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Digitalising cities requires new urban governance processes that account for rapidly changing environments and technological advances. In this context, agile development methods have become valuable, if not necessary. However, agile development contradicts public administration practices of risk aversion and long-term planning. The purpose of this study is to discuss practical avenues for navigating these two contradictions by adapting agile development to the needs of public sector organisations.

The authors review the collaborative elaboration of Dresden’s smart city strategy as a critical case study. Dresden’s smart city strategy was developed using agile development and quadruple-helix innovation. The year-long co-creation process involved stakeholders from various groups to conceive an integrated and sustainable vision for digitalisation-based urban development.

Despite the apparent contradictions, this study finds that key aspects of agile development are feasible for public sector innovation. Firstly, risks can be strategically managed and distributed among administration and non-administration stakeholders. Secondly, while delivering value through short iterative loops, adherence to formal processes remains possible. Informal feedback cycles can be harmoniously combined with official statements, allowing iterative progress.

The empirical material is based on a single case study and thus risks overemphasising the general applicability of the proposed methods.

This paper outlines practical steps to greater agility for public administration engaged in digitalising cities. The paper conceptualises a forward and lateral momentum for the agile development of a smart city strategy that aims to reconcile formal policymaking processes with short-term loops and risk aversion with experimental value creation. This approach balanced risks, created value and enhanced the strategy‘s alignment with strategic frameworks, ultimately promoting innovation in the public sector.

This paper proposes a novel, empirically grounded conceptualisation of implementing agile methods that explicitly recognises the peculiarities of public administrations. It conceptualises the orchestrated and pragmatic use of specific agile development methods to advance the digitalisation of cities.

This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have increasingly created social innovation (SI) programmes, as a way to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These community-oriented and field-based programmes are difficult to ally with conventional classroom education. This study explores how these programmes could integrate the participatory approach and what would be the benefits. It also investigates the effectiveness of the experiential learning approach for teaching sustainability.

A case study method is used to document SI projects initiated by an HEI programme in rural India.

It was found that the participatory approach contributes to empowering communities and also benefits the students in terms of academic, professional and personal growth. Empirical findings show that experiential learning is an efficient method to teach sustainability. Ultimately, both pedagogical approaches are found to be mutually beneficial.

This study fills a gap in the literature, by providing empirical evidence on how HEI can implement innovative educational strategies such as participatory approach and experiential learning in their programmes towards teaching sustainability. A conceptual model for HEI interested in developing similar programmes is also proposed. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies focusing on the context of Indian HEI.

The authors investigate the varying impact of three categories of conflicting consumer reviews (i.e. conflicting opinions on attributes of a product item, conflicting ratings of an item and the intensity of conflicting reviews of an item) on the potential customers' perceived informativeness, which is expected to affect the perceived correct purchase.

To test their proposed hypotheses, the authors conducted an experiment using a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design for each conflict type comprising two levels (low vs high).

The results of this study found that conflicting opinions on product attributes can enhance potential customers' perceptions of informativeness and subsequent correct purchase decisions while conflicting ratings and the intensity of conflicting reviews can diminish potential customers' perceptions of informativeness. In addition, conflicting ratings negatively moderate the effect of conflicting attributes on perceived informativeness such that the positive effect of conflicting attributes on perceived informativeness will be less prominent when conflicting ratings are present (vs absent).

While potential customers are browsing product descriptions, reviews and comments from other purchasers are also playing a role in influencing a potential customer's purchase decision. However, given the different experiences and temperaments of individuals, the subjective remarks and ratings of individuals are sometimes inconsistent or even conflicting, which can lead to confusion among potential customers. The authors categorize the positive or negative effects of the three conflicting reviews based on the two dimensions of ease of capture and product diagnosticity. The findings can help platforms optimize the display of product reviews to help potential customers make more accurate purchase decisions.

This study aims to investigate how configurations of boundary objects (BOs) support innovation teams in developing innovative product concepts. Specifically, it explores the effectiveness of different artefact configurations in facilitating collaboration and bridging knowledge boundaries during the concept development process.

The research is based on data from ten undergraduate innovation teams working with an industry partner in a creative industry. Six categories of BOs are identified, which serve as tools for collaboration. The study applies fsQCA (fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis) to analyse the configurations employed by the teams to bridge knowledge boundaries and support the development of innovative product concepts.

The findings of the study reveal two distinct groups of configurations: product envisioning and product design. The configurations within the “product envisioning” group support the activities of visioning and pivoting, enabling teams to innovate the product concept by altering the product vision. On the other hand, the configurations within the “product design” group facilitate experimenting, modelling and prototyping, allowing teams to design the attributes of the innovative product concept while maintaining the product vision.

This research contributes to the field of innovation by providing insights into the role of BOs and their configurations in supporting innovation teams during concept development. The results suggest that configurations of “product envisioning” support bridging semantic knowledge boundaries, while configurations within “product design” bridge pragmatic knowledge boundaries. This understanding contributes to the broader field of knowledge integration and innovation in design contexts.

Taking the dialogic organizational development perspective, this study aims to investigate the framing processes when engaging in dialogue for strategy implementation and how these enable the evolution of implementation opportunities.

Through a qualitative exploratory study conducted in a large multinational, the authors analyse the dialogue and interactions among 25 dyads when identifying opportunities to contribute to strategy implementation. The data analysis relies on a process-coding approach and linkography, a valuable protocol analysis for identifying recursive interaction schemas in conversations.

The authors identify four main framing processes – shaping, unveiling, scattering and shifting – and provide a framework of how these processes affect individuals’ mental models through increasing the tangibility of opportunities or elevating them to new value hierarchies.

