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Inter-organisational governance is an important enabler for information processing, particularly in relationships undergoing digital transformation (DT) where partners depend on each other for information in decision-making. Based on information processing theory (IPT), the authors theoretically and empirically investigate how governance mechanisms address information asymmetry (uncertainty and equivocality) arising in capturing, sharing and interpreting information generated by digital technologies.

IPT is applied to four cases of public–private relationships in the Dutch infrastructure sector that aim to enhance the quantity and quality of information-based decision-making by implementing digital technologies. The investigated relationships are characterised by differing degrees and types of information uncertainty and equivocality. The authors build on rich data sets including archival data, observations, contract documents and interviews.

Addressing information uncertainty requires invoking contractual control and coordination. Contract clauses should be precise and incentive schemes functional in terms of information requirements. Information equivocality is best addressed by using relational governance. Identifying information requirements and reducing information uncertainty are a prerequisite for the transformation activities that organisations perform to reduce information equivocality.

The study offers insights into the roles of both governance mechanisms in managing information asymmetry in public–private relationships. The study uncovers key activities for gathering, sharing and transforming information when using digital technologies.

This study draws on IPT to study public–private relationships undergoing DT. The study links contractual control and coordination as well as relational governance mechanisms to information-processing activities that organisations deploy to reduce information uncertainty and equivocality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a formative intervention project that was developed for the Municipal Secretariat of Education in São Paulo, Brazil for the broad development of all levels of educational management (teacher educators, coordinators, principals, teachers and students). Thus, the creative chain of activities is a key theoretical framework for promoting critical collaboration in order to cross the boundaries of educational management organization.

The authors use data from the Management in Creative Chains Project (Liberali, 2012), as a way to enable the wide development of all levels of educational management. Data comprise formative meetings in which different educational managers system take part in two settings, the regional board with 25 schools and one of the participating schools. The analysis is based on thematic content and argumentative organization, and on critical situations and the potentials they entailed.

The study guides to the conclusions of the process of creative chain as a possibility to expand management in the educational system and its community.

Every time there is a change in the mayors, there are changes in the way of addressing school management in the city. However, after the project, considerations about the needs of the communities became part of the public policy regardless of who is in charge of the city and its educational system.

This study can be used for transformation in the management and teaching and learning activities and improvement of the school-community relation.

Socially this study can lead to improvement in the quality of life in the community and at school.

Differently from a top down educational management, which enables a reproductive chain, educational management in a creative chain, considering the community needs, enables subjects to become interdependent to expand and transform the activities in the educational system and hence the communities’ reality.

Understanding the outcomes of co-creation (CC) in healthcare is increasingly gaining multidisciplinary scientific interest. Although more and more service management scholars have pointed out the benefits of cross-fertilization between the various research fields, the literature on this topic is still scattered and poorly integrated. This study aims to summarize and integrate multiple strands of extant knowledge CC by identifying the outcomes of health CC and the determinants of these outcomes and their relationships.

A structured literature review was conducted per PRISMA guidelines. A total of 4,189 records were retrieved from the six databases; 1,983 articles were screened, with 161 included in the qualitative thematic analysis.

This study advances a comprehensive framework for healthcare CC based on a thorough analysis of the outcomes and their determinants, that is, antecedents, management activities and institutional context. Extant research rarely evaluates outcomes from a multidimensional and systemic perspective. Less attention has been paid to the relationship among the CC process elements.

This study offers an agenda to guide future studies on healthcare CC. Highlighting some areas of integration among different disciplines further advances service literature.

The framework offers an operational guide to better shape managerial endeavors to facilitate CC, provide direction and assess multiple outcomes.

This is the first extensive attempt to synthesize and integrate multidisciplinary knowledge on CC outcomes in healthcare settings by adopting a systematic perspective on the overall process.

