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The purpose of this paper is to explore how big-picture sustainability strategies are translated into tangible product development efforts. The authors assert that most sustainable products currently remain confined to niche markets and do not permeate the mainstream. The authors propose that there is a missing link between strategic sustainability goals and operational product development initiatives. The authors establish a path to bridging this gap.

The manuscript is based on a qualitative research design with a sample of 32 companies. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with product developers as well as secondary data analysis.

The authors delineate three empirically derived approaches firms from the sample pursue to develop sustainable products. The authors identify a phenomenon that the authors’ call the fallacy of trickle-down product sustainability. The authors find that only one of the three approaches – codification – is equipped to successfully turn strategic sustainability targets into authentic sustainable products.

This study provides an actionable guide to executives and product developers with respect to bridging the gap between often elusive sustainability aspirations and tangible product improvements via the process of rigorous codification.

This study provides a novel and unique perspective into strategy, sustainability and product development. The authors synthesize the extant literature on sustainable product development, juxtapose the emergent structure with primary interview data, and elaborate the resource-based view (RBV) to provide theoretical and practical implications. The authors establish scalability as the missing RBV capability of many attempts toward mass–market compatibility of more sustainable products.

The study is an attempt to explore much talked but less understood issue of “blockchain in logistics industry” in modern perspective. The customers' acceptance of blockchain technology in logistics and supply chain is tested through “Technology Acceptance Model” by using attitude, perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), behavioral intention and use behavior.

Data has been collected through online and offline medium, where active 240 responses have been collected finally using convenience sampling. Confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM) was carried out for data analysis.

The customers' acceptance of blockchain technology in logistics and supply chain is tested through “Technology Acceptance Model.” The findings reveal model fit where PEOU, PU and attitude are the major constructs of the model to realize the substantial gains in logistics process efficiency.

Convenience sampling has been considered for the study to collect the data of online users of various technology applications for tracking and shipment detail, whereas a more specified method sampling can be considered for the future research. The study has been conducted in the Indian context, which has been considered as the limitation pertaining to generalization across countries and industries.

The findings of this study will be helpful for market practitioners to build transparency between customers and industry to overcome the frictions in logistics. Blockchain will help in monitoring the performance history and previous commitments of logistics professionals resulting in selecting a responsible logistics solution provider. Access to critical data by the authorized member of the supply chain will reduce unsubstantiated disputes.

Blockchain technology will be available to everyone on the network. This will bring transparency and help logistics professionals such as carriers, shippers and brokers to detect early frauds and prevent thefts. It will increase customer trust toward any financial transaction for tracking the ownership of titles.

Blockchain technology is envisioned to be a technology that could be a game-changer for decentralizing infrastructure, introducing transparency and building trust in the supply chain. The current study is a novel addition to the literature where blockchain technology enables the indisputable storage of verified data that was previously kept in safeguarded silos.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate cultural and individual differences in newsvendor decision making.

The online experiment, programmed in the PHP scripting language, had 107 participants: local managers of four large, well-known and supply chain–intensive firms in China (Lenovo, Shenhua, CMST and GM).

The authors find that, as compared with American subjects, Chinese subjects engage in more demand chasing, order quantities that are closer to the mean demand, have a lower expected profit and exhibit greater variance in order quantities. However, these observations may not hold when the cross-cultural comparison is conducted for each pair of ethnic subgroups whose members have the same cognitive reflection test score, a measure of individual differences. Moreover, cultural differences also affect how individual differences manifest in newsvendor decisions.

The authors findings have important implications for employee selection, training and management in any cross-cultural business environment.

Little attention has been paid, in the behavioural operations literature, to individual differences and how they interact with culture. This paper is the first to examine the interaction effects of cultural and individual differences in newsvendor decisions, and it highlights an important research area that is currently understudied in operations management.

When developing a new product, a buying firm solicits revenue sharing bids from two competing suppliers. Bidding behaviors of suppliers do not always align with predictions from rational agent models due to task uncertainty and bounded rationality, which could result in non-optimal supplier offers and ultimately hurt buying firm interests. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issues.

The authors built an analytical model that considers the impact of supplier technological risk, buyer–supplier coordination cost and supplier loss aversion on the optimal bid of the supplier. Next, using limited information processing capacity as a theoretic lens, the authors explore antecedents to the size of a focal supplier's bidding error, the absolute difference between the actual bid and the optimal bid. The authors used quantitative lab experimental data to test the hypotheses.

(1) Bounded rational bidders often fail to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant competitive information when placing bids, (2) loss aversion of a bidder significantly affects not only levels of bids, particularly for bidders with competitive disadvantages, but also sizes of the bidding error and (3) competitive information that has clearer performance implications are more influential in reducing sizes of bidding errors.

The results provide a comprehensive view of the bidding behaviors of a bounded rational supplier in an innovation outsourcing context with competition. With the results, managers now have a better understanding of behavioral influencers behind non-optimal supplier bids in an innovation outsourcing context.

As service robots increasingly interact with customers at the service encounter, they will inevitably become an integral part of employee's work environment. This research investigates frontline employee's perceptions of collaborative service robots (CSR) and introduces a new framework, willingness to collaborate (WTC), to better understand employee–robot interactions in the workplace.

