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Argues that currently many businesses are looking to reduce the environmental impact of their activities or products but sadly the results are often disappointing. Sustainable development remains elusive. The future clