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The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for practitioners for developing creative strategies and new business models.

This paper reviews more than 150 interviews with CEOs, directors and business unit heads from across functional areas over the past decade, and captures best practices in strategy development and business modelling.

Findings of this study were combined with a review of relevant research papers from leading academic and practitioner journals to identify three critical management practices: challenging mental models, looking beyond logic and encouraging openness for new ideas, which enable organizations to develop creative strategies for building better business models.

This paper demonstrates how these three practices combined can serve as a much needed tool for creative strategy design and development, particularly for established companies, when confronted with new forms of competition.

Organisations must build resilience to be able to deal with disruptions or non-routine events in their supply chains. While learning is implicit in definitions of supply chain resilience (SCRes), there is little understanding of how exactly organisations can adapt their routines to build resilience. The purpose of this study is to address this gap.

This paper is an in-depth qualitative case study based on 28 interviews across five companies, exploring learning to build SCRes.

This study uncovers six learning mechanisms and their antecedents that foster SCRes. The learning mechanisms identified suggest that through knowledge creation within an organisation and knowledge transfer across the supply chain and broader network of stakeholders, operating routines are built and/or adapted both intentionally and unintentionally during three stages of a supply chain disruption: preparation, response and recovery.

This study shows how the impact of a supply chain disruption may be reduced by intentional and unintentional learning in all three disruption phases. By being aware of the antecedents of unintentional learning, organisations can more consciously adapt routines. Furthermore, findings highlight the potential value of additional attention to knowledge transfer, particularly in relation to collaborative and vicarious learning across the supply chain and broader network of stakeholders not only in preparation for, but also in response to and recovery from disruptions.

This study contributes novel insights about how learning leads both directly and indirectly to the evolution of operating routines that help an organisation and its supply chains to deal with disruptions. Results detail six specific learning mechanisms for knowledge creation and knowledge transfer and their antecedents for building SCRes. In doing so, this study provides new fine-grained theoretical insights about how SCRes can be improved through all three phases of a disruption. Propositions are developed for theory development.

The management of reputation and status is central to creative professional service firms (CPSFs) rendering the internationalisation process a particular challenge. The authors build on arguments that internationalisation requires moving from outsidership to insidership within client networks and focus on how CPSFs build signals about quality to start this process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The exploration draws from the international business, professional services and organisational status bodies of literature. A multiple case study design was developed comprising ten Irish architecture firms. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted.

The findings clarify how relationships start in the internationalisation process through signal building about quality. This allows CPSFs to join client networks moving from outsidership to insidership. The findings systemise three different approaches for CPSFs: from outsidership to insidership within a local market network, within a global industry network and within a global project network.

Research within other sectoral and geographical contexts could support transferability of the findings.

The study has implications for international business strategies as it identifies multiple paths to relevant network insidership and the tactical responses managers can use to achieve this.

The authors believe that incorporating signal-building mechanisms into the internationalisation process is a novel approach to theorizing about how CPSFs move from outsidership to insidership. The authors offer important theoretical insights into the international business, professional service firm and organisational status literatures. CPSF business leaders should benefit as it helps them to focus on a portfolio of signal-building approaches that can start the internationalisation process.

This paper aims to enhance the understanding of how subsidiary CEOs can move their unit's activities up the value chain and reduce the risk of subsidiary closure and relocation of its activities.

The entire population of over 1,100 subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) located in Ireland were sampled for this study, representing a diversified pool in terms of foreign ownership. Respondents were largely subsidiary CEOs. In addition, 24 subsidiary CEOs/directors from a cross section of eight subsidiaries were interviewed.

CEOs/directors are taking active steps to enhance their subsidiary's role within the MNC and to move their activities up the value chain. These include positioning to extend subsidiary autonomy, building information networks, creating a climate for entrepreneurship and promoting strategy development processes.

Results from the survey are subject to the standard limitations and a larger pool of interviewees may have strengthened the findings.

Little practical guidance is available to subsidiary CEOs on how they can reduce their subsidiary's relocation risk. This paper addresses this gap and provides a stimulus to CEOs to be proactive in managing their subsidiary's ability to recognize and exploit opportunities to enhance subsidiary contribution and position within their MNC.

While other papers have focused on how subsidiaries can generate initiatives or promote entrepreneurship, the unique contribution of this paper is the identification of strategies CEOs can adopt to enhance their subsidiary's ability to respond to opportunities and position for survival and growth within their MNC.

