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This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.

Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration.

This conceptual paper adopts a techno-demarcation view on service innovation, encompassing three core dimensions: service offering (the service product, or the “what”), service process (the “how”) and service ecosystem (the “who/for whom”). It delineates the implications of three digital technologies – the internet-of-things (IoT), intelligent automation (IA) and digital platforms – for service innovation across these core dimensions in B2B markets.

Digital technology has immense potential ramifications for value creation by reshaping all three core dimensions of service innovation. Specifically, IoT can transform physical resources into reconfigurable service products, IA can augment and automate a rapidly expanding array of service processes, while digital platforms provide the technical and organizational infrastructure for the integration of resources and stakeholders within service ecosystems.

This study suggests an agenda with six themes for further research, each linked to one or more of the three service innovation dimensions. They are (1) new recurring revenue models, (2) service innovation in the metaverse, (3) scaling up service innovations, (4) ecosystem innovations, (5) power dependency and lock-in effects and (6) security and responsibility in digital domains.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often operate in environments marked by high levels of turbulence. Such firms adopt digital technologies and platforms that provide access to external real-time information and establish digital connectivity between firms to remain competitive. This study aims to focus on SMEs’ downstream and upstream platform-based digital connectivity (PDC).

This study examines the effects of PDC on SMEs’ operational performance under conditions of environmental turbulence. The data was gathered from 192 SMEs operating in the manufacturing arena.

The results show that the adoption of PDC does not directly affect an SME’s operational performance. However, in highly turbulent environments, PDC can improve operational performance. The results indicate that the performance effects of PDC vary according to the level and type of environmental turbulence.

This research offers insights into the relationship between PDC among SMEs and operational performance and encourages future research examining other possible conditional effects that could explain the contradictory results found in previous research.

This study contributes to the knowledge of supply-chain digitalization among SMEs and its performance effects in varying environmental conditions. Further, this study contributes to the prior research by focusing on the interorganizational aspects of digitalization in SMEs.

Food and beverage (F&B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must diversify their markets and obtain predictable sources of revenues to withstand difficult and volatile periods such as the post-pandemic geopolitical scenario, recently burdened by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. On the other hand, another strand of the literature suggests that public procurement could be considered a great source of income, enabling solid contracts, revenues and cash-flow stability. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the role of public procurement, the adoption of e-commerce platforms and their interactions in affecting the exporting performances of SMEs operating in the F&B sector.

The study retrieves data from 2,186 Italian F&B manufacturing SMEs relying on Margò by Cribis database. Therefore, it conducts a structured equational model (SEM) to test the developed hypotheses empirically.

The findings reveal that digital selling platforms positively affect exports, whereas public procurement negatively affects F&B SMEs exports. Nonetheless, findings underline that the interaction between public procurement and the adoption of digital selling platforms dampens public procurement's negative effects on exports.

This study brings an original contribution to the F&B literature by conducting empirical research on an extensive sample of firms from one of the most influential countries in the F&B vertical, Italy, with officially registered data. More importantly, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study pioneers the investigation of the relationship between public procurement and e-commerce platforms in affecting F&B SMEs' export performances.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their positioning among innovation policy measures. A growing number of companies have implemented initiatives to access external knowledge to increase their innovativeness, consistently with the open innovation paradigm. Competition-based approaches have received increasing attention by the private sector as a way to access external knowledge. However, despite their potential role as innovation policy measures, a limited attention has been devoted so far to investigate them from the policymakers’ perspective.

To this aim, a two-stage empirical analysis has been carried out to develop a taxonomy of competition-based approaches. The first stage leveraged a multiple case study methodology including a sample of 20 competition-based approaches, while the second one leveraged interviews with Italian and European key informants.

This paper proposes a novel taxonomy including eight competition-based approaches, which differ among each other in terms of policy strategy, scope breadth and output required. Moreover, this paper enriches a well-established taxonomy of innovation policy instruments with the identified competition-based approaches.

This study contributes to the current debate on innovation policy by providing a taxonomy that includes eight competition-based approaches that can be exploited by policymakers to foster external knowledge search as well as their positioning among the innovation policy instruments. The taxonomy will hopefully support policymakers in identifying of the most suitable instruments in the light of their policy strategy and objectives.

The review examines the existing literature on blockchain-based small and medium enterprise (SME) finance and highlights its trend, themes, opportunities and challenges. Based on these factors, the authors create a framework for the existing literature on blockchain-based SME financing and lay down future research paths.

The review follows a systematic approach. It includes 53 articles encompassing multiple dimensions of blockchain-based SME finance, including peer-to-peer lending platforms, supply chain finance (SCF), decentralized lending protocols and tokenization of assets. The review critically evaluates these approaches' theoretical underpinnings, empirical evidence and practical implementations.

The review demonstrates that blockchain-based SME finance holds significant promise in addressing the credit gap by leveraging blockchain technology's decentralized and transparent nature. Benefits identified include reduced information asymmetry, improved access to financing, enhanced credit assessment processes and increased financial inclusion. However, the literature acknowledges several challenges and limitations, such as regulatory uncertainties, scalability issues, operational complexities and potential security risks.

The article contributes to the growing knowledge of blockchain-based SME finance by synthesizing and evaluating the existing literature. It also provides a framework for the existing literature in the area and future research paths. The study offers insights for researchers, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand the potential of blockchain technology in filling the SME credit gap and fostering economic development through improved access to finance for SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to make the case that ethical guardrails in emerging technology businesses are inadequate and to develop solutions to strengthen these guardrails.

