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This study aimed to discuss issues related to the process for validating a performance management system for design (PMSD) in three product development companies.

The use of multifunctional groups becomes important because it favors viewing the organization as a whole, thereby reducing existing gaps between segments of the company. To support this study, focus group research was used.

Viewing design as a resource that contributes to increased competitiveness offers companies benefits, such as improved performance measurement. This measurement is based on indicators and, to be useful, an indicator system should stimulate the company's interest. In addition, the present study made it possible to conclude that the validation process is essential in preimplementation stages because validation allows the PMSD to be adapted to bring it closer to the reality of companies, thus increasing the chances of success during the implementation stage.

Validation of the metrics from the perspective of senior management enabled critical analyses of the applicability of the PMSD, as well as its suitability and approximation to the reality of businesses, by selecting the most relevant data.

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the process and results achieved from the implementation of a design management indicator system in four product development companies.

To this end, instruments and techniques for implementing and collecting composite data were adopted.

The implementation made it possible to test the system metrics, and the analysis of the results enabled the identification of factors that hinder a successful implementation.

Design is being recognized as providing significant economic, social, and environmental benefits, and as it becomes a part of the management process, it can have an impact on business performance. Therefore, information sharing through indicator systems that consider factors that generate reliable and quantifiable information has become fundamental.

Organizations are increasingly required to take up extended responsibilities for social and environmental outcomes, including in global value chains. To address these challenges, the organization must call upon stakeholders to engage, contribute, and innovate, and in turn, this requires the organization to have a stronger social basis for its relationships. An integrative model of global value chain management based on social cooperation shifts the focus from corporate reputation to value chain reputation, from a firm-centric view of corporate reputation to a multistakeholder conception of value chain reputation. This approach conceptualizes reputation as a dynamic and potentially vulnerable organizational feature which cannot always be managed by public relations but requires a more stable notion grounded in something more permanent in the organization’s character, history, and the quality of its relationships with stakeholders. We consider the prospects for attending to organizational integrity as a stabilizing force for its public reputation. Integrity may be adopted as a hypernorm for motivating stakeholders who share a concern for the organization’s reputation. Co-creating reputation depends upon a social bond of cooperation developed by stakeholders caring about the organization and in turn, the organization caring about its stakeholders. This socialized understanding of reputation-building is grounded in an ethic of care and manifested through joint purposes, boundary-crossing processes, collaboration practices, and a division of labor into which value chain members are integrated and brought into relation with one another. We propose a model of global value chain management that discusses organizational capabilities required for such an approach.

Corporations operating global value chains must grapple with a multiplicity of ethical and practical considerations, most notably when value chains extend to emerging markets. Such contexts involve interactions with diverse stakeholders who possess the ability to impact supply chain performance, but who also bring conflicting needs, values and interests. The purpose of this paper is to outline a transformative model of supply chain fairness, arguing that adopting plural fairness principles and practices generates a higher fairness equilibrium which includes all affected stakeholders in the production of fairness outcomes, with consequent positive organizational and system level impacts.

Through a philosophically informed overview of the literature on organizational fairness, the paper applies fairness to the management of supplier relations to identify the institutional features of ethically sustainable supply chains. The proposed conceptual model uses a complex adaptive systems approach (CADs), supplemented by describing the contribution of fairness norms and practices.

This paper argues that a transformative approach to supply chain fairness can suggest new structures for interaction between firms, stakeholders, mediating institutions and governments.

Emerging market supply chains are facing significant changes. Adopting a complex adaptive systems perspective upon stakeholder relationships, this paper offers insights from the theoretical literature on fairness, and proposes a normative model of supply chain fairness which accounts for both the normative and empirical aspects of relational complexity.

In a major multi-sport event, the athlete is both a benefactor and producer of organizational activities. Athletes’ centrality makes understanding their satisfaction with the event an important management activity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the lived athletes experience (during the event), so as to provide insight into the important Games facets contributing to their satisfaction and to explore the controllable aspects of the event from an organizer’s perspective that athletes felt made the Games special and memorable.

A multi-dimensional instrument (i.e. Athlete Experience Questionnaire) was designed and tested at previous iterations of a major multi-sport event and was employed during Games-time. In total, 813 athletes completed the questionnaire during the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

The findings demonstrated an overall high level of satisfaction with the event. Several important facets contributed to athlete satisfaction including social-, service- and communication-related aspects. Further, athletes reported on the importance of cultural opportunities within their Games experience.

The paper denotes the importance of the social and cultural interactions and opportunities which lie outside the athletes’ actual competition experience and increase their specialness of the event. Theoretical and practical implications are drawn from the findings relative to the service-dominant logic and service-quality literature within a major multi-sport event Games for the athlete stakeholder.

This paper explores how athletes experience the major international multi-sport event environment. Moreover, this paper offers a significant contribution from a hard-to-reach population (i.e. elite-level international athletes), adopts their perspective of the Games environment and determines what contributes to their satisfaction. As the authors highlight, the paper denotes the importance of the planned social and cultural interactions and opportunities, which lie outside the athlete’s actual competition event experience, to increase athlete satisfaction; in contrast, basic sport competition needs seem to be a “basic” expectation.

The authors’ aim is to investigate if entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has a role in interpreting an external crisis, such as COVID-19, as an opportunity for investing in digital transformation.

The authors undertook multiple case study research on the digital transformation of seven “Made in Italy” SMEs and proposed a conceptual framework that sees an external stimulus (e.g. the pandemic) as a driver of the digitalisation, filtered by the entrepreneurial orientation of SMEs.

The authors’ results show how EO deals with the changing environment and helps address the market opportunities related to digitalisation.

