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The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the adoption of e-commerce improves company business, innovation and operational performance and whether sales internationalisation might moderate this relationship.

The research is based on a survey within the fashion industry and a multi-step linear regression model investigating the relationships between e-commerce and performance.

Results reveal that e-commerce improves innovation performance but has no significant relationship with business and operational performance. Also investigating whether the sales internationalisation might moderate the relationship between e-commerce and performance, the findings reveal that the adoption of these tools might even be negative when applied at the international level in particular by considering innovation operational practices, and the research suggests for fashion companies the necessity to develop strong markets’ knowledge and brand awareness among foreign markets and customers before investing internationally.

This paper offers an original analytical approach to identifying the relationships between a company’s adoption of e-commerce, performance and internationalisation within the fashion industry.

Researchers ascertain that the more the activities of new product development (NPD) process are outsourced to partners, the higher the need for integration. The purpose of this paper is to study: the extent to which the amount of information shared with the partners during NPD projects (DC visibility) depends on the degree of outsourcing (DC virtuality), and what are the context variables (product features and business relationship features) that influence this relationship.

This paper provides two sets of quantitative indexes to measure: the relevance of the activities outsourced during the NPD project (i.e. virtuality), in terms of the spread of the outsourced technological knowledge, and in terms of outsourced workload; and the amount of information that a focal company shares with product development partners (i.e. visibility). Seven NPD projects in different companies have been analyzed to investigate visibility, virtuality, and the implications of contingencies.

The cross-case analysis shows that the amount of information shared with the partners during the NPD project varies with the relevance of outsourced activities. In particular, the higher the relevance, the higher the amount of information shared with the partner. Partner location and integration, trust, and ICT support have a role in determining the amount of information shared with each single partner.

This study adopts an original network perspective in that the whole set of partners involved in the NPD process is analyzed. New quantitative indexes of visibility and virtuality of NPD projects are proposed, along with original insights about the impact of context variables. The quantitative indexes also provide a useful managerial tool to evaluate whether a focal company has the possibility to build competitive advantages that exploit unique resources beyond the boundaries of the company.

Supply chain management is a critical issue when dealing with the fashion industry. When managing retail, Demand Management is an area that requires investigation because retail is usually the only contact point between the company and its customers. This paper focuses on two luxury fashion industries; fashion apparel and shoes, watches and jewellery. The goal is to understand how the players in these markets deal with their retail channel and the Demand Management process and to find out which are the main drivers that influence their behaviour.

Management practices are analysed using the case study methodology. The findings show that a relationship exists between the company’s features, such as ( the configuration and control of the retail stores) and the products they sell (the duration of the products lifecycle) and the use of retail and Demand Management levers which have been grouped into five main families; information management; demand forecasting; assortment planning; orders and replenishments management, and demand and supply synchronization.

The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative quantitative approach to measure visibility in outbound supply chains and to implement it in order to evaluate the current degree of visibility that focal companies operating in the apparel industry have on their supply chains.

The study is based on an in‐depth literature review on supply chain visibility and on 11 case studies in the apparel industry.

The outcome of the paper is twofold. First, it proposes a metric for measuring visibility in complex outbound supply chains. Second, it analyses the quantity and quality of visible information in eleven companies belonging to the apparel industry, comparing visibility on outbound supply chains vs inbound supply chains.

Although the paper shows the usefulness of the proposed metrics in supporting value assessment, a structured tool is still to be developed. Moreover, the visibility metric is suitable for benchmarking analyses, but the sample presented in the study is still limited and should be enlarged by further studies, also considering other industries.

The metrics so far proposed by researchers to assess the level of visibility in complex supply networks are mainly focused on the upstream supply chain; this paper fills the gap by proposing a quantitative metric for assessing the degree of visibility on the outbound supply chain. Moreover, some interesting insights about visibility in the apparel industry have been found on the basis of 11 case studies.

This paper aims at developing a conceptual framework to identify the main features of supply chain innovation and to analyse the role of dynamic capabilities in implementing such innovations in the context of the fashion-luxury industry.

The paper follows an exploratory approach based on one in-depth case study. The theoretical framework, developed through the literature review, is applied to a Italian fashion-luxury company, thus exploring its applicability in a real context and obtaining evidence in the area of supply chain innovation.

The paper offers insights on supply chain innovation, by investigating an area under-explored in the existing literature. The paper provides a conceptual framework oriented to analyse the main features of supply chain innovation for fashion-luxury companies, by investigating the main determinants of innovation.

The proposed model provides initial insights into the topic of supply chain innovation in fashion-luxury companies. To date, the analysis is predominantly qualitative and therefore replication is needed to generalise the results.

The paper identifies three different perspectives of supply chain innovation and the relationships between supply chain innovation and other types of innovations, which are hopefully useful for managers that are willing to introduce innovation inside fashion-luxury companies.

The paper addresses a new topic, underexplored in the supply chain management literature, by considering a peculiar area of investigation, the fashion-luxury. Moreover, the paper investigates the topic of supply chain innovation through the support of empirical data.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a quantitative approach to assess the degree of visibility that a focal company has of its supply chain, addressing specifically complex networks and ecosystems.

The study is based on an in‐depth literature review concerning the measurement of supply chain visibility and the assessment of its value. An extensive, six‐month discussion and refinement process with the supply chain managers of nine leading companies was conducted to validate the proposed approach and to conduct real case studies.

The main outcome of this paper is a model to measure the visibility level in complex supply networks. Such a measure can be used for benchmarking and as a diagnostic tool for practitioners to find more easily the areas where a visibility improvement is more urgent.

The model provides a measure of the visibility across the inbound supply chain. Further research will extend the approach to the internal and outbound supply chains. Moreover, limited empirical evidence is presented in this paper, which mainly aims to validate the proposed approach. A wider application of the model could offer interesting opportunities in terms of managerial practice and provide a more extensive basis for benchmarking.

Various authors have attempted to quantify visibility across a supply chain, but they either calculate it only for simplistic, two‐tier or linear supply chains, or they fail to provide a comprehensive visibility metric.

The purpose of this paper is to examine which environmental and social sustainability practices companies in the Italian fashion industry adopt and how these companies communicate their sustainability commitment through their corporate websites.

The multiple case studies approach was selected and the practices of 12 companies in the Italian fashion industry were investigated.

The findings showed that four different approaches in the field of sustainability practices and web-based communication are available within the Italian fashion industry (i.e. low commitment, high commitment, low disclosure, high marketing) by highlighting the alignment (i.e. fit or misfit) among these dimensions and by discussing the practices as well as the drivers/barriers of each approach.

The paper contributes to the literature by deepening the understanding of both the environmental and social dimensions of the sustainability issue. Moreover, the work investigates the relationship between sustainability practices and web-based sustainability communication, a topic that has not yet been addressed in the current literature.