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This paper aims to investigate sustainability-led innovation, focusing on the interplay between product and process innovation for sustainability goals and the underlying supplier–customer relationships. Thus, the paper delves into sustainability-led innovation and how it affects supplier–customer relationships, and vice versa, thus providing a twofold perspective.

The textile industry is the empirical context of this study, which is exploratory research based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, managers and experts in the textile industry.

In the textile industry, sustainability-led product innovation concerns mainly product durability and performance, product recyclability and the use of waste for new product development. Process innovation deals with circular economy, traceability and water and chemical use minimization. The paper also shows how sustainability-led innovation is implemented in more technical terms and regarding supplier–customer relationships.

The paper adopts an original perspective on how processes take place in the relationships between suppliers and customers, where there is no dominance of one actor, but innovation emerges from interdependence and interaction. Such perspective allows to provide an in-depth analysis of the supplier–customer relationships and underlying dynamics that affect sustainability-led innovation; moreover, the authors study how such innovation impacts supplier–customer relationships and the underlying relational dynamics. The value of the paper also stands in delivering a real representation of the innovation processes grounded in the textile industry.

Recent technological turbulence stemming from Industry 4.0 provides managerial opportunities and challenges simultaneously. In this context, the purpose of this study is to explore the role of technological opportunism on innovativeness and discover the impact of innovativeness on new products performance in international markets.

To empirically test the hypotheses, the authors have collected survey data from 237 Korean exporting firms and applied structural equation modeling.

Empirical results indicate that technological opportunism, which represents technology sensing and responding capability, has a positive and significant influence on both exploratory and exploitative innovativeness. Also, explorative and exploitative innovativeness have positive and significant effects on new product performance in international markets.

This study highlighted the importance of technology sensing and responding capabilities to capture emerging opportunities, which may arise from Industry 4.0 technologies. In addition, sensing and responding capabilities will help a firm create a culture that values innovative proclivity, and in turn, will lead to superior new product performance in international markets.

Despite extensive scholarly interest in Industry 4.0, previous studies have neglected to address the potential impact of Industry 4.0 within the domain of new product development and its performance. Also, there have been several calls from the literature to address the managerial and strategic issues surrounding the Industry 4.0 phenomenon. In this study, the authors attempted to fill the research gaps in Industry 4.0 research studies through empirical examination.

This study examines current dynamics, consolidates current knowledge, elicits trends, identifies and analyzes primary research clusters, offers future directions, and develops an integrated framework for Product Advantage (PA) research.

Using the SCOPUS database, this study applied bibliometric analysis (208 articles) and conducted content analysis on the 35 curated articles selected using a combination of bibliographic coupling and the most cited articles.

This study presents the field’s publication trends, most relevant authors, articles, journals, and knowledge structures. It identifies six primary research themes and four major clusters using the thematic map and bibliographic coupling. Marketing and PA, New Product Development (NPD) and PA, Product Innovation and PA, and New product speed and PA are the main clusters. Finally, this study offers directions for future research and provides an integrated framework for PA research.

By developing an ADO framework of PA, the study offers key insights into how PA shapes product outcomes and identifies key antecedents of PA. Firms must focus on firm factors such as market and technological orientation; product factors, such as development time and pre-announcement proficiency; external factors, such as competition; and environmental factors, such as competitive intensity and technological turbulence. It enables firms to create products with high PA, shaping product outcomes and contributing to their competitive advantage.

This is the first study to conduct a two-stage sequential hybrid review of quality articles on PA. It offers an Antecedents-Decisions-Consequences (ADO) framework based on significant studies and offers cluster-wise directors for future research.

Organisations are investing in systems such as product lifecycle management (PLM) to support product development, collaboration across complex supply chains and to provide a framework for digital transformation. Graduates of apparel programmes would benefit from a knowledge of PLM to help realise the opportunities that PLM offers. The purpose of this paper is to report on an educational research project that used PLM as a context for practice-based learning and as a mechanism to update the learning experience and stimulate the development of future practice.

