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This work aims to investigate the current financial structure of Italian agri-food micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to understand how MSMEs face innovation challenges, which are also required to support sustainable development.

To reach the goal, an empirical longitudinal analysis is performed on a sample of Italian agri-food firms. In detail, to highlight the changes in the use of financial sources between 2013 and 2019, a descriptive ratio analysis is carried out on the data extracted by the AIDA database. In addition, statistical analyses were performed, including t-tests and U Mann–Whitney. Finally, a fixed-effects model is created to analyse the panel data. To ensure homogeneity, the sub-sectors of production and transformation are separately considered.

The financial structure analysis shows an increase in the equity percentage in the funding sources, attributable to an attempt to compensate for the reduction of banks' funding. However, even though this change has not compromised firms' profitability, the undercapitalisation of companies is still present. Therefore, more equity investments are required to support the innovation process.

The value of the present research is to highlight the choice of using new alternative financing sources instead of traditional banks' credit to implement sustainable and innovative development Italian agri-food sector (AFS). This choice is forced by reducing finance from banks and other financial institutions because of the credit crunch. This issue is even more relevant, considering that MSMEs have structural financial problems but have to fulfil the mission of pursuing innovation in the same way as large companies. Therefore, this paper expands the literature on agri-food, delving into an issue typical of MSMEs and combining agri-food with the need for innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the academic side of university–firm linkages, reporting the results of research (called the “BR Survey”, a primary database) conducted in Brazil with leaders of research groups that interacted with firms. The authors analysed the answers from 662 research groups (from both universities and research institutes) to investigate whether the intensity of private funds affects the results of the interactions. The main intent is to answer the following question: Is there a difference between funding sources and the type of results achieved by research groups when interacting with firms?

To verify the impact of some variables on the perception of the main results of university–firm interactions, highlighting the impact of funding sources, the authors present a Logit Model defined with binary dependent variables. The null value is categorized as a “scientific result” (new scientific discoveries and research projects; publications, theses and dissertations; human resources’ and students’ education) and the value 1 is classified as an “innovative/technological result” (new products, artefacts and processes; improvement of industrial products and processes; patents, software, design and spin-off firms).

The authors found that the modes of interaction (relationship types) and some knowledge transfer channels, besides the number of interactions with firms, have statistically significant coefficients, so their values present different impacts on the results of the interaction. The results suggest that the Brazilian innovation policy towards a more active and entrepreneurial role of universities is fostering innovative/technological results from university–firm interactions.

The originality of the study lies on the results found that given the fact that private funding sources do not affect the conventional mission of Brazilian universities – teaching and research – university research groups should be even more incentivized to search for private funds to carry out their research. This may be a solution to the public fund scarcity and may help in reducing the historical distance between universities and firms in Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how specialised capabilities including absorptive capacity and marketing capabilities influence innovation commercialisation in manufacturing and service firms in Nigeria. The authors hypothesise that absorptive capacity measures including openness and formal training for innovation, and marketing capabilities encompassing new product marketing and marketing innovation are positively associated with innovation performance.

The authors examine commercialisation of innovation within the profiting from innovation (PFI) and dynamic capabilities (DC) framework and use data from the 2012 Nigeria Innovation Survey to test the hypothesis by means of a Heckman sample selection model.

The authors find that absorptive capacity measures comprising openness and formal training are positively associated with innovation performance. The authors also find that marketing capabilities as indicated by new product marketing and marketing innovation are positively associated with innovation performance.

The authors acknowledge that firms undergo continuous changes and that there may be the presence of unobserved or unmeasured heterogeneity. Taking into cognisance that Nigeria is a federal state, cultural diversity and economic factors are likely to differ widely between geographical regions. Also, while the proposed conceptual framework offers a deeper understanding of innovation performance, examining how integrating activities of the R&D department, human resource department and marketing department affect innovation commercialisation is likely to provide more meaningful insights.

The role that inter-organisational learning and intra-organisational learning play in driving innovation performance provide managers with a basis for incorporating absorptive capacity building programs that boost employees’ ability to recognise and apply valuable external knowledge to commercial ends. Similarly, firms may benefit from offering marketing capabilities development programs. Furthermore, innovation policies in Nigeria are generally designed to focus on fostering innovation activities aimed at developing innovative output. Accordingly, government support explicitly targeting new product marketing and marketing innovation is likely to play a vital role in the successful commercialisation of innovation in Nigeria.

