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This study sought to examine how women founders navigate gender and cultural influences in constructing network ties in Jordan.

In-depth interviews document the experiences of 14 women founders operating digital technology-based businesses in Amman, Jordan.

Gender homogenous ties were perceived to be of diminished quality, limiting the ability of the women founders to acquire resources while risking isolation from diverse networks. Formal professional, male-centric ties were perceived to offer more business impact due to the applicability and usefulness of information. Formal communication, use of intermediaries and industry events were used to develop network ties. These approaches enable founders to respect gendered collectivist norms, such as adhering to family members’ expectations about occupational roles, while meeting new business associates. The strength of network ties emerged as a continuum with strong, weak and midpoint ties. Midpoint ties offered valued encouragement and emotional support but were perceived to be less effective and provided fewer resources compared to strong network ties.

Mechanisms of gender inequality are evidenced in how gender, culture and social networks operate in relation to each other. Perceptions reflect culturally situated, within-group stereotypes, informing how women founders discount other women’s knowledge and experience.

This article aims to understand the challenges and key takeaways of implementing total quality management (TQM) in a virtual organisation.

An interventionist research (IVR) methodology combined with a qualitative critical event analysis was used to evaluate the challenges and concerns faced during the company’s adoption of TQM and understand the roles of the key players involved.

Standard process tools such as desktop procedures (DTP), focused teams, and service-level agreements (SLAs) were fundamental to implementing TQM in the company. These processes require the right leaders, but external agents may also be influential, acting as accelerators of change in adopting and using management practices in small companies. Indeed, the researcher acted as a problem solver, bringing innovative solutions to the firm using a hands-on iterative approach.

This research underscores the importance of critical success factors (CSF), such as employee engagement, training, and project management tools. These factors are not just important but crucial for the success of TQM in organisations seeking to adopt the industry’s best practices.

This study, conducted as a virtual IVR for TQM implementation, provides novel insights for practitioners and academics. It elucidates the pivotal role of some quality management tools in the journey towards TQM and the role of both internal and external critical players in the process, particularly in small virtual organisations based on innovative business models.

This paper evaluates intellectual capital (IC) within entrepreneurial environments, towards conceptualising the sequential role of education, its institutions in practice, and wider ecosystems. Well-established attributes of entrepreneurialism, such as idea generation, problem-solving, market expertise and risk awareness are commensurate to that of expected IC practices within enterprising organisations. However, scarce research has been undertaken concerning the confronting of IC practices and activities across collaborative, and sequential, multistakeholder partnerships and activities. This includes alignment to distinct stages of developmental entrepreneurialism inclusive of education and ecosystem support: knowledge exchange and training; mentoring the emergence of the start-up; strategically timing scale-ups; and continued navigation within networks while enduring change.

An integrative review of the relationship between IC, entrepreneurs and new ventures is undertaken to evaluate developmental IC practices as per this paper’s highlighted sequential stages, within entrepreneurial environments and organisational contexts.

Significant roles and responsibilities are evident among collaborative sectors, benefitting the entrepreneurial process and heightening the importance and emergence of IC within entrepreneurial environments. Exposure to enterprise-specific education and support emphasises the developmental human capital process of progressing and protecting ideas and ventures. Latterly, ecosystem engagement leads to consistent intrapreneurialism amongst employees and new venture partners, influencing structured IC systems and enterprising cultures and relational aspects of responsive branding of commercial activity and increased market agility.

Through presenting an attribute-based framework, this paper conceptualises sequential multistakeholder intervention of IC practices and organisational considerations within institutions, as well as guiding the developmental role of education in emboldening individuals and organisations through building IC and evidencing entrepreneurial thinking.

Worldwide challenges impose public organizations to rethink their processes and satisfactorily meet citizens’ needs. Process mining (PM) techniques enable organizations to objectively analyse and improve their processes, by providing higher process transparency and efficiency. However, extant literature on PM applications in the public sector reveals there is still limited evidence on the opportunities and challenges perceived from PM introduction in the public sector, and on PM potential to enhance public sector digital transformation: this study aims to fill these gaps.

Based on Business Process Management and digital innovation fields of research, we administered a questionnaire to a sample of Italian civil servants working in different public organizations to investigate their perceptions of PM opportunities and challenges and the extent to which it can support public sector digital transformation. A three-level analysis was conducted to inspect findings with different levels of granularity, and results were analysed both descriptively and quantitatively.

We found a positive attitude towards PM introduction in the public sector, and perceived opportunities and challenges related to both the technical and the social systems. The triangulation between close-ended and open-ended questions suggests that PM could be the missing link between public sector digitalization and digital transformation. These findings can be used by policymakers to develop the best strategies to introduce PM into public organizations and support its adoption, and by researchers to further explore PM role in public sector digital transformation.

Despite PM claiming to push digital transformation, it is not clear if it is also true for public sector organizations. This paper addresses this gap and it is among the first attempts to explore PM from civil servants’ viewpoint to investigate their perceptions of PM opportunities and challenges, as well as the variables that influence these perceptions.

The paper positions social and technological innovation as pivotal counterforces to conservative resistance against change, particularly in light of the recurrent economic and technological upheavals characterizing the present shape of capitalism.

