Search results

This paper concerns the pivotal role that entrepreneurial universities can play in developing knowledge transfer and translation processes tailored to the cultural ecosystem.

The paper examines IncubiAmo Cultura, an innovative project that aims to mentor potential entrepreneurs and offer incubation and acceleration for cultural start-ups. The research methodology is based on action research and theory building from cases. An interventionist approach has been adopted, as one of the authors is also the founder of the ongoing project.

The in-depth collection of first-hand information on this pilot project has allowed the authors to formulate an analytical reflection and generate the design of a knowledge translation model driven by an entrepreneurial university that manifests itself through the creation of cultural and creative start-ups.

This article offers an original contribution to scholarship by offering a conceptual model for knowledge translation in cultural ecosystems. Common values (i.e. social, cultural, ethical and aesthetic ones) emerge as the basis on which to build open innovation and knowledge circulation.

For local policymakers, this study provides a clue to understand the need for both an integrated vision of knowledge translation and policies that aim to make an impact at the cultural ecosystem level. For entrepreneurial university governance, our investigation offers suggestions on the design and implementation of knowledge translation processes that fit with the specificity of the cultural ecosystem. For practitioners in the cultural field, a change of mindset is required to combine resources, energies and knowledge.

This work fills several gaps in the literature, as research generally concerns knowledge transfer from entrepreneurial universities to the market with regard to high-tech sectors. In contrast, the cultural sector is often neglected, despite its importance in the renewal and development of a territory.

This paper aims to explore why a company voluntarily engages in the sustainability reporting process, how this process becomes institutionalised and the resulting effects.

The research focusses on a single case study, conducted following an action research approach and interpreted through the lens of institutional work. According to the institutional work theoretical perspective, the individual or organisation is responsible for creating, maintaining or disrupting institutions.

The case company, Deco S.p.A., undertook sustainability reporting to clarify the values that the company was founded upon and how those values translate into management practice. By institutionalising the sustainability reporting process, Deco S.p.A. found its corporate climate improved, various aspects of its operations could be rationalised and the information gathered to produce the report was valuable for decision support.

This research project contributes to understanding why and how a company institutionalises its sustainability reporting. It also provides a better understanding of the internal forces that drive the voluntary reporting of sustainability issues and sheds light on the stages of the institutionalisation process.

The authors find that universities have a role to play in promoting the sustainability of companies, as they can transform the knowledge produced from research into useful knowledge for managing and reporting sustainability issues.

This four-year action research project contributes to the literature on both engagement research and the institutionalisation of sustainability reporting practices. The authors also expose some of the drivers affecting a company’s approach to sustainability reporting.

Service-learning (SL) shows potential to respond to the global policy agenda of education for sustainable development (ESD) by increasing pro-sustainability competences through direct involvement of students in projects that satisfy identified community needs. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies that attempt to measure the impact of SL on students’ sustainability competences, especially the action competence. This study aims to address this gap by examining the experiences of higher education students.

A pre-post survey design based on the Self-Perceived Action Competence for Sustainability Questionnaire was conducted on an interdisciplinary group of 219 students of two courses (Sustainable Development and Ecology) in Medellin, Colombia, half of which (109) participated in SL projects.

Sufficient empirical evidence was found to suggest that SL boosts the impact of academic courses regarding action competences in students (specially their willingness to act).

The statistical analysis shows some contradictions that should be addressed in further research.

These results can encourage more educators and universities to implement strategies such as SL to move forward with ESD and thus help overcome the current socioecological crisis.

This paper not only discusses the theoretical potential of SL but also contrasts theory with empirical observations of 13 SL projects assessed in terms of self-perceived action competence for sustainability.

Pragmatism is very relevant to workplace management and performance measurement, yet in the accounting literature, it is a term used loosely and in a colloquial manner. By drawing on a framework based on classical pragmatism, this study aims to examine how a pragmatic perspective is discernible in the form and use of management control (MC) practices.

This study collects data using a case study of a firm in the green energy construction sector.