This study fuses the PFI and DC framework to examine why innovating firms may not necessarily succeed. This area of study has received scant attention in sub-Saharan Africa given that extant literature focusses on value creation as opposed to value capture.

The aim of this paper is to explore whether open innovation is emerging in the Italian fashion industry.

Based on available studies on innovation and open innovation, we first identified the main facets of open innovation within the industry investigated, such as the process of searching for new ideas, the involvement of external partners in the new product development process and the use of collaboration mechanisms between supply chain partners. Starting from these findings, the authors designed a semi-structured questionnaire that was used as a guideline for 15 case studies, carried out in the Italian fashion industry.

The outcomes from the case studies allow drawing some conclusions about the emergency of open innovation in the fashion industry and the related patterns.

Given its exploratory nature, this study is expected to start a debate about open innovation in the fashion industry, as well as to encourage future studies in this field.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of servant leadership (SL) and innovative organizational culture (IOC) on employees' innovative work behavior (IWB). In addition, this paper attempts to examine the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS) in these relationships.

Data were collected from 280 employees working in technopark companies located in Turkey, which require intensive IWB. Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedure were used to test the hypothesized relationships.

The findings suggest that SL, and IOC are significantly and positively related to employees' IWB. The results also show that SL and IOC stimulate employees' IWB through POS.

Because this study was carried out by employing a cross-sectional research design with data obtained from the same source, the inferences about the causality among the variables cannot be inferred.

The empirical findings suggest that organizations should make efforts to promote SL and improve IOC in order to harvest IWB from their employees. Moreover, organizations and managers need to recognize the importance of the POS by employees, and therefore form an adequate working environment, create and utilize policies and procedures accordingly.

This study suggests ways for organizations to enhance their innovativeness through IOC and SL applications in pursue of harvesting employees' IWB using POS by employees as mediator. This study is also original, in that no previous studies have investigated the mediating role of POS in the relationship between IOC, SL and IWB.

本研究旨在探討僕人式領導和創新組織文化對僱員的創新工作行為的影響; 研究亦擬探討就上述有關的影響和關聯而言、組織支持感所扮演的調節角色。

研究的數據取自在土耳其的科技園區裡工作的280名僱員 (在科技園區工作，僱員須具備強大的創新工作行為) 。研究採用結構方程模型和拔靴法程式去測試假設的關聯。

研究結果間接表明了僕人式領導和創新組織文化與僱員創新工作行為之間的關聯是正相關的，而且，這相關性頗為顯著。研究結果亦顯示，僕人式領導和創新組織文化均會透過組織支持感、促進僱員的創新工作行為。

由於研究採用橫斷研究設計，而使用的數據又取自同一來源，故變數間的因果關係是無法推斷的。

本研究之經驗結果建議組織應鼓勵推行僕人式領導，亦應努力提昇創新組織文化，以能取得僱員創新工作行為所帶來的成效。而且，組織和管理階層必須明白使僱員感受到組織的支持是很重要的，因此，組織和主管須創造一個良好的工作環境，並制訂適當的政策和處理各種事宜的程式，以能提高組織支持感。

本研究為組織提供了增強創新能力的建議，方法是透過促進創新組織文化和採用僕人式領導，並利用僱員組織支持感的調節作用，以取得僱員創新工作行為所帶來的成效。另外，本研究是獨創的，這是因為從前沒有研究、去探討在創新組織文化和僕人式領導與創新工作行為之間的關聯上、組織支持感所扮演的調節角色。

Technological platforms encourage the exchange of knowledge and creation of new ideas that create new value for participating members who pool and combine their knowledge, facilities, tools and skills, thus contributing to the development of innovative solutions. This paper focuses on hackathon platforms, working as open innovation intermediaries, investigating their role and functions and exploring how they encourage the collaboration and the innovativeness among participants in order to boost their innovative new ideas.