This paper presents an alternative approach to evaluating the overall efficiency and performance of Taiwanese container ports. Specifically, a parallel activity with series structure concept in the form of data envelopment analysis (MNDEA) is used to construct a model that applies to three different activities: harbor management, stevedoring and warehousing operations. We will further divide each activity into two process types, production processes and services processes. We will also adopt a Delphi survey approach and use the Analytic Network Process (ANP) to identify these processes’influence dependence and their degree of importance for the MNDEA model setting. An empirical application demonstrates the performance of Taiwanese container ports by using MNDEA with window analysis techniques via the directional distance functionThe results demonstrate that the application is effective in indicating and/or suggesting resource-adjustments, while considering which undesirable output levels and shared inputs were involved. The results also present directions for possible improvements in workplace efficiency.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the marketing and communication activities carried out by small management consulting firms and how they relate to customers.

After the framing of the literature on the subject, the study is based on the results of a survey carried out through an online questionnaire. The sample under investigation is represented by 914 small consulting firms located in central Italy.

Results show that half of the sample carried out marketing and communication activities, mainly through the website and social media, while others participating in events as speakers at conferences. It also emerges that management consulting firms carry out activities aimed at maintaining relationship with customers even if they do not invest time in market research in order to find potential and new clients.

The study suggests that management consulting firms should adopt a systematic and strategic approach to communication and should develop a complete and integrated digital communication strategy, as well as to rethink the consulting business model.

There are no previous studies that provide insight into the everyday practice of marketing and communication of small management consulting services in today's dynamic and changing economic environment.

The purpose of this paper is to present the innovation management program (IMP) (FAZ Program) and analyze its results according to the public policy goals that support it (Pró-Inova) suggesting improvements.

Intensive-direct-observation method in 43 companies; systematic data gathering and analysis (172 meeting documents); and innovation maturity diagnostics in 30 companies between August 2013 and May 2016.

The FAZ Program success rate according to the Pró-Inova goals achieved 81 percent. The percentage of completion of FAZ activities decreases during its implementation from 100 percent (strategic module) to 74 percent (management module) and ending at 46 percent (project module). The maturity for innovation of these committees/teams is decisive for those percentages. Companies whose maturity for innovation of the strategic committee and the organizational team are above average or excellent have, respectively, 1.8 and 1.7 times greater probability of implementing the program successfully.

The FAZ Program represents only 4 percent of the programs supported by Pró-Inova. The innovative products, processes and businesses produced by the FAZ Program implementation are not measured. These innovations usually happen several years after an innovative management models implementation.

The maturity for innovation diagnosis is useful both to evaluate the company’s innovation capacity and to predict its chances of implementing the program successfully. Adjusting the structure of the model (e.g. PDCA cycle for the organizational module) and improving the program’s implementation (e.g. ensure management module resources and maturity for innovation capacity) can increase the program’s success rate.

Previous research works on IMPs supported by Pro-Inova focus on describing their methodology or benefits. The results allow answering what and how one of these programs offers in a return to the public innovation support received.

From the organisational perspective, the authors know that management, including innovation management, becomes less “organised” by bureaucracy and administrative tools, and much more impacted by organisational capabilities, competences and hidden, “soft” routines, bringing innovation and creativity to the core of organisation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on competency sets for open innovation (OI) and is to provide recommendations for OI competency development in companies, linked to the core OI processes.

The research is exploratory and aims at theory-based practical indication combining deductive identification of competency clusters and inductive model development. Thus, the authors apply quantitative methods to data collection and analysis. The authors conducted an extensive literature review on competence challenges with regard to execution of OI, and empirical data analysis based on a large-scale structured industrial survey in Europe (N=264), leading to the development of competency sets for companies. SPSS tools are applied for empirical tests.

The authors develop a generic OI competency model applicable across industries, combined with organisational implications for sustaining OI management capabilities. The research clusters competencies based on the empirical analysis, which addresses the various challenges of OI, leading to recommendations for competency management in an OI context.

