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Alain Bouchard was born in 1949. He bought his first convenience store in 1978, when he was almost 30 years old. By then, he already had nearly 10 years of experience in the sector. He had already been involved in the start-up of more than 200 convenience stores. He understood that if he was to transform his newly acquired store into a chain and build something big, he needed to set up a team of people with complementary skills to help him make acquisitions.

In 2023, there are roughly 15,000 convenience stores operating under the Circle K/Ingo/Couche-Tard banners, employing 130,000 people in more than 30 countries. Annual sales are more than US$60 billion. Alain Bouchard officially retired from his position as President and CEO in 2014 and became Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board. He continues to be a major shareholder. He is still actively involved in strategic orientations and in identifying potential acquisitions. He has become a ‘Chief Culture Officer’ involved in executive leadership mentoring. He has never stopped communicating the importance of innovative, creative and intrapreneurial behaviour at all levels of the enterprise.

This case study presents Alain Bouchard, the man and the entrepreneur. It shows how he learned and mastered the craft of starting, acquiring, managing and developing convenience stores. It looks at how he encouraged the people around him to act as facilitators and intrapreneurs. It describes his values, how he works and learned to live with risk.

This study aims to explore the interplay between community dynamics and knowledge production using the quantum computing research field as a case study. Quantum computing holds the promise of dramatically increasing computation speed and solving problems that are currently unsolvable in a short space of time. In this highly dynamic area of innovation, computer companies, research laboratories and governments are racing to develop the field.

After constructing temporal co-authorship networks, the authors identify seven different events affecting communities of researchers, which they label: forming, growing, splitting, shrinking, continuing, merging, dissolving. The authors then extract keywords from the titles and abstracts of their contributions to characterize the dynamics of knowledge production and examine the relationship between community events and knowledge production over time.

The findings show that forming and splitting are associated with retaining in memory what is currently known, merging and growing with the creation of new knowledge and splitting, shrinking and dissolving with the curation of knowledge.

Although the link between communities and knowledge has long been established, much less is known about the relationship between the dynamics of communities and their link with collective cognitive processes. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present contribution is one of the first to shed light on this dynamic aspect of community knowledge production.

While there are many guides available on how to construct academic texts, the actual experience of writing can often remain unspoken. In this chapter, I share my personal experience of academic writing in entrepreneurship research, including the enabling and constraining aspects. My aim is to make academic writing more visible and encourage open discussion about this important activity. I approach academic writing as a comprehensive experience, encompassing various dimensions such as embodied, emotional and social aspects. I reflect on the influence of my body, physical conditions, emotions and writing habits on my writing process. Additionally, I consider the impact of external expectations and the context of working in entrepreneurship research, and how they shape my writing style. By examining these different dimensions of my writing experience, I hope to provide insight into the multifaceted nature of academic writing in entrepreneurship research.

Diaspora tourism primarily refers to various population groups, including migrants, foreign workers, political refugees, ethnic and religious minorities and overseas communities living away from their ancestral homeland for various reasons. Throughout history, people have been forced to leave their original homeland due to various factors ranging from economic crises to natural and human-made tragedies, including war. The 24 February 2022 unjustified and unproved Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, which started on the heels of the two-year COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in massive and terrible consequences for many domains of political, economic and social life. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has generated the largest historical migration flows at a scale unforeseen in Europe since World War II. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, at least 12 million people have been displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations. The unprecedented influx of the Ukrainian people raises concerns about future developments, issues and challenges associated with Ukrainians' presence in other countries, particularly neighbouring ones. Therefore, this chapter analyses the possibility of diaspora tourism for Ukrainians shortly by utilising a critical approach when the situation stabilises in Ukraine. To begin with, this chapter first explains diaspora tourism with its definition and characteristics. Furthermore, it reviews the literature on the Russia–Ukraine war and its impact on Ukrainian tourism. In conclusion, it discusses the new Ukrainian diaspora wave soon.

Despite widespread recognition of the importance of place in entrepreneurship research, much less attention has been paid to the methodological challenges that inquiries into place presents. Understanding the relationship between place and entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly important as focus turns to sustainable entrepreneurship and as policy makers turn to ‘place-based’ approaches to regional sustainability challenges. This chapter provides insight one researcher’s experiences engaging stakeholders in discussions about the relationship between a place-based university programme for sustainability and local sustainability agendas. The chapter reveals the struggles experienced by both researcher and participants in articulating what places and the local region means to both individuals and to the programme. The findings provide an important insight into how researchers studying place need to be cognisant of the limitations and flexibility of language when engaging research participants in discussing the relationship between place, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) is a widely accepted guideline for performing a systematic review (SR) in clinical journals. It not only helps an author to improve the reporting but also assists reviewers and editors in the critical appraisal of available SR. These tools help in achieving reproducibility in research, a major concern in contemporary academic research. But there is a lack of awareness about the approach among management researchers. This chapter attempts to fill this gap using a narrative review of reliable online resources and peer-reviewed articles to discuss the PRISMA guidelines and recent amendments. The chapter further points out the limitations of PRISMA in the review of management literature and suggests measures to overcome that. This piece of literature introduces a reader to the basics of a systematic review using PRISMA as an instrument. One of the significant contributions is to delineate a seven-step strategy to attain reproducibility in the systematic review. The chapter is useful for researchers and academicians in the field of social science and management.