This study contributes to the existing literature on EO and digital transformation of SMEs, creating a new model for forthcoming studies on this topic. In addition, interesting insights are offered on the role of EO to promote the introduction of digital transformation in SMEs operating in the “Made in Italy” sectors.

This study shows the role of EO as a reactive characteristic during a crisis. Thus, the authors’ suggestion to SMEs is to develop their EO as a part of the strategic orientation. In addition, this work encourages policymakers to invest in the promotion of specific interventions aimed at supporting entrepreneurs in enhancing their capacity to effectively manage digital transformation.

Identifying the most important triggers of digitalisation in times of crisis remains an underexplored area of research. Thus, this study adds value to both digital transformation and entrepreneurial orientation topics.

The paper analyzes the relative technical efficiency of the transition economies of the Western Balkans in the period 2007–2021, in comparison with the former countries with a socialist state system, today members of the European Union (EU), based on selected macroeconomic indicators and panel data.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA), i.e. its extension, DEA Window analysis, is applied. Total technical efficiency, as a prerequisite of economic efficiency, is decomposed into pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE). Bootstrapping method and Mann–Whitney U test were used to check the robustness of the obtained results, i.e. efficiency values.

The results show that in 2020, all observed countries recorded a significant drop in economic efficiency as a result of a general, disproportionate drop in the value of selected macroeconomic variables, which occurred due to the global economic crisis and the slowdown in economic activity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This drop in efficiency was significantly greater in the former socialist states, now members of the European Union, which showed their greater sensitivity to global crises. None of the observed economies in the observed period was relatively efficient, that is, at the level of best practice, which occurred primarily as a consequence of the inefficiency of business conditions expressed in the economies of scale.

The main limitation of this study stems from the very nature of the concept of DEA efficiency, which is relative in nature. Also, the results and their interpretation are also significantly influenced by the choice of model variables, as shown by Lábaj et al. (2013), as well as a small number of decision-making units (DMUs). The mentioned limitations prevent unambiguous interpretation and generalization of the obtained results.

The study may be of importance to economic policy makers in macroeconomic decision-making. The application of the DEA concept in measuring the technical efficiency of national economies is a useful tool in the analysis of macroeconomic performance and a benchmarking approach for positioning and achieving competitive advantage on the international market.

Since research of this type is very limited, the results of this study make a theoretical and empirical contribution to the literature, creating a basis for future research and reexamination. The application of the DEA concept in measuring the technical efficiency of national economies is a useful tool in the analysis of macroeconomic performance and a benchmarking approach for positioning and achieving competitive advantage in the international market.

The objectives of this study are twofold: identify the main challenges in performing training on Industry 4.0 concepts to managers operating in the manufacturing sector who are not familiar with them but aspire for an Industry 4.0 broad view and validate training practices that can be adopted to reduce managerial knowledge differences.

A Delphi method was carried out in two rounds to identify the Industry 4.0 training challenges and a Fuzzy Delphi method was applied in one round to validate the training practices. Both methods used the same set of participants composed of experts in training for Industry 4.0. Results were discussed considering literature statements.

In total, 11 challenges in Industry 4.0 training were identified and grouped into: challenges associated with the necessary knowledge, challenges of breaking paradigm, challenges associated with training characteristics and challenges associated with expected results. In total, 11 training practices were directly validated, including actions to be adopted before, during, and after the training process.

The findings are relevant for professionals, academics, or consultants as the findings enable better training planning and execution. No similar papers were found in scientific databases, reinforcing this present study's originality and contribution.

Junior enterprises have been gaining increasing attention in the Brazilian Higher Education Institutions. In addition, these companies are contributing to enhance the training of future professionals. Improvements in future professionals’ training must consider education for sustainability. In this context, this paper aims to critically analyze the role of junior enterprises in the training of undergraduate students in line with the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

To discuss the ways for junior enterprises to contribute to students’ training with a higher alignment with sustainable development, it is necessary to know the routine of their activities well. Therefore, the strategy used in this research was to use the Delphi process with students who participated/participate in this kind of extracurricular activity in their institutions and are familiar with the SDGs disseminated by the United Nations.

From the rounds of Delphi method debates, eight items were listed and presented an agreement greater than 50% of the participants. Illustratively, three of them are cited here: most participants understand that some current metrics used by junior enterprises require greater alignment with the SDGs; most participants agree that junior enterprises need to better monitor the results of their postexecution projects because in general beneficial impacts on sustainability are observed in the long term; and most of the participants understand that the actions developed by junior enterprises are aligned with corporate sustainability and conscious capitalism.

The contribution of junior enterprises to the promotion of sustainability education is practically not addressed in the literature. The findings presented here, resulting from the Delphi process, can greatly contribute for junior enterprises to rethink their actions to better prepare future professionals to act toward sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to find supplier's role in brand co-creation. This paper also discusses the perspective of suppliers on the role and benefits of other stakeholders like consumers and the sponsoring organization in brand co-creation and to come up with some concepts and constructs related to these.

A qualitative approach has been used to identify supplier roles. Depth interviews were conducted on 15 selected suppliers from India already participated in brand co-creation. Grounded theory method was used to code and analyze the data and come up with important themes.

The grounded theory findings showed that suppliers need to have certain features like professionalism, willingness to invest in research and development (R&D) and flexible attitude in order to participate in brand co-creation. In turn, suppliers are benefited from participating in such an event as it improves their performance, growth and offerings. The depth interview findings also showed the reasons for successful and failed brand co-creation and the informant suppliers' view on the roles consumers and organization play in band co-creation and the benefits they receive.

This is one of the first academic studies of identifying supplier's role in brand co-creation looking beyond consumers and organization. There is no qualitative and quantitative study that was conducted to find out supplier's role. The paper conceptualizes important concepts related to supplier's features, roles and benefits in brand co-creation.