Based on literature and first principles reasoning, the paper develops theoretical arguments about the fundamental purpose of ethical guardrails and how they evolve and then uses this along with the characteristics that distinguish emerging technology businesses to identify inadequacies in the ethical guardrails for emerging technology businesses and develop solutions to strengthen the guardrails.

The paper shows that the ethical guardrails for emerging technology businesses are inadequate and that the reasons for this are systematic. The paper also develops actionable recommendations to strengthen these guardrails.

The paper develops the novel argument that reasons for the inadequate ethical guardrails in emerging technology businesses are systematic and stem from the inadequacy of laws and regulations, inadequacy of boards and the focus of business executives.

Since Zuckerberg's announcement to change Facebook's name to Meta Platforms Inc. on October 28, 2021, the concept of the metaverse has gained unprecedented popularity in the business world. Tech giants, SMEs and start-ups across various sectors are making substantial investments in metaverse-related technologies. Despite this, scholarly research in entrepreneurship and strategic management regarding the metaverse remains limited. This paper, grounded in value creation theory, aims to analyze how value is generated in the metaverse era.

This paper conducts a thematic analysis of 895 press releases published by LexisNexis between October 28, 2021, and October 28, 2022. The analysis identifies the primary emerging themes related to value creation in the metaverse age.

The thematic analysis reveals four significant emerging themes concerning value creation in the metaverse age: (1) factors enabling value creation, (2) digital resources contributing to value creation, (3) motives driving value creation and (4) practices of value creation.

This paper represents the inaugural attempt to analyze the metaverse through a value creation lens. Given the substantial investments and growing academic interest in the metaverse, understanding value creation in this context is a pressing concern. Additionally, this study provides valuable insights and suggests critical questions for future research on the metaverse.

The current study aims to propose and empirically investigate a conceptual model of the most relevant antecedents and consequences of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) attribution, thus providing a practical and concise model as well as examining brand attachment as a mediator explaining the relationship between CSR attribution and its consequences.

A between-subjects experimental design was employed. The study included two experimental conditions; intrinsic and extrinsic CSR attribution and a control condition. An online self-administered survey was utilised for data collection. The sample was a convenience sample of 336 university students. Both one-way between-groups ANOVA and Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) were utilised for hypotheses testing.

The most significant antecedents of CSR attribution in order of importance are the firm's approach to CSR communication, past corporate social performance, CSR type and the firm's call for customers' participation in its CSR. CSR attribution exerted a significant direct positive impact on brand attachment and trust. Three significant indirect consequences of CSR attribution were PWOM intention, purchase intention and brand loyalty intention. Whereas trust played a significant mediating role between CSR attribution and its three indirect consequences, brand attachment exerted significant mediation only between CSR attribution and brand loyalty intention. Brand attachment might mediate the relationship between CSR attribution and purchase intention. However, brand attachment failed to play a mediating role between CSR attribution and PWOM intention.

Several studies marginally investigated CSR attribution. Despite the vital role of CSR attribution in how consumers receive firms' CSR engagement, the availability of CSR attribution-centric studies is limited. By introducing a model of the most relevant antecedents and consequences of CSR attribution, this study aids in understanding the psychological mechanism underlying consumers' CSR attribution and provides valuable implications.

The study examined the influence of small and medium enterprise (SME) owner-managers' managerial competencies on supply chain performance, the mediation role of information quality on the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship, the mediating role of information quality on the information sharing and supply chain performance relationship and the mediating role of both information sharing and information quality on SME owner-managers' managerial competences and supply chain performance relationship.

Data were collected from SME agro-processing firms. The determined sample size for the agro-processing firms was 200, while an effective sample size of 177 was obtained. The Covariance Structural Equation Modelling software was used to obtain results on the influence of SME owner-managers' managerial competencies on supply chain performance, the mediation role of information quality on the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship, the mediating role of information quality on the information sharing and supply chain performance relationship and the mediating role of both information sharing and information quality on SME owner-managers' managerial competences and supply chain performance relationship.

Findings indicated that a positive significant influence of SME owner-managers' managerial competencies on supply chain performance and the presence of partial mediation effects when the mediating role of information quality in the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship and the information sharing and supply chain performance relationship is tested. Also, a partial mediating role of information sharing and information quality is obtained in the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance relationship.

The study mainly focused on SME agro-processing firms eliminating other SME manufacturing firms. Also, the research employed a wholistic approach when studying the SME agro-processing firms without focusing on how SME owner-managers' managerial competencies would affect information sharing, information quality and supply chain performance based on the market type (local or foreign) and the source of raw materials (local or foreign) and the impact of information sharing on information quality hasn't been given significant attention in the existing literature.

The research focused on the mediation role of quality of information shared by SME owner-managers in the relationship between information sharing and supply chain performance, the mediating role of information quality in the SME owner-managers' managerial competencies and supply chain performance and the mediating role of both SME owner-manager's information sharing and quality of information shared in the relationship between SME owner-managers' managerial competences and supply chain performance. These mediation effects haven't been given significant attention in previous research. Further, while information sharing and information quality have been studied, they have been studied at a supply chain level, not at a managerial level.