This paper reports on the experiences, critical reflections and data from an action research study to establish a learning community through an educational partnership for PLM software within an undergraduate fashion business course. The cohort of the first year of the intervention (n = 28) is the main study population.

The findings indicate that PLM provided a stimulating learning context supportive of a detailed understanding of current industry practice, critical and innovative thinking and the development of a professional identity.

The opportunity for the development of both industry and educational practice is outlined.

A general introduction to PLM provides important information to support and advance Fashion Industry 4.0. Educational partnerships can reduce barriers to the integration of advanced technologies into the higher education curriculum.

Applications of PLM are under researched in textiles and apparel. The paper contributes to the broadening of the knowledge base of PLM and its potential to achieve strategic transformation of the sector.

This study aims to examine how different uses of performance measurement systems (PMS) enable or hinder organizational ambidexterity (OA), intended as the simultaneous pursuit of exploitation and exploration.

Following a qualitative research design, we gathered data through semi-structured interviews, observations and reviews of documents at four departments of an automotive firm.

We contribute to operations management research and practice by demonstrating how PMS, which are typically associated with exploitation, can also foster exploration and enable organizations to become ambidextrous. Specifically, we show how PMS can be structured and used in more agile ways and, in relation to innovation, we identify which PM practices should be introduced and with what effects and those that should be avoided. We also contribute to organization theory by highlighting how a single management tool can promote the achievement of both exploration and exploitation.

In investigating PMS uses and their effects, we identify several positive practices. For example, we show how managers can use PMS more effectively and how targets could be deployed to stimulate creativity and innovation. We also emphasize the need for managers to opt more often for team incentives rather than individual ones to encourage the collaboration needed for OA.

We provide in-depth insight into how PM tools affect an organization’s ability to pursue exploitation and exploration, thus contributing to research in operations, innovation and organization theory.

Strategic flexibility (SF) has become increasingly important for firms because of the fast changes in the external environment. In line with the practical importance of SF, an emerging research field has developed around it that has attempted to understand the nature of SF and the key relationships. The aim of this study is to unveil the semantic structure of the recent literature on SF and to suggest new promising areas for future research.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review with a bibliographic analysis technique, which allows authors to identify the main recent streams in the literature, as well as offer reflections and suggestions for future research.

The authors uncover three main emerging areas in the research on SF, namely SF as a dynamic capability, the role of knowledge management for SF and the relationship between a firm SF and the external environment. The authors put forward three avenues for future research on SF: Avenue 1. SF, business model innovation (BMI) and other dynamic capabilities (DC), Avenue 2. Digital technologies and SF/organizational agility and Avenue 3. SF and sustainability. Articles included in the special issue entitled “A strategic perspective on flexibility, agility and adaptability in the digital era” contribute to Avenue 2, thus paving the way for filling some of the identified gaps regarding the relationship between SF and digitalization.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on SF that uses a bibliometric approach to draw conclusions on the findings in the literature. The review contributes to the theoretical understanding of SF by illustrating and explicating core topics that have persisted over time, as well as by presenting three main avenues for further developing authors’ knowledge around SF.

The aim of the paper is to analyze how actors in foodservice companies organize for inbound open innovation (OI).

This paper conducted a case analysis of a large and successful foodservice company operating in the Dutch market. Furthermore, drawing on 18 interviews and archive data, we identified the main organizational practices involved in the implementation of inbound innovation activities and the ways they are embraced are defined.

The results provide a holistic view of the main organizational practices a foodservice company implemented at different organizational levels, to exploit external knowledge coming from third parties and to promote the sharing and recombination of knowledge resources within the organization. The identified organizational practices reveal the main interaction patterns between relevant internal actors and other external parties in the company network, as well as between actors on different hierarchical organizational levels which allows processing relevant innovation information and make relevant decisions about it.