The data were collected from one key informant per company. Although the authors made efforts to ensure that this was a senior manager responsible for innovation, the authors cannot exclude some bias in the way that OI activities and related competencies are perceived. Exploratory nature of the research, which calls for a more systematic investigation of the OI activity modes and the OI competencies resulting competency model. In particular, the competencies could be tested on an inter-professional sample of employees with involvement in and/or responsibility for innovation, development, and HR management, as well as on leaders of innovating companies. Third, although significant in size for the analyses undertaken, the sample is not large enough to enable a more fine-tuned analysis of regional differences across Europe in the way that OI is managed through the development and implementation of competencies.

The research contributes to the OI management field with an outlined OI competency profile that can be implemented flexibly and tailored to individual firm’s needs. It brings indications for both further theory building and practice of innovation organisation, especially with regard to human resource development and organisational capability building for OI.

The social implications of the paper result from the contribution to innovation management competency development in OI regimes, which is an important tool for designing contemporary educational programmes, contributes to OI management sophistication in business which is especially important during the economy slowdown and search for new sources of growth and productivity, and supports firms productive engagement in OI ecosystems and collective technology upgrading towards higher societal benefits and stakeholder involvement.

An empirically grounded OI competency model is proposed with an implication to support human resource development for OI. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has been no prior attempt to build such a model. The distinguished feature of the research is its extensive European coverage of 35 countries and multinational scope. The empirical validation strategy makes the research extremely relevant for management decisions related to human factors related OI capability development in organisations.

This paper explores the relationship between earnings management and firms' value through the moderating effect of the missing elements – corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and state ownership in Russian companies. The main argument of the paper is that CSR disclosure can be used as a mitigating mechanism to weaken the negative relationship between earnings manipulation and market value. Additionally test whether state ownership is an important moderating factor in this relationship are conducted as state has always played an important role in the emerging Russian market.

The hypotheses are tested on panel data for 223 publicly listed Russian firms for the period 2012–2018. A number of robustness tests are used to check the obtained results for consistency. Following previous research GMM method is employed to address endogeneity concerns.

Supported by stakeholder theory, it is observed that firms that disclosed more CSR information experience a weaker negative relationship between earnings management and market value because investors and other stakeholders positively evaluate a positive CSR image. This negative effect of earnings management on market value is even weaker for state-owned companies as market participants appreciate involvement of state-owned companies in CSR activities and place greater expectations on these firms to be responsible without clear understanding whether these actions are “window dressing” for this type of companies or not.

The study results provide new insights into the relation between earnings management, firm's value, CSR disclosure and state ownership in emerging-market firms. The paper highlight the importance of considering country-specific factors, such as state ownership, while analysing the market reaction on CSR disclosure and earnings management since the institutional peculiarities may help to explain differences in the obtained results.

This study aims to examine and understand the impact of reverse logistics adoption on firms' digitalization and collaboration activities. Specifically, leveraging the knowledge-based view, this study examines how adopting sustainable logistic practices (reverse logistics) prepares firms to embrace digitalization and encourages them to collaborate with other organizations.

The study used longitudinal survey data from two waves (2017 and 2019) from the Mannheim Centre for European Economic Research. The authors used the negative binomial regression analyses to test the impact of reverse logistics adoption on the digitalization and inter-organizational collaboration dependent count variables.

The study's findings highlight the usefulness of reverse logistics in enabling digitalization and inter-organizational collaboration. The results show that the firms investing in sustainable supply chains will be better positioned to nurture digitalization and inter-organizational collaboration.

For resource-bound managers, this study provides an important insight into prioritizing activities by highlighting how reverse logistics can facilitate digitalization and collaboration. The study demonstrates that the knowledge generated by reverse logistics adoption can be an essential pillar and enabler toward achieving firms' digitalization and collaboration goals.

The study is among the first to examine the effect of reverse logistics adoption on firm activities that are not strictly associated with the circular economy (digitalization and collaboration). Utilizing the knowledge-based view, this study reports on the additional benefits of reverse logistics implementation previously not discussed in the literature.