From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the strategy implementation and organizational development literature, providing a micro-perspective of how dialogue allows early knowledge structures to emerge and shape the development of opportunities for strategy implementation.

From a managerial perspective, the authors offer insights to trigger action and change in individuals to contribute to strategy when moving from formulation to implementation.

Rather than focusing on the structural control view of strategy implementation and the role of the top management team, this study considers strategy implementation as a practice and what it takes for organizational actors who do not take part in strategy formulation to enact and shape opportunities for strategy implementation through constructive dialogue.

This paper studies the Digital Service Innovation (DSI) concept by systematically reviewing earlier studies from various scholarly communities. This study aims to recognize how recent advances in DSI literature from different research streams complement and can be incorporated into the growing digital servitization literature to define better and understand DSI.

After systematically identifying 123 relevant articles, this study employed complementary methods, such as author bibliographic coupling, linguistic text mining/textual analysis and qualitative content analyses.

This paper first maps the intellectual structure and boundaries of the DSI-related communities and qualitatively assesses their characteristics. These communities are (1) Innovation for digital servitization, (2) Service innovation in the digital age and (3) Adoption of novel e-services enabled by information system development. Next, the composition of the DSI concept is examined and depicted to comprehend the notion's critical dimensions. The findings discuss the range of theories and methods in the existing research, including antecedents, processes and outcomes of DSI.

This study reviews, extends the understanding of origins and critically evaluates DSI-related research. Moreover, the paper redefines and clarifies the structure and boundaries of the DSI-concept. In doing so, it elaborates on the substance of DSI and identifies the essential themes for its understanding and conceptualization. Thus, the study helps the future development of the concept and allows knowledge accumulation by bridging adjacent research communities. It helps researchers and managers navigate the foggy emerging research landscape.

Machine learning (ML) analytical tools are increasingly being considered as an alternative quantitative methodology in management research. This paper proposes a new approach for uncovering the antecedents behind product and product–service innovation (PSI).

The ML approach is novel in the field of innovation antecedents at the country level. A sample of the Equatorian National Survey on Technology and Innovation, consisting of more than 6,000 firms, is used to rank the antecedents of innovation.

The analysis reveals that the antecedents of product and PSI are distinct, yet rooted in the principles of open innovation and competitive priorities.

The analysis is based on a sample of Equatorian firms with the objective of showing how ML techniques are suitable for testing the antecedents of innovation in any other context.

The novel ML approach, in contrast to traditional quantitative analysis of the topic, can consider the full set of antecedent interactions to each of the innovations analyzed.

This study aimed to analyze the strategies and challenges related to technology transfer (TT) in technology transfer offices (TTOs), specifically regarding actions to offer technologies in their portfolios.

The qualitative research used a multiple case study based on interviews with TTO managers from seven Brazilian public Science and Technology Institutions (STIs): University of São Paulo (USP), State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Paulista State University (UNESP), Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR) and Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ).

STIs that invest more resources in their portfolio’s active offering and marketing are more successful in TT than STIs with a passive strategy. Although this active strategy has grown in importance, there is a disparity among Brazilian TTOs as some are still passive in commercializing their intellectual property. This research also highlights the need for clear policies to overcome obstacles related to legal uncertainty for researchers who wish to undertake projects as entrepreneurs using the intellectual property of STIs.

The results of this study cannot be generalized since its conclusions are limited to the studied institutions. However, the outcomes indicate some interesting matters for managers of STIs, public policymakers and TT researchers.

Literature on marketing and innovation related to TT between research institutions and companies in developing countries is still limited. Thus, this research contributes to generating knowledge in the field and improving TTOs.

This work aims to analyze the university–industry interaction in innovation ecosystems. The problem under study addresses how agents can operate in university–industry interactions to enhance the connections, specifically in the aspect of operational mechanisms of an innovation ecosystem.

The study is qualitative, applied through grounded theory approach, cross-sectional and multiple sources of evidence – semi-structured interviews were conducted. An explanatory conceptual model was subsequently compared with the literature and validated with specialists.

The results showed that the university–industry interaction is influenced by several factors, such as networking, legal support, facilitating agents, management practices. Despite this, some other factors were identified for the improvement of U–I relationships, such as: strengthening of triple helix, greater legal certainty and encouragement of open innovation.

The small sample size and the heterogeneity among the universities interviewed did not allow full saturation to occur. In spite of that, a significant level of saturation with respect to the challenges and barriers was observed.

This work has a direct dialogue with researchers, managers and actors involved in university–industry interaction with regard to increasing the capacity for creation and dissemination of knowledge among organizations, educational institutions, government and companies.

By adopting a grounded theory approach, a detailed research agenda addresses research needs in two main areas: activities that precede the interaction between universities and companies, and the organization and management of the consequences of collaborative relationships.

Previous literature has identified human resources as a key source of competitive advantage in organizations of all sizes. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face difficulty in comprehensively implementing all recommended Human Resource Management (HRM) functions. In this study, we shed light on the field of HRM in SMEs by focusing on the context of Greek Small and Medium-sized Hotels (SMHs), which represent a dominant private sector employer across the country.

Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and 34 in-depth interviews with SMHs' owners/managers, we explore the HRM conditions leading to high levels of performance, while taking into consideration the influence of internal key determinants.

We uncover three alternative successful HRM strategies that maximize business performance, namely the Compensation-based performers, the HRM developers and the HRM investors. Each strategy fits discreet organizational characteristics related to company size, ownership type and organizational structure.

To the best of the authors' knowledge this is among the first empirical studies that examine different and equifinal performance-enhancing configurations of HRM practices in SMHs.