Drawing on appraisal theory, this study employed an exploratory research approach to investigate frontline employees' cognitive appraisal of service robots and their WTC with their nonhuman counterparts in service contexts. Data collection consisted of 36 qualitative problem-centered interviews. Following an iterative thematic analysis, the authors introduce a research framework of frontline employees' WTC with service robots.

First, this study demonstrates that the interaction between frontline employees and service robots is a multistage appraisal process based on adoption-related perceptions. Second, it identifies important attributes across three categories (employee, robot and job attributes) that provide a foundation to understand the appraisal of CSRs. Third, it presents four employee personas (supporter, embracer, resister and saboteur) that provide a differentiated perspective of how service employee–robot collaboration may differ.

The article identifies important factors that enable and restrict frontline service employees' (FSEs’) WTC with robots.

This is the first paper that investigates the appraisal of CSRs from the perspective of frontline employees. The research contributes to the limited research on human–robot collaboration and expands existing technology acceptance models that fall short to explain post-adoptive coping behavior of service employees in response to service robots in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to identify luxury-specific entrepreneurial success factors that, in addition to the well-established general success factors of startups, drive the performance of startups in the luxury industry. The study proposes a contingency perspective on the success factors of startups by examining entrepreneurial excellence in one specific context, the luxury context.

The study uses a qualitative research design, with 24 semi-structured in-depth interviews with senior executives of Swiss luxury startups as key informants. The data is analyzed using the grounded theory approach.

The study develops a new construct of entrepreneurial luxury excellence consisting of two dimensions, resource-related excellence and strategy-related excellence, and identifies the underlying specific success factors related to these two dimensions of entrepreneurial luxury excellence.

The study advances research on strategic entrepreneurship as it combines a holistic approach to managerial success factors of startups with a contingency perspective on them. It also adds to the existing body of research on luxury management where studies with a focus on industry newcomers are still a new domain.

The study makes important implications for luxury entrepreneurs and other stakeholders (e.g. investors) by showing that the success factors of luxury startups might differ from those of startups in other industries.

The paper identifies a new construct – entrepreneurial luxury excellence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of small-business lending following the recession.

The authors survey the literature and analyze recent surveys of small-business lending.

The results reinforce the importance of owner equity as a primary source of small-business financing. In addition, the authors find that small firms have been seeking and obtaining less capital since the 2008 financial crisis.

The findings about the main sources of small-business financing will be informative when formulating financial regulation.

The available evidence suggests that new regulation of the financial services industry may be restricting access to products that small-business owners rely on and may adversely affect small banks.

The authors offer the most recent analysis of small-business financing, focusing on changes that may have been caused by the recession and major financial regulations.

Major crises such as the global financial crisis 2007–08 or the COVID-19 crisis increase the level and likelihood of supplier financial distress. This research expands the understanding of how cooperatively, respectively, uncooperatively buying firms might respond to suppliers who suffer from financial distress in the course of major crises.

The authors build on a collaborative project with a German automotive OEM, analyze OEM internal “financial quick check data”, questionnaire data and longitudinal supplier financial data and apply regression, mediation and difference-in-difference estimation analyses.

The results show that the stronger the dependence on the distressed supplier, the more cooperative the buying firm's response. Furthermore, a more cooperative response of the buying firm has a strong positive influence on the suppliers' financial performance and hence recovery from the distress situation. Insights from supplier financial distress in the course of the financial crisis 2007–2008 can serve as learnings for the COVID-19 crisis.

The study fills a gap in the scholarly literature on “response to risk incidents” and response formation. Resource dependence theory and resource dependence dynamics offer a strong rationale for the type of response buying firms are likely to choose.

Besides offering the first menu of response options, this study can help practitioners in figuring out the most appropriate response to distressed suppliers. The findings can assist buying firms in their decisions how to deal with suppliers during major economic and financial crises.

This research is the first to conceptualize buying firms' response options to financially distressed suppliers, to investigate the influence of dependence on buying firm's response and to reveal the consequences of the buying firm's response for the supplier's financial recovery.

The society faces growing global challenges in terms of sustainable development. A key factor in preparing society for these challenges is education for sustainable development (ESD). This study aims to discuss how the combination of research-based learning (RBL) and digitalization can be used for successful ESD in higher education. The paper introduces the conceptual development of technical and didactical implications for an online learning format, which combines the opportunities of RBL and digitalization to facilitate the distribution of ESD. Furthermore, corresponding evaluation results are presented.

A framework, based on key dimensions described by the relevant literature, was applied for the empirical approach to evaluate students’ learning experiences. On this basis, the differences in the students’ learning experiences between the RBL-format and conventional digital learning format (self-directed studies, learning videos and electronic examination) were measured.

The performed two-sample t-test indicates statistical significant differences in all dimensions. On average, students (N = 226) using the RBL-based format report higher ratings for each examined dimension than students who experienced a conventional format. In summary, this indicates an overall corresponding tendency in students’ learning experience between the examined learning formats.

The presented examination offers empirically based insights on how a digital format can combine RBL and ESD to enhance students’ learning experiences. Moreover, theoretical contributions are provided regarding the future development of digital learning formats to further integrate ESD in higher education.