretative lenses for managers and policy makers in understanding the most suitable organizational models able to encourage open innovation in healthcare ecosystems, taking into consideration the players’ motivation and the knowledge transfer processes on the basis of the innovation results.

The paper introduces a novel framework that fills a gap in the innovation management literature, by pointing out the key role of external not R&D players, like patients, involved in knowledge transfer for open innovation processes in healthcare ecosystems.

Crowdfunding models recently emerged as relevant enhancing systems aimed at fostering innovation and entrepreneurial dynamics. Accordingly, great attention has been paid to seeker firms' characteristics and platforms. For this reason, adopting a holistic knowledge-based perspective on crowdfunding is essential. This paper first identifies and categorizes the potential knowledge-based dimensions grounding crowdfunding and technological scouting strategies to provide a theoretically-grounded framework potentially useful for driving decision-making processes. Then, it is applied to interpret a real crowdfunding strategy developed by an Italian platform in the field of the real estate sector.

The paper combines deductive and inductive approaches. After elaborating a conceptual framework identifying the potential knowledge-based dimensions for a crowdfunding strategy, it is tested and applied by re-interpreting a real crowdfunding strategy.

The study identifies the potential knowledge assets dimensions grounding a crowdfunding strategy through elaborating a dedicated conceptual framework. Then, the case study enriches the proposed conceptual arguments with a set of empirical evidence.

The paper provides a conceptual framework capable of fostering a specific research stream and carrying out a first holistic and systematic knowledge-based perspective. The authors believe that their research may provide a relevant contribution to the existing literature, depicting a comprehensive picture of the intellectual capital components that seekers have to identify and manage in crowdfunding. While doing so, the study significantly addresses the challenge launched by Troise et al. (2021) in order to enrich prior but highly fragmented studies on the role of intellectual capital components in crowdfunding.

The analysis of the models and tools developed and discussed can be useful to support the elaboration and the application of practical knowledge-based approaches, protocols and routines for the value generation in the crowdfunding field and to drive the designer of crowdfunding platforms and strategies to develop more effective and impactful initiatives and campaigns. Accordingly, when elaborating a crowdfunding strategy, it should be effectively highlighted that seekers have and are capable of managing intellectual capital in different manners. This is particularly true for new ventures that are generally challenged to provide information about their quality, in particular about founders, their previous experiences, potential and real networks and partnerships, innovation capacity.

This paper contributes to the further development of the crowdfunding literature according to a knowledge-based perspective.

This paper explores how learning processes supported by intensive use of design can favour absorptive capacity in open innovation contexts characterised by the interaction of a high number of diverse stakeholders.

The paper combines the insights from theory with the empirical evidence gathered by adopting a case study approach.

Findings provide evidence about the role of design-based learning to facilitate intra- and inter-organisational knowledge flows and to sustain absorptive capacity through processes of recognition, internalisation and adoption.

The study integrates currently distinct research streams focussing on (1) design research, particularly on how design can support knowledge processes and specific learning processes and (2) open innovation, particularly regarding how to enhance absorptive capacity in those contexts in which a high number of diverse stakeholders interact.

This study can help companies, research institutions and other organisations leveraging open innovation to reflect on the potential of design-based learning processes and on how to deliberately facilitate such processes in their projects.

The original contribution provided by this study is to explore open innovation through some analytical categories elaborated in design research concerning materially grounded forms of design-based learning. In particular, the study investigates how design supports knowledge transfer, sharing, translation and creation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how collaborative entrepreneurial learning (EL) processes between entrepreneurs and university students can enhance the entrepreneurial practices in the context of knowledge-intensive enterprises. These learning processes represent a valuable source for entrepreneurship development in incumbent enterprises in the forms of innovative products, services, processes or organizational renewal.

An extreme case study is the project “Mimprendo” (www.mimprendo.it), an initiative promoted by the Italian Conference of the University Colleges and the Italian Association of Young Entrepreneurs in collaboration with Italian universities. This is analyzed in the period 2009-2015, during which seven editions were developed.

A framework is presented based on collaborative EL processes to perform relevant entrepreneurial projects in knowledge-intensive enterprises. The framework provides a coherent and systematic approach to generate, select and implement entrepreneurial practices in incumbent companies starting from a project competition involving creative students and innovative entrepreneurs. EL processes in the community composed of entrepreneurs, experts and university students are grouped into the entrepreneurial phases of inspiration, exploration, exploitation, acceleration and growth, and include the learning processes of “intuition and sensing,” “contamination,” “experiential and contextual learning,” “experimenting and acting” and finally “thinking and reflecting.”

Implications for research can be identified according to many perspectives to deepen the centrality of the learning process in the research on knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship.

The framework results to be a promising approach to diffuse an entrepreneurial culture both in incumbent enterprises and in university students through a synergic collaboration among industry, university and institution. Practical implications could be derived for enterprise, students and educators involved in the design of innovative learning initiatives to sustain the development of an entrepreneurial mind-set.

The framework contributes to extending an emerging research area exploring entrepreneurship as a never-ending dynamic learning process. The involvement of brilliant university students in activating EL process with entrepreneurs in incumbent enterprises represents a novel aspect in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation.