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Conventionally, shipping companies have invested in large ships to achieve economies of scale. More recently, high speed ships have been proposed as a means of achieving timely service for customers and improving shipping performance. Yet another solution offered here is to boost the cargo handling speed at port allowing for a higher number of annual round trips. Both the cost efficiency and timeliness of shipping service can be improved. The economic trade‐offs between the investments in cargo handling and ship propulsion technologies are formally analysed by taking the round trip frequency as the key to performance. The theoretical analyses as well as the practical cases studied indicate that investments in cargo handling technology, such as automation of container terminal operations and hatchless self‐loading ships, have indeed considerable profit‐making potential for shipping companies. Other technology investment opportunities appear less promising: ship propulsion due to energy consumption and environmental concerns; and larger ships due to low customer responsiveness and risks of low capital productivity.

New service businesses carry opportunities for industrial companies. The different cost management and management control implications of those service businesses deserve attention, which is a widely under-researched area in management accounting and control literature. Digital twins could hold potential in unveiling and supporting those new service business opportunities, as a unique approach of this paper. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility and potential for creating a digital twin of a service, especially to unveil the management accounting and control implications of the digital twin in developing new service businesses.

This paper investigates the potential of a digital twin in unveiling cost and control implications of new service businesses by examining the characteristics of a digital twin in the service business development context. The paper use an in-depth interventionist case study, where the designed animations illustrate the possibilities of a digital twin of a service. The animations showing the service process characteristics were first used as a communication tool and eventually those animations were actively used in customer cases for different purposes. This motivated the idea for examining the implications of such animations representing a digital twin of a service.

The paper provides empirical insights regarding the potential for developing and using a digital twin of a service for different cost management and management control purposes. The digital twin of a service may include all main details of a new service offering, simulating the functionality of a service, hence making the performance and the implications of the new service concept clear for all the stakeholders. The digital twin of the service enables defining the processes, setting targets and helps communication about the value generation. Thus, they represent a significant toolkit for the management accounting and control function of the manufacturers.

This paper is among the first attempts to understand the digital twin of the service. The paper is unique in providing financial and control implications of digital twins also in the context of service business development. The in-depth interventionist approach enabled an exceptional exploration process on the subject. The article paves the way toward further research on managing the digital twins of services in the future.

This paper aims to propose an approach to broaden the focus of a low-fidelity prototype (i.e. mock-up) to enable user experimentation in a real environment at the early stages of the product development process. The functionality approaching a real solution enables customers to experience the key functionality, and therefore, the perceived customer value of the new product idea before major investments in the development.

The study is based on an interventionist case study in a manufacturing company. The researchers were involved in the development of two new products and analysing the potential process and cost implications.

Mock-ups enable the preliminary measurement of cost and value implications of a new product at the early stages of the development process. This holds significant potential for advancing development practices and reducing the uncertainties present in such processes. Thus, the business case at the early stage of the development process can be argued with “user-experienced” cost information and, therefore, also “perceived” customer value.

The use of mock-ups to gain customer feedback is well aligned with the fail-fast mentality emphasised in the contemporary start-up scene, but this study also encourages developers/practitioners from mature industries to use mock-ups to assess perceived customer value.

The originality of the paper lies in broadening the focus of mock-ups to enable user experimentation in a real environment at the early stages of the development process.

The paper explores processes associated with the adoption of corporate sustainability communication in a B2B context. It employs a combined action research and sensemaking approach to document moments that precede the initiation of external sustainability communication.

The paper is the outcome of an action research project, where we examine the case of one industrial company that was silent on its multiple sustainability-related practices, but recently decided to become more transparent to the outside world. A processual approach to sensemaking is adopted to show how organisational and non-organisational members actively participated in meaning co-construction.

Corporate silence can be disrupted by triggering events that cause moments of sudden realisation for organisational members, eventually leading to the initiation of sensemaking processes inside the organisation. Once this occurs, the possibility of externally communicating sustainability appears a feasible and strategic approach to pursue. We document how different actors are involved in meaning co-construction and how the entire process of sensemaking unfolds.

A sensemaking approach sheds light on the complexity of sustainability communication, where multiple actors are involved. This is a useful approach to consider in order to couple sustainability with other organisational practices. Moreover, sensemaking opens a window of opportunity for various societal actors' interventions to shape the role and content of sustainability communication.

The paper offers an original, theoretically informed methodological contribution to the literature on sustainability communication by coupling a sensemaking approach with action research. The approach is employed to examine the role of internal organisational actors in sustainability reporting processes, an area that has received scant attention.

In spite of the increased research activity on inter‐organizational cost management (IOCM) and open‐book accounting (OBA), detailed evidence on the application of these tools in real‐life settings is still relatively sparse. Increased outsourcing and supplier responsibilities call for more thorough understanding on the possibilities and variations of supply chain cost management. As a research avenue, in‐depth case studies have been invited to elaborate the cost management interaction between companies. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper is based on an interventionist research within two supply networks. By making research interventions on the development of cost management practices among the suppliers, the researchers have set the ground for implementation of OBA, which, then, has provided a box seat to observe the process of OBA and its associations with the different forms of control. Within these two networks, this paper focuses on two OBA episodes portraying different facets of openness in IOCM.

This paper presents OBA as an accounting template with a seemingly flexible character. By relying on the empirical study, the paper shows how OBA might be used for mitigating the component's price increasing pressures and, thus, controlling the costs of the end product in hybrids resembling very much market conditions. However, the very similar OBA procedures can be applied for achieving the long‐term goals of partnering in hybrids resembling to a great extent hierarchical structures. As the paper shows, the best corresponding control archetype for a given OBA application largely depends on the purpose defined for the IOCM activity by participating stakeholders.

Thus, far, there are no interventionist studies on OBA and, hence, the research setting provides an interesting new element to the extant literature on OBA and IOCM. However, the research method does not have intrinsic value. Thus, the contribution, and therefore also the originality, of this paper is based on new aspects provided to the theory on OBA.