Reliance on individual talent and motivation renders creative professional service firms (PSFs) highly dependent on their ability to attract and mobilise the right individuals. This paper aims to build an integrated framework showing firstly how creative industry PSFs can differ in their strategy for growth, and secondly how these alternative strategies for growth can influence the firm's approach to organising and the type of talent required.

The findings are based on a series of interviews with managing directors, senior management and practitioners of architectural organisations in a single country, combined with an extensive literature review.

The authors' framework illustrates how the proposed growth strategies for creative PSFs are aligned to alternative professional talent profiles – a product portfolio strategy where the firm structures for efficiency aligned to a managerial talent profile, and an artistic competency strategy where the firm structures for creativity aligned to a technical talent profile.

The usual limitations apply in terms of generalisability of findings from case studies.

The authors' proposed framework represents a novel attempt to help management of creative PSFs to align their growth strategies with human resource practice to achieve the firm's objectives, and provide valuable practical advice to managers on achieving this “fit”.

By linking the firm's strategy and structure to identify the organisation's human resource requirements, the authors provide a novel framework for how creative PSFs can attract and retain the type of talent profile and motivational characteristics best suited to perform consistently and contribute to achieving the firm objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of agility in the context of supply chains of humanitarian aid (HA) organizations, particularly non‐government organizations (NGOs). This responds to the increasing pressure on NGOs to use their resources more strategically if they are to gain donor trust and long‐term commitment.

A literature‐based approach that extends the commercial supply chain concept of agility to NGOs is combined with the first exploratory semi‐structured interviews of these concepts with five NGO supply chain directors.

The commercial concept of agility when responding to disaster relief holds strong potential for increasing efficiency and effectiveness, but this application is restrained by the absence of supporting information technology (IT) and the relegation of supply chain management (SCM) to the “back office” by NGOs. This has potential implications for NGOs and other HA agencies.

This paper represents an exploratory study, and an extended pool of interviewees would reinforce the qualitative findings. Planned future research will address this issue.

Practical guidance on how NGOs can proactively manage their organization's ability to respond with agility in a highly pressured environment is provided.

This paper is the first to offer practical guidance to managers of NGOs on strategies available to improve their organization's flexibility and agility, based on theoretical concepts and initial exploratory data. In addition, evidence of how commercial tools apply in a different arena may prompt commercial managers to be more innovative in utilizing and customizing supply chain principles to their particular context of operation.

This study aims to combine theory and practice to develop an integrated supply chain resilience framework by investigating the inter-dependencies between the strategic literature based concept of supply chain resilience and operational practitioner based disaster management processes.

Utilising an in-depth qualitative case of a collaborative agency, this study identifies best practices within disaster management for insights on the operationalisation of supply chain resilience.

The empirical data leads to the development of an integrated supply chain resilience framework capturing the interplay of disaster management processes and capabilities required to build supply chain resilience. The critical importance of mitigation processes in building supply chain resilience is highlighted.

The generic supply chain resilience framework represents a valuable guide for managers when directing resources and planning for building the capabilities required in each phase of disaster management, while remaining strategically focused. The value of the framework is demonstrated by a retrospective analysis of aid operations in response to Hurricane Katrina.

The study's results are the first to bridge theory and practice on supply chain resilience. By utilising the unique humanitarian aid disaster supply chain management context, a two-way knowledge and learning flow between humanitarian and commercial organisations is established.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Established organizations become stuck sticking to the old ways, the business model that brought the initial success. When these organizations struggle, they need to look to uncertainty, and embrace the mantra of a start-up to help regain a competitive advantage.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction of the two parts of the Special Edition of the journal devoted to the challenges of humanitarian aid logistics. To achieve this, an overview of the humanitarian logistic field is provided focussing on a number of key areas in which the principles and practices supporting commercial supply network management (SNM) have the potential to offer significant improvement in the efficiency and/or effectiveness of the humanitarian logistics preparation and response.

The paper is based on a conceptual discussion of issues of SNM in a humanitarian aid context, linked to the more specific discussions of the contribution of the research presented by the authors of the papers accepted for the special editions.

The paper discusses the concept of SNM and argues that the fundamental principles that have been the subject of considerable academic scrutiny are equally applicable to the humanitarian logistic field – albeit, in some cases, the specific environment may alter the balance of risk/benefit for particular approaches.

The application of commercial SNM theory and practice has received limited consideration within the humanitarian aid logistics literature to date. This paper is designed to redress this shortfall. As a result, it is hoped that it will act as a catalyst for further research and to widen and deepen the resultant debate with a view to improving the outcome for those affected by current and future disasters.