The research adopts a qualitative methodology, rooted in a comparative case study approach, offering a critical retrospective analysis of societal disruptions and transformations. Central to this methodological framework is the construct of sensemaking, which is characterized as the process by which collective entities retrospectively develop plausible narratives that rationalize their experiences. The approach is informed by the dynamics of socio-ecological systems, which are understood to undergo cyclical phases of growth, stabilization, collapse, and regeneration.

The study shows evidence that resilience and adaptability are more authentically gauged by socio-technological responses to cyclical disruptions and recoveries. It delineates sensemaking as a crucial socioecological mechanism through which elicitation emerges and societies and organizations navigate these cycles, forging shared narratives from collective experiences that are driven by plausibility rather than mere accuracy.

The research calls for the development of policies that synthesize disruptive innovations with strategies for social cohesion. Such policies must ensure the protection of the socioeconomic texture from implicit structural precariousness arising from innovation. The ability to integrate and institutionalize change is emphasized as crucial, demanding a synergy between innovative creativity, new normative frameworks, and the preservation of fundamental societal values.

The paper challenges reductionist technological interpretations of societal changes, advocating for a holistic perspective that accounts for the redistributive and elicitation roles as vital to the evolution of socio-economic systems. The value of this research lies in its comprehensive framing of these transformations, underscoring the importance of a multi-faceted understanding in the effective management of socioeconomic change.

The aim of this paper is to identify the main challenges and limitations of current business process management (BPM) development directions noticed by researchers, as well as to define the areas of the main BPM paradigm shifts necessary for the BPM of tomorrow to meet the challenges posed by Industry 4.0 and the emerging Industry 5.0. This is extremely important from the perspective of eliminating the existing broadening gap between the considerations of academic researchers and the needs of business itself.

A systematic literature review was conducted on the basis of the resources of two digital databases: Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS. Based on the PRISMA protocol, the authors selected 29 papers published in the last decade that diagnosed the challenges and limitations of modern BPM and contained recommendations for its future development. The content of the articles was analyzed within four BPM core areas.

The authors of the selected articles most commonly point to the areas of organization (21 articles) and methods and information technology (IT) (22 articles) in the context of the challenges and limitations of current BPM and the directions of recommended future BPM development. This points to the prevalence among researchers of the perspective of Industry 4.0 – or focus on technological solutions and raising process efficiency, with the full exclusion or only the partial signalization of the influence of implementing new technologies on the stakeholders and in particular – employees, their roles and competencies – the key aspects of Industry 5.0.

The proposal of BPM future development directions requires the extension of the BPM paradigm, taking into account its holistic nature, especially unpredictable, knowledge-intensive business processes requiring dynamic management, the need to integrate BPM with knowledge management (KM) and the requirements of Industry 5.0 in terms of organizational culture. The limitation is that the study is based on only two databases: WoS and SCOPUS and that the search has been narrowed down to publications in English only.

The proposal of BPM future development directions also requires the extension of the BPM paradigm, taking into account the specific challenges and limitations that managers encounter on a daily basis. The presented summaries of the challenges and limitations resulting from the literature review are accompanied by recommendations that are primarily dedicated to practitioners.

The article indicates the area people and culture as one of the four core areas of BPM. It emphasizes the necessity to account to a greater degree for the influence of people, their knowledge, experience and engagement, as well as formal and informal communication, without which it is impossible to use the creativity, innovativeness and dynamism of the individual and the communities to create value in the course of business process execution.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first systematic review of the literature on the limitations of modern BPM and its future in the context of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0.

Our study draws on gender role congruity theory to theorize and test an integrative conceptual model outlining how motives for entrepreneurial action explain the relationship between female entrepreneurship and innovation in nascent ventures.

To test our hypotheses, we employed structural equation modeling (SEM) in a sample of early-stage entrepreneurs (N = 533).

We found a positive relationship between nascent female entrepreneurs and innovation, and that this relationship is mediated by motives for recognition, respect, and autonomy.

By revealing a positive relationship between female entrepreneurship and innovation, our work provides a complementary perspective to the literature, which suggests that there are limits to innovation potential for female entrepreneurs. Further, we find that this relationship is explained by motives for recognition, respect, and autonomy, but not financial security. Finally, most empirical research focuses on the innovative outputs of established new ventures, while our work leverages a sample of early-stage entrepreneurs.

This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

The building sector is vital to a nation’s economy, as it has a major influence on economic activity and growth, job creations and the advancement of infrastructure. Intricate challenges that are inherent in crises such as the COVID-19 outbreak lead to material scarcities, project delays, labor shortages, escalated expenses, funding challenges, regulatory obstacles and dwindling investment funds, all of which culminate in costs that are in excess of those budgeted. While numerous studies have explored the ramifications of COVID-19 on project budgets, there is little, if any, data available on forecasting the magnitude of this impact.

This investigation seeks to bridge this knowledge deficiency by devising a predictive tool grounded in an ordinal logistic regression method. An online survey was designed and disseminated to gauge the views of construction field experts about the diverse contributors to excessive costs during the viral outbreak, and a predictive tool, crafted from the survey participants’ feedback.

Findings showed that smaller-scale enterprises and contractor-centric establishments faced greater adversities than medium-to-large ones and consultancy-or-owner-type entities.

The insights from this research shed light on the amplified risk of higher project costs amid health crises or analogous events, underlining the imperative need for fortified risk management approaches to bolster project outcomes. By factoring in demographics, this research offers policymakers a refined lens through which to customize interventions and promote balanced and enduring advancement in the construction industry.