Building on the analytical framework, this study provides evidence that a pragmatic perspective is discernible in both form and use of MC practices, through a clear focus on targets rather than variance analysis, the presence of mutable local MC practices characterised by interaction and problem-solving and the absence of other common MC practices with no clear links to ends-in-view. This study also provides evidence of the potential limitations of a pragmatic perspective including myopia and an exacerbation of the inherent bias in organisations towards exploitation.

This research brings analytical clarity to the study of pragmatism in the accounting literature and insights into how a pragmatic perspective is discernible in the form and use of MC practices. Further, the study shows the potential limitations of a pragmatic perspective for management.

This study aims to understand and compare how the mechanism of innovative processes in the information technology (IT) industry – the most innovative industry worldwide – is shaped in Poland and the USA in terms of tacit knowledge awareness and sharing driven by a culture of knowledge and learning, composed of a learning climate and mistake acceptance.

Study samples were drawn from the IT industry in Poland (n = 350) and the USA (n = 370) and analyzed using the structural equation modeling method.

True learning derives from mistake acceptance. As a result of a risk-taking attitude and critical thinking, the IT industry in the USA is consistently innovation-oriented. Specifically, external innovations are highly correlated with internal innovations. Moreover, a knowledge culture supports a learning culture via a learning climate. A learning climate is an important facilitator for learning from mistakes.

This study revealed that a high level of mistake acceptance stimulates a risk-taking attitude that offers a high level of tacit knowledge awareness as a result of critical thinking, but critical thinking without readiness to take a risk is useless for tacit knowledge capturing.

In this paper, the authors suggest that Central Americans can use entrepreneurship to solve economic uncertainty in their home country and that entrepreneurship can contribute to reducing the number of undocumented migrants to the USA.

The authors first illustrate the context of Central American illegal migration to the USA from a transitional entrepreneurship perspective, the authors address the economic drivers of illegal migration from Central America, which results in marginalization in the USA. Second, the authors build a theoretical model that suggests that Central Americans can improve their entrepreneurial abilities through the entrepreneurial cognitive adjustment mechanism.

Central Americans at risk of illegally migrating to the USA have high entrepreneurial aptitudes. Entrepreneurship can help them avoid the economic uncertainty that drives Central Americans to illegally migrate to the USA and become part of a marginalized community of undocumented immigrants. This conceptual paper introduces an entrepreneurial cognitive adjustment mechanism as a tool for Central Americans to reshape their personalities and increase their entrepreneurial abilities in their home countries. In particular, entrepreneurial intentions reshape the personality characteristics of individuals (in terms of high agreeableness and openness to experiences, as well as low neuroticism) through the entrepreneurial cognitive adjustment mechanism, which consists of reflective action in sensemaking, cognitive frameworks in pattern recognition and coping in positive affect.

This paper studies Central Americans at risk of illegal migration using the lens of transitional entrepreneurship, which advances the understanding of the antecedents to marginalized immigrant communities in the USA and suggests a possible solution for this phenomenon. Besides, the authors build a cognitive mechanism to facilitate the transitional process starting from entrepreneurial intention to reshaping individuals' personality, which further opens individuals' minds to entrepreneurial opportunities. Since entrepreneurial intention applies the same way to all entrepreneurs, the authors' aim of constructing the entrepreneurial intention unfolding process will go beyond transitional entrepreneurship and contribute to intention-action knowledge generation (Donaldson et al., 2021). Moreover, the conceptual study contributes to public policy such that international and local agencies can better utilize resources and implement long-term solutions to the drivers of illegal migration from Central America to the USA.

Engineering knowledge continuity is crucial for the life cycle management of long-lived and complex assets, such as nuclear plants, locks and storm surge barriers. At the storm surge barriers in the Netherlands, engineering knowledge continuity is not yet fully assured, despite long-standing efforts. This study aims to explore the relationship between system characteristics, the organizational demarcation of maintenance and operation and the challenges in achieving engineering knowledge continuity and provides suggestions for improvement of theory and policy.

Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with professionals from various backgrounds in construction, engineering and asset management of the Dutch storm surge barriers, augmented with visits to barriers and barrier teams. A thematic analysis was used to identify and describe the challenges to engineering continuity, their origins and potential solutions. We reviewed knowledge management policy documents and asset management consultancy reports to validate the findings. Additionally, we engaged in frequent interactions with professionals at the barriers. We achieved saturation and validation once no new issues were raised during these discussions.