Spirituality has long played an important role in conflict and crisis management at both individual and organizational levels, and the interest in spirituality is increasing day by day. Spirituality gives meaning or purpose to one's life and minimizes the potential for conflict, so spirituality has a mitigating role in conflict and crisis processes. In addition, spirituality is thought to foster values such as equality, honesty, compassion, avoidance of harm, respect, peace, justice, forgiveness, sense of duty, reliability, good citizenship, gratitude, optimism, gratitude, love, dedication, and empathy. Therefore, it can be said that employees who have internalized such moral values will definitely reflect them in their actions and discourses in conflict and crisis situations and will achieve successful results. In fact, spirituality drives the behaviors of employees in both crisis management and coping with crisis management. In this context, it can be said that employees with a high level of spirituality can choose the integrative conflict style in conflict situations and can manage conflict positively and thus prevent a crisis from occurring. It is also foreseen that religious spirituality will play a positive role in conflicts and create a peaceful environment in organizations.

The current chapter proposes a theoretical framework to assess the sustainability of economic growth in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States. The authors integrate insights from endogenous growth models and consider the unique socioeconomic characteristics of the GCC region to provide a comprehensive and tailored approach to understanding the determinants of economic growth and formulating effective policy measures to foster sustainable development and growth. This chapter highlights the environmental challenges faced by GCC; based on this, the authors suggested indicators to construct a theoretical framework (Economic Growth, Climatic Indicators, Energy Indicators, Social Indicators, and Economic Resources Indicators). The authors propose that policymakers and researchers in GCC States should take these factors into account when devising policies or conducting research aimed at fostering sustainable economic growth. Overall, this chapter presents significant insights for policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders involved in promoting the sustainable economic advancement of the GCC States.

Pre-positioning and distributing relief items are important parts of disaster management as it simultaneously considers activities from both pre- and post-disaster stages. This study aims to address this problem with a novel mathematical model.

In this research, a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model is developed to tackle pre-positioning and distributing relief items, and it is formulated as an integrated location-allocation-routing problem with uncertain parameters. The humanitarian supply chain consists of relief facilities (RFs) and demand points (DPs). Perishable and imperishable relief commodities (RCs), different types of vehicles, different transportation modes, a time window for delivering perishable commodities and the occurrence of unmet demand are considered. A scenario-based game theory is applied for purchasing RCs from different suppliers and an integrated best-worst method-technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution technique is implemented to determine the importance of DPs. The proposed model is used to solve several random test problems for verification, and to validate the model, Iran’s flood in 2019 is investigated as a case study for which useful managerial insights are provided.

Managers can effectively adjust their preferences towards response time and total cost of the network and use sensitivity analysis results in their decisions.

The model locates RFs, allocates DPs to RFs in the pre-disaster stage, and determines the routing of RCs from RFs to DPs in the post-disaster stage with respect to minimizing total costs and response time of the humanitarian logistics network.

The goals of the contemporary environment in this new era of the Internet of Things (IoT), digital technologies (DTs) and smartisation are to enhance economic, social and environmental sustainability while also concentrating on the citizens' quality of life. As these initiatives advance, more determination is required to offer effective approaches to the problem posed by the accomplishment of the Sustainable City Project in Nigeria as a developing nation. To address these problems and facilitate the process for Nigeria's major cities to become ‘smart cities’, universities, research institutions and other stakeholders must collaborate alongside. This chapter aims to establish a model or framework that addresses urban intelligence, social inclusion, resilience and technological innovation, mobility, urbanisation and residents' quality of life. The reviews of the characteristics and management of smart cities in developed countries were documented to serve as a comparison study of the cities in African sub-Saharan regions. This will assist in building models that can produce predictions about possible smart solutions in the areas of mobility, urban infrastructure and ecological problems brought on by climate change in African cities. This chapter brings attention to the body of knowledge by envisioning the benefits to the government and citizens in making appropriate decisions to enhance sustainable development, a better resilience environment, improved infrastructure, smart city environments and residents' quality of life. The study's implications centre on how the government could prioritise urban features and services as indicated in the smart cities framework.