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Digital technologies create myriad innovation opportunities and have inspired the establishment of many new start-ups in recent years. Despite the growing knowledge on digital entrepreneurship, few studies explore how start-ups exploit these opportunities to achieve entrepreneurial success. The purpose of this paper is to explore start-ups’ capabilities for successful delivery of digital artefacts in a cloud computing infrastructure.

Empirical data were collected during a qualitative case study of an established start-up in the Chinese market by interviewing 41 interviewees. Informed by the notion of dynamic capabilities and using the Gioia methodology, the case firm's life cycle was analysed in detail.

The study identifies start-ups’ ordinary and dynamic capabilities for successful development and delivery of digital services. The findings provide insights into a portfolio of start-ups’ capabilities, namely adaptation, networking, reengineering and refinement.

The study suggests that start-ups’ capabilities and underlying entrepreneurial actions determine the degree to which adoption of digital technologies create and transfer value to customers. The study offers specific insights into how start-ups successfully develop and deliver digital artefacts in a cloud infrastructure based on entrepreneurs' prior expertise, vision and accumulated experience.

Infrastructure forms a basis for the operations and sustainability of the modern society. This paper aims to recognize value creation from the infrastructure procurement ecosystem perspective to achieve those goals. The pursuit of enhancing value creation involves an examination of infrastructure procurement challenges, boundaries as well as boundary spanners that facilitate effective knowledge transfer and interaction.

The qualitative study is based on content analysis of 25 thematic interviews. Data was transcribed and coded via Atlas.ti software.

Infrastructure procurement value creation challenges appear complex and related to boundaries that hamper collaboration, coordination and knowledge sharing. Our results show that these boundaries locate within and between different levels of procurement ecosystem. Therefore, value creation in infrastructure procurement requires boundary spanners for leveraging knowledge sharing and interaction. Artifacts, discussion, processes and brokers as identified boundary spanners are strongly nested and interrelated in the industry. Special attention should be given to supporting individuals to act as brokers, since they play the key roles in trust building, culture steering and usage of other boundary spanners.

Promoting value creation in infrastructure procurement helps to achieve socio-economic development goals.

This study offers a unique perspective on value creation in the context of infrastructure by adopting an ecosystem lens and examining boundary crossing mechanisms. The results support future development of collaboration and knowledge sharing practices fostering procurement productivity.

While previous research has demonstrated the positive effects of digital business strategies on operational efficiency, financial performance and value creation, little is known about how such strategies influence innovation performance. To address the gap, this paper aims to investigate the impact of a firm’s digital business strategy on its innovation performance.

Drawing on the dynamic capability view, this study examines the mechanism through which a digital business strategy affects innovation performance. Data were collected from 215 firms in China and analyzed using multiple regression and structural equation modeling.

The empirical analysis reveals that a firm’s digital business strategy has positive impacts on both product and process innovation performance. These impacts are partially mediated by knowledge-based dynamic capability. Additionally, a firm’s digital business strategy interacts positively with its entrepreneurial orientation in facilitating knowledge-based dynamic capability. Moreover, market turbulence enhances the strength of this interaction effect. Therefore, entrepreneurial-oriented firms operating in turbulent markets can benefit more from digital business strategies to enhance their knowledge-based dynamic capabilities and consequently improve their innovation performance.

This study contributes to the understanding of how a firm’s digital business strategy interacts with entrepreneurial orientation in turbulent markets to shape knowledge-based dynamic capability, which in turn enhances the firm’s innovation performance.

As public awareness of the concept of sustainable development has increased, a new investor market has appeared. These investors will only make investments in sustainable financial instruments. Yet, how corporate managers can effectively exploit this new financing concept to make their companies risk resilient remains unaddressed. This study, a conceptual research, aims to examine the impact of sustainable finance (SF) on business risk resilience (BR) and the impact of SF on risk management infrastructure (RI). It also addresses the impact of RI on BR and the mediating effect of the former between SF and BR in the corporate world. Finally, this research explores the moderating effect of managerial capability (MC) and firm technology-focused innovation capability (IC) between SF and RI.

This study incorporates both theoretical and empirical works in the sustainability, innovation, risk management and HRM fields. Afterwards, it constructs a conceptual model alongside suppositions that can be tested in further studies.

This study proposes that SF will enhance BR and RI. Moreover, RI will promote BR and positively intervene between SF and BR. Furthermore, MC and IC will reinforce the SF–RI impact such that the SF–RI impact will be strengthened for companies whose MCs and ICs are high than low.

This research affords suggestions for researchers in multidisciplinary fields. It reinforces BR and RI by introducing SF, MC and IC as tactical devices. It also serves as a reference point for forthcoming academics to investigate this conceptual model, empirically, in diverse industries worldwide.

Practical lessons for finance, investment and risk managers, as well as corporate investors are discussed.

This study provides a new research model that demonstrates how SF can be exploited to promote BR and build RI. It also shows how RI can bolster BR and how RI can connect SF to BR. This new model also exhibits how MC and IC moderate the impacts of SF and RI. Thus, it attempts to advance existing knowledge and theoretical frameworks.

