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This study examines the criteria for evaluating the quality of servitization and the factors influencing the project–service system's success.

Evidence was collected through three rounds of Delphi consensus with 42 project managers.

The results indicate that the quality of servitization in project-oriented organizations is conceptualized as a cumulative construct driven by the product-service system's overall ability to offer more customer value. This value is defined by three interconnected dimensions: the service, the project and the integration system. The study also proposes a novel customer-oriented quality process with two connected levels comprising eight key factors influencing the quality of the project–service systems and nine key quality criteria that assist in evaluating the project–service systems.

Offering extra services is crucial for successful project-oriented organizations to deliver more customer value. The value of servitization is the combined value of products and services. The failure of one of these components to satisfy customers leads to the collapse of the whole system, which entails the need for a balanced-focus quality system toward projects and services.

This study contributes to the quality of servitization in project-oriented organizations, arguing that a balance between service orientation and project orientation is preferred to increase customer value and reduce the clash and ambiguity between project operations and service provision.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the structural changes needed for project-based organisations (PBOs) to synthesise their project operations and services following the servitisation strategy. It addresses the question of how PBOs should change their organisational structure fitting with service provision strategy.

This study followed an exploratory research method using a single in-depth case with evidence collected from 51 project managers from five different industry sectors: construction, oil and gas, IT, logistics and health care

Capitalising on organisational design theory, it has been found that successfully extending PBOs' outcomes into a system of both project output and extra services requires an adjustment of organisational structure that creates greater value for both companies and customers. This required adjustment has been divided into five main categories: (1) collaboration cross-project and customers; (2) flexible workflow, (3) decentralised decision-making, (4) wide span of control and (5) project governance. However, the findings indicate that success can only be ensured by particular mutually coordinated organisational designs with a suitable balance of products and services

This study presents vital indicators to PBOs practitioners when deploying servitisation within their operational strategy by adjusting the organisation's design.

Servitisation could add both economic and social values for a diverse set of project stakeholders. However, the sustainability performance of servitisation in servitised project-based organisations is an outcome of reducing the discrepancy between project operation and service provision activities.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge and proposes a structural alteration process in PBOs to help align project operations and service provision activities. It explains how project-based organisations reconfigure their resources to provide services.

There is a consensus suggesting that the theoretical underpinning associated with supply chain quality management practices remain evolutionary to current thinking. Therefore, this study aims to explore how absorptive capacity (AC) supports supply chain quality integration (SCQI) by building product and process quality within a supply chain (SC).

A comparative case study of global pharmaceutical manufacturers in a developing market was undertaken. A two-round qualitative research method was designed to collect data through 54 semi-structured interviews with pharmaceutical managers and senior managers.

The results demonstrate that AC is essential to the development of SCQI because of its ability to use valuable strategic and operational knowledge, which is important when improving consistent internal product and process quality, along with establishing a robust SC design. The authors found that AC enables companies to design their quality and continuously improve their products and processes among their SC members.

The authors acknowledge that these sets of findings are difficult to generalise to other sectors, however, the authors are confident that they can be extrapolated to other companies in the pharmaceutical industry.

The study develops a framework to support practitioners and decision makers to leverage their AC towards facilitating their SCQI practices.

This study explains the role of the AC process in relation to SCQI practices, in the context of the pharmaceutical SC. The study profiles the characteristics of dynamic capabilities to increase the companies’ competencies, processes and resources.

This study aims to examine reciprocal exchanges in knowledge networks using temporal differentiation of knowledge exchanges. To date, research on horizontal knowledge networks rather overlooks the temporal perspective, which could explain the dynamics of exchange in those networks.

The paper reports on a study of four horizontal knowledge networks in the UK over a period of 18 months.

The findings integrate three temporal dimensions of timescale, timeliness and time modalities. The dimensions have implications for the way knowledge is exchanged (or not), which can in turn sustain or stymie productive knowledge exchange in horizontal knowledge networks.

The study encourages researchers to attend to the micro-processes of knowledge exchanges through the integrative framework of temporalities. While this study examined horizontal networks, future research can be extended to analysing temporalities in other types of networks.

It seeks to inspire practitioners to appreciate how the impacts of knowledge networks play out in/over time, and how more effective coopetitive knowledge-sharing environments can be created and sustained by taking differentiated time structures into account.

This study contributes to the knowledge management literature by providing a temporal perspective to understand reciprocal knowledge exchanges in horizontal knowledge networks.

The purpose of this paper is to assess how national and regional authorities in south-east Europe in a period of crisis perceive and set in motion research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3) and the options that these strategies offer to overcome the current fiscal and development crisis.

The paper starts with a literature review on the guiding principles of smart specialisation strategies and the differences from previous rounds of regional innovation strategies. Evidence on smart specialisation efforts is provided by cases studies in Greece, Slovenia, and Cyprus, focusing on the elaboration of such strategies in three countries with precarious innovation systems under severe conditions of crisis. The case studies are organised around key aspects of the smart specialisation logic, such as the selection of specialisation priorities, bottom-up governance, private sector leadership, and engines of innovation and competitiveness.