The research method is a qualitative design that includes in-depth interviews of ten stakeholders that play different roles in “Hack for Travel,” the case under analysis. It is a hackathon organized entirely online, as a response to the crisis generated by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Findings revealed six processes developed by the hackathon platform used to effectively organize the event and facilitate participants to cooperate and share knowledge in order to boost the spread of innovative ideas. Results identify how hackathons should be organized and through which processes they work as innovation platforms.

This is one of the first attempts to study the increasing phenomenon of hackathons, providing theoretical contribution and practical implications about their role in developing innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the compensation between research groups and companies that contribute the most for the innovative performance of Brazilian public higher educational institutions (PHEI), using as database the 2010’s tabular plan from CNPq’s Directory of Research Groups.

Descriptive and multivariate statistical techniques such as spearman correlation, cluster analysis, ANOVA and discriminant analysis were used.

Compensations that contribute the most for the updating of the PHEI are identified as transfer of financial resources from the partner to the group; providing grants for the group; transfer of material supplies to partner’s activities; temporary physical transfer of human resources from the group to the activities conducted by the partner; other forms of compensation that do not fit in the previous categories; and partnering with transfers of resources of any kind going in any direction.

As a limitation, it is pointed out the discontinuity of the tabular plan, which presents 2010 as the last available data.

The results can contribute to programs and policies to encourage innovation within universities.

It may be inferred that the stimulus to specific compensations may expand the quantitative idea of interaction points between the university and companies, linking qualitative aspects, which leads to an understanding that such interactions may, in fact, contribute directly to the activity of generating and spreading knowledge and innovation.

Although employees' creativity is vital for firm innovation and overall performance, little is done to examine the potential association between creativity and employment. This paper investigates the contribution of employees' creativity, process and product innovations to firm-level employment growth.

The authors use data from World Bank Enterprise Survey and Innovation Follow-up Survey on 9503 firms covering the period 2012–2015 in 11 countries from sub-Saharan Africa and Heckman's two-stage estimation model.

This study's results indicate a positive role of creativity on firm-level employment growth. In addition, the authors find evidence for a complementary effect arising from the combination of creativity with managerial experience, staff level of education and their associated skills, in contrast, combining creativity with internal or external R&D results in a substitution effect. Interestingly, these synergy effects are pronounced for SMEs but absent for large firms.

Policy makers in developing economies of sub-Saharan Africa should stimulate company management to use free time offered to employees to be creative in the workplace as one of their key strategies to stimulate employment growth. This strategy is expected to be particularly fruitful among SMEs having some managerial experience and skilled stuff.

In contribution to innovative work practices and workforce creativity, the authors demonstrate that providing employees with free time could be an alternative way to enhance the focal firms' performance.

External factors such as global competition and new technologies, require organizations to be innovative. Such organizational innovations also ask for innovative human resource management (HRM). However, in the current literature, it is not completely clear what innovative HRM means, as it is conceptualized in different ways. This study aims to provide clarity about innovative HRM by suggesting a new measurement scale; formulating hypotheses about some core determinants of innovative HRM; and investigating how innovative HRM relates to organizational innovation.

Using a sample of 719 Dutch organizations it was possible to investigate the properties of the inventory and examining several determinants of innovative HRM and how it relates to organizational innovation.

The innovative HRM scale is internally consistent and differs from other HRM indicators. It is explained by external developments, organizational size and stability of the organization. Finally, innovative HRM is a predictor of organizational innovation.

The measure that was developed in this paper is new to the literature. Innovative HRM has not been measured in a similar way to date. Besides that, the innovative HRM Survey is a novel data set.

This chapter draws out lessons regarding how the diagnosis of urgent problems, the formation of ambitious and visionary goals, and the participation of stakeholders with critical innovation assets stimulate the cocreation of innovative solutions that promote the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), and how changemakers can lead and manage cocreated innovation processes. It considers the initiation of innovation processes and the design and testing of innovative solutions as well as the upscaling and diffusion of new successful products, processes and organizational forms. Finally, it identifies several common pitfalls that are important for changemakers to avoid, including an assumption of the necessity for heroic leadership, failure to include relevant actors, overly strict and detailed plans and procedures, and inability to integrate newcomers.