Implications are provided in terms of both theory and practice. This paper helps foodservice companies to create an internal organizational environment that supports the exploitation of customer knowledge.

There are few studies on how companies organize themselves for OI in general, and especially in the foodservice sector.

The empirical study of factors related to digital transformation (DT) in the banking sector is still limited, even though the importance of the topic is universally evident. To bridge that gap, this paper aims to explore the role of digital leadership (DL), innovative culture (IC) and technostress inhibitors (TI) to support engagement for improved digital innovation (DI). Based on the literature, these variables are crucial aspects of digitalisation, even though there is no agreement on their conclusiveness.

This quantitative study tested a new conceptual model using survey data from five major banks in Libya. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data from the 292 usable responses.

The results showed that DL and IC positively affect DI. Techno-work engagement (TE) mediated the relationship between leadership, culture and innovation. TI played a significant moderating role in leadership, culture and engagement relationships.

The research findings highlight critical issues about how leadership style and fostering organisational support in the banking sector can enhance DT. Leaders must demonstrate a commitment to long-term resource allocation to avoid possible negative effects from digital stress while pursuing DI through work engagement.

The study suggests that fostering organisational support can enhance DT in retail banks, potentially leading to improved customer experiences and increased access to financial services. These programs will help banks contribute to societal and economic development.

This timely study examines predictor mechanisms of innovation in retail banking that resonate within the restrictions of organisational and DI frameworks and the social exchange theory. Exploring the intervening effect of TE in the leadership, culture and innovation associations is unprecedented.

Common availability of digital technologies encouraged companies in almost all industries to focus on exploring various ways of benefiting from their adoption and thus taking steps toward their digital transformation. This paper aims to describe the digital transformation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as a challenging opportunity and identify ways in which companies from the food industry address it.

The paper presents empirical evidence based on a case study of the Polish freeze-drying market and companies operating on it. This study adopted a single case study research method to describe the digital transformation journey of SMEs. The sample constitutes a single sectoral case study with more than one unit of analysis – sixteen companies. The undertaken approach follows an embedded case study design and allows for an extensive and multidimensional analysis of rich empirical data.

The results of this analysis allowed to identify four significant trends describing human resources involvement in the digital transformation of freeze-drying companies in Poland (i.e. visionary top-down, cooperative task-oriented, persuasive bottom-up, chaotic), a detailed catalog of outcomes of digital transformation from the perspective of food industry companies grouped in seven categories and a list of main barriers to digital transformation.

This paper contributes to expanding knowledge on the practices of food industry companies in addressing challenges posed by the development of information technology and the dynamically changing environment after the COVID-19 pandemic. It contributes further to the discussion related to context-, industry- and country-specific barriers to digital transformation, identifying time-related constraints as an essential barrier to digital transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different manufacturing technologies are bundled together and how these bundles influence operations performance and, indirectly, business performance. With the emergence of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies, manufacturing companies can use a wide variety of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT) to build an efficient and effective production system. Nevertheless, the literature offers little guidance on how these technologies, including novel I4.0 technologies, should be combined in practice and how these combinations might have a different impact on performance.

Using a survey study of 165 manufacturing plants from 11 different countries, we use factor analysis to empirically derive three distinct manufacturing technology bundles and structural equation modeling to quantify their relationship with operations and business performance.

Our findings support an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary perspective. I4.0 technologies build on traditional manufacturing technologies and do not constitute a separate direction that would point towards a fundamental digital transformation of companies within our sample. Performance effects are rather weak: out of the three technology bundles identified, only “automation and robotization” have a positive influence on cost efficiency, while “base technologies” and “data-enabled technologies” do not offer a competitive advantage, neither in terms of cost nor in terms of differentiation. Furthermore, while the business performance impact is positive, it is quite weak, suggesting that financial returns on technology investments might require longer time periods.

Relying on a complementarity approach, our research offers a novel perspective on technology implementation in the I4.0 era by investigating novel and traditional manufacturing technologies together.