The paper explores the obstacles encountered in running effective RIS strategies under crisis conditions. The paper highlights the main challenges to address, such as the readiness and credibility of public authorities to design and implement sound RIS3 strategies, the willingness of companies to be involved in strategic planning, the availability of private investment funds, innovation and diversification during a crisis, and the drivers of specialisation that could lead to competitiveness and growth. In the conclusions the paper identifies three routes towards smarter productive diversification and five critical stages in the entrepreneurial discovery process.

The paper has both practical and theoretical significance. It focuses on the main challenges of smart specialisation and offers guidance in the elaboration of RIS3 in peripheral EU economies. On the other hand, it proposes a model for the entrepreneurial discovery process, based on the assessment of areas and futures of productivity and added-value increase, as productive diversification and crisis exit route.

To examine the application of the principles of “agile manufacturing” to marketing strategy, planning and management, in the context of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).

Uses the case‐study method to test the development and deployment of “agile marketing” by applying the marketing techniques normally practised only by larger companies, within the “hard” and “soft” constraints imposed by one small company's managerial attitudes, corporate resources and time horizons. The host company was a UK supplier of technological products to other manufacturers; it had no history of marketing. The focus of the study was on the third stage of the agility framework: how a proactive marketing approach can be used to generate new custom.

“Agile marketing” innovations released latent capacity, and a strategic marketing plan was devised to win new custom. After follow‐up, four new customers had been recruited, and the potential for developing long‐term relations with them was good. This proactive approach was recognised by the company to be a cost‐effective route to business growth, as was the ease with which the plan could be reconfigured when new market niches were to be targeted.

The case study provides one “snapshot” of the outcome of transferring agility principles from manufacturing to marketing. The findings are nonetheless indicative and thought‐provoking.

Such marketing as small companies practise is more likely to be reactive than proactive. They rarely have the resources to take advantage of marketing ideas transferred from the big‐business setting. There are thus many constraints on their ability to respond cost‐effectively and swiftly to changes in their operating environment. The more flexible and reconfigurable the manufacturing and marketing systems, the more likely that growth will be achieved. Any spare capacity can then be channelled into recruiting new customers.

Transfers a planning framework and set of procedures from manufacturing management to marketing strategy and planning in the challenging environment of SMEs.

Aberdeen University Library's digitisation programme has reached an advanced stage, with three projects all designed to deliver images (of a 300‐page medieval liturgical text, of the papers of a nineteenth‐century philosopher, and of 1000 Jacobite engravings) via the Web. A comparison of these projects highlights differences in image capture pathways, quality requirements and file storage solutions.

This paper aims to investigate theoretically and empirically the interactions between smart economic development (SED) and competitiveness in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The main argument to uphold here is that smartness approach has been traditionally more focused on smart urban planning and smart specialization.

An evaluation by index, correlation and significance analysis is used to present original empirical evidence from six CEE countries.

Smartness approach integration into economic development justifies the identification of SED determinants: basics (welfare, digitality, environmental, social responsibility) and enhancers (learning, networking, agility, innovations and knowledge-driven). The interaction between SED and countries’ competitiveness in CEE countries might be described by two approaches, namely, focus-based (several most important basics and enhancers) and balance-based (equal importance of basics and enhancers).

The limitations relate to the particular sample of CEE countries and gathering opportunities of statistical data.

The combination of SED-Index sub-indices and WEF GCI might aid a more accurate ex ante measurement. Despite common global challenges, each country should choose its own combinations for smartness determinants to achieve long-term competitiveness.

The findings are important for fostering smartness approach in economic development for long-term competitiveness.

This paper contributes to economic development literature by discovering basics and enhancers for SED. By linking well-known term of competitiveness and economic development with a concept of smartness, the new approaches, namely, focus-based and balance-based, to policy making in CEE countries emerged.

Seeking ways towards a sustainable future is the most dominant socio-political challenge of our time. Marketing should have a crucial role to play in leading research and impact in sustainability, yet it is limited by relying on cognitive behavioural theories rooted in the 1970s, which have proved to have little bearing on actual behaviour. This paper aims to interrogate why marketing is failing to address the challenge of sustainability and identify alternative approaches.

The constraint in theoretical development contextualises the problem, followed by a focus on four key themes to promote theory development: developing sustainable people; models of alternative consumption; building towards sustainable marketplaces; and theoretical domains for the future. These themes were developed and refined during the 2018 Academy of Marketing workshop on seeking sustainable futures. MacInnis’s (2011) framework for conceptual contributions in marketing provides the narrative thread and structure.

The current state of play is explicated, combining the four themes and MacInnis’s framework to identify the failures and gaps in extant approaches to the field.

This paper sets a new research agenda for the marketing discipline in quest for sustainable futures in marketing and consumer research.

Approaches are proposed which will allow the transformation of the dominant socio-economic systems towards a model capable of promoting a sustainable future.

The paper provides thought leadership in marketing and sustainability as befits the special issue, by moving beyond the description of the problem to making a conceptual contribution and setting a research agenda for the future.