This study aims to explore how sustainable business models (SBM) can be developed within agri-innovation systems (AIS) and emphasize an integration of the two with a systemic understanding for reducing food loss and value loss in postharvest agri-food supply chain.

This study conducted longitudinal qualitative research in a developing country with food loss challenges in the postharvest supply chain. This study collected data through multiple rounds of fieldwork, interviews and focus groups over four years. Thematic analysis and “sensemaking” were used for inductive data analysis to generate rich contextual knowledge by drawing upon the lived realities of the agri-food supply chain actors.

First, this study finds that the value losses are varied in the supply chain, encompassing production value, intrinsic value, extrinsic value, market value, institutional value and future food value. This happens through two cumulative effects including multiplier losses, where losses in one model cascade into others, amplifying their impact and stacking losses, where the absence of data stacks or infrastructure pools hampers the realisation of food value. Thereafter, this study proposes four strategies for moving from the loss-incurring current business model to a networked SBM for mitigating losses. This emphasises the need to redefine ownership as stewardship, enable formal and informal beneficiary identification, strengthen value addition and build capacities for empowering communities to benefit from networked SBM with AIS initiatives. Finally, this study puts forth ten propositions for future research in aligning AIS with networked SBM.

This study contributes to understanding the interplay between AIS and SBM; emphasising the integration of the two to effectively address food loss challenges in the early stages of agri-food supply chains. The identified strategies and research propositions provide implications for researchers and practitioners seeking to accelerate sustainable practices for reducing food loss and waste in agri-food supply chains.

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the impact of marketing analytics capability on business performance from the perspective of RBV theory.

This study used a survey method to gather information from 225 food processing SMEs registered with the Ghana Enterprise Agency (GEA) in Ghana’s eastern region. A structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis was used to assess the impact of marketing analytics capability (MAC) on the performance of SMEs.

The results of the study show that MAC significantly and positively affect the financial performance (FP), customer performance (CF), internal business process performance (IBPP) and learning and growth performance (LGP) of Ghanaian SMEs. The findings of this study also illustrated the significance of MAC determinants, including marketing analytics skills (MAS), data resource management (DRM) and data processing capabilities (DPC), in achieving SME success in Ghana.

The research’s conclusions give RBV theory strong credence. The results of this study also provide credence to previous research finding that SMEs should view MAC and its determinants (i.e. DRM, DPC, MAS) as a crucial strategic capability to improve their performance (i.e. FP, CF, IBPP, LGP). With regard to its contribution, this study broadens the body of knowledge on MAC and SME performance, particularly in the context of an emerging economy.

How can large international financial firms go green in authentic ways? What enhances ‘Net Zero action’? Changes in global banks, fund managers, and insurance firms are at the heart of green finance. External change pressures – combined with problematic firm predispositions – exacerbate barriers to change and promote scepticism about authentic Net Zero change. Field research reveals main elements, connections, and interactions of this question by considering financial firms as complex socio-technical systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). An interdisciplinary/holistic narrative approach (De Bakker et al., 2019) is adopted to design a conceptual framework that can support a green ‘behavioural theory of the financial firm’ (green BTFF). The BTFF presents an international version (Peng, 2001) of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Hart, 1995; Teece et al., 1997).

The approach of this chapter is aimed at closing knowledge gaps and realign values in financial markets and society. By raising awareness about organised hypocrisy and facades (Brunsson, 1993; Cho et al., 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2020) in financial firms the chapter aims at overcoming the gap between ‘talking’ and ‘walking’ in the financial sector. The chapter defines testable firm-level hypotheses for ‘Green Finance’ (Poterba, 2021) as well as – by implication – tests for ‘greenwashing’.

This study aims to determine the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation at the related quadruple levels of commercialisation, including the idea, benchtop technical knowledge, prototype technical knowledge and commercialised technical knowledge, and then classify the factors by the valuation objectives.

The study method is descriptive-causal, and documentation tools of published scientific research articles in authentic local and international journals were used to extract the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation. Moreover, the Likert spectrum-based questionnaire is used to determine the weight of each determined component. On the other hand, hierarchical analysis is used based on the extracted results from the distributed classification questionnaire among scholars to determine the allocable weight of each component.

The results indicate that at the idea step, the highest ranks among the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation are for the indicators of innovation rate enhancement, novelty, creation of new products, profitability growth and dependence decline. In the benchtop technical knowledge step, the indicators of profitability growth, product quality enhancement, novelty, production risk drop, innovation rate enhancement, production costs drop, product price competitiveness and independence from rare machinery have the highest impact coefficients on valuation. Moreover, the prioritisation of factors in prototype technical knowledge shows that the indicators of productive risk decline, infrastructure, decrease in product delivery time, productivity growth and profitability growth are the most critical factors in technical knowledge valuation. Finally, profitability growth factors, production cost drop, productive risk drop, creating a new product, product price competitiveness and dependence decline determine the most valuable technical knowledge in the commercialisation phase.