The thematic analysis developed multiple themes describing the challenges to engineering continuity, their origins and potential solutions. The key findings are that expert engineers are critically important to deal with redesigns induced by obsolescence. Moreover, due to barrier uniqueness, long redesign cycles and reliability requirements, conventional knowledge continuity tools are insufficient to enable new engineers to reach expert level. Finally, the thematic analysis shows that, in some cases, outsourcing should be reduced to facilitate internal learning.

The study introduces the application of the knowledge-based view of the firm and the concept of requisite knowledge redundancy to the long-term management of complex assets. It calls for more attention to long gaps in the use of unique knowledge and the effect on knowledge continuity.

This paper discusses the effects of enabling conditions of project knowledge management in building volatile organizational memory. The theoretical rationale underlies a recursive relationship among enabling conditions of project knowledge management, organizational learning and memory.

This research employs a qualitative descriptive single case study approach to examine a mobile application development project undertaken by a major software company in Brazil. The analysis focuses on the project execution using an abductive analytical framework. The study data were collected through in-depth interviews and company documents.

Based on the research findings, the factors that facilitate behavior and strategy in managing project knowledge pose a challenge when it comes to fostering organizational learning. While both these factors play a role in organizational learning, the exchange of information from previous experience could be strengthened, and the feedback from the learning process could be improved. These shortcomings arise from emotional tensions that stem from power struggles within knowledge hierarchies.

Based on the research, it is recommended that project-structured organizations should prioritize an individual’s professional experience to promote organizational learning. Organizations with well-defined connections between their projects and strategies can better establish interconnections among knowledge creation, sharing and coding.

The primary contribution is to provide a comprehensive view that incorporates the conditions required to manage project knowledge, organizational learning and memory. The findings lead to four propositions that relate to volatile memory, intuitive knowledge, learning and knowledge encoding.

Are there smart ways to find heuristics? What are the common principles behind heuristics? We propose an integrative definition of heuristics, based on insights that apply to all heuristics, and put forward meta-heuristics for discovering heuristics.

We employ Herbert Simon’s metaphor that human behavior is shaped by the scissors of the mind and its environment. We present heuristics from different domains and multiple sources, including scholarly literature, practitioner-reports and ancient texts.

Heuristics are simple, actionable principles for behavior that can take different forms, including that of computational algorithms and qualitative rules-of-thumb, cast into proverbs or folk-wisdom. We introduce heuristics for tasks ranging from management to writing and warfare. We report 13 meta-heuristics for discovering new heuristics and identify four principles behind them and all other heuristics: Those principles concern the (1) plurality, (2) correspondence, (3) connectedness of heuristics and environments and (4) the interdisciplinary nature of the scissors’ blades with respect to research fields and methodology.

We take a fresh look at Simon’s scissors-metaphor and employ it to derive an integrative perspective that includes a study of meta-heuristics.

This study aims to bring together the available scattered knowledge about teaching and learning in Living Labs within higher education, and to explore their potential for supporting students’ sustainability-oriented transformative learning.

A literature review was conducted, applying a realist approach. A sample of 35 articles was analyzed qualitatively, mapping the data according to the realist constructs “context,” “intervention,” “mechanism” and “outcome” and using the constant comparison method for data analysis.

This study identified multiple characteristics of teaching and learning in sustainability-oriented Living Labs, namely, two socio-physical teaching and learning contexts, two pedagogical approaches as interventions therein, four learning processes as (potential) mechanisms and six sustainability-related learning outcomes. Two main challenges were also identified.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that brings together the scattered results from previous studies into a comprehensive description of characteristics and challenges of teaching and learning in Living Labs as sustainability-oriented learning spaces in higher education. The findings can support educators in making scientifically grounded informed choices for teaching and learning in Living Labs and inform future empirical studies to examine when, how and why certain characteristics of teaching and learning in Living Labs, as identified in this study, can support sustainability-oriented transformative learning in higher education.