The most salient innovation of the study involves the development levels of technical knowledge in the commercialisation cycle for determining the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation and using multivariate decision-making methods to classify the so-called factors. The major limitation can be the context of the study because the paper was carried out by Iranian assessors and specialists using the experiences, opinions and approaches of opinion leaders based on the dominant social, cultural and accounting background of a developing country, not a developed one.

This paper is applicable because it elucidates the technical knowledge valuation factors for managers and owners of technological and knowledge-based companies to facilitate value determination and register the technical knowledge of innovative products in financial statements for the logical presentation of available intangible assets in the economic unit. Besides, in the high-tech area, collecting information from the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation provides an opportunity to support intellectual property rights and facilitate transaction processes. Finally, in legal areas, in cases of breaching intellectual property rights relative to technical knowledge, the determination of technical knowledge value provides a solid basis for estimating the damage rate.

The growing awareness of climate risks associated with food safety issues has drawn the attention of stakeholders urging the food industry to carry out a sustainable food safety management system (FSMS). This study aims to investigate whether the critical success factors (CSFs) of sustainable FSMS can contribute to achieving climate neutrality, and how the adoption of FSMS 4.0 supported by the Industry Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) technologies moderates the impact of the CSFs on achieving climate neutrality.

Survey data from 255 food production firms in China and Vietnam were utilised for the empirical analysis. The research hypotheses were examined using structural equations modelling (SEM) with route analysis and bootstrapping techniques.

The results show that top management support, human resource management, infrastructure and integration appear as the significant CSFs that directly impact food production firms in achieving climate neutrality. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the adoption of FSMS 4.0 integrated with the three components (ecosystems, quality standards and robustness) significantly moderates the impact of the CSFs on achieving climate neutrality with lower inputs in human resources, infrastructure investment, integration and external assistance, and higher inputs in strengthening food safety administration.

This study provides empirical findings that fill the research gap in understanding the relationship between climate neutrality and the CSFs of sustainable FSMS while considering the moderating effects of the FSMS 4.0 components. The results provide theoretical and practical insights into how the food production sector can utilise IR 4.0 to attain sustainable FSMS for achieving climate neutrality.

This study aims to focus on the five most relevant and discursive emerging technologies in accounting (cloud computing, big data and data analytics, blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics process automation [RPA]). It investigates the adoption and use of these technologies based on data collected from accounting professionals in a technology-developed country – Canada, through a survey.

The study investigates the adoption and use of emerging technologies based on data collected from accounting professionals in a technology-developed country – Canada, through a survey. This study considers the said nature and characteristics of emerging technologies and proposes a model using the factors that have been found to be significant and most commonly investigated by existing prior technology-organization-environment (TOE)-related technology adoption studies. This survey applies the TOE framework and examines the influence of significant and most commonly known factors on Canadian firms’ intention to adopt the said emerging technologies.

Study results indicate that Canadian accounting professionals’ self-assessed knowledge (about these emerging technologies) is more theoretical than operational. Cloud computing is highly used by Canadian firms, while the use of other technologies, particularly blockchain and RPA, is reportedly low. However, firms’ intention about the future adoption of these technologies seems positive. Study results reveal that only the relative advantage and top management commitment are found to be significant considerations influencing the adoption intention.

Study findings confirm some results presented in earlier studies but provide additional insights from a new perspective, that of accounting professionals in Canada. The first limitation relates to the respondents. Although accounting professionals provided valuable insights, their responses are personal views and do not necessarily represent the views of other professionals within the same firm or the official position of their accounting departments or firms. Therefore, the exclusion of diverse viewpoints from the same firm might have negatively impacted the results of this study. Second, this study sample is limited to Canada-based firms, which means that the study reflects only the situation in that country. Third, considering the research method and the limit on the number of questions the authors could ask, respondents were only asked to rate the impact of these five technologies on the accounting field and to clarify which technologies are used.

This study’s findings confirm that the organizational intention to adopt new technology is not primarily based on the characteristics of the technology. In the case of emerging technology adoption, the decision also depends upon other factors related to the internal organization. Furthermore, although this study found no support for the effect of environmental factors, it fills a gap in the literature by including the factor of vendor support, which has received little attention in prior information technology (IT)/ information system (IS) adoption research. Moreover, in contrast to most prior adoption studies, this study elaborates on accounting professionals’ experience and perceptions in investigating the organizational adoption and use of emerging technologies. Thus, the findings of this study are valuable, providing insights from a new perspective, that of professional accountants.

The study findings may serve as a guide for researchers, practitioners, firms and other stakeholders, particularly technology providers, interested in learning about emerging technologies’ adoption and use in Canada and/or in a relevant context. Contrary to most prior adoption studies, this study elaborates on accounting professionals’ experience and perceptions in investigating the organizational adoption and use of emerging technologies. Thus, the findings of this study are valuable, providing insights from a new perspective, that of professional accountants.

The study provides insights into the said technologies’ actual adoption and improves the awareness of firms and stakeholders to the effect of some constructs that influence the adoption of these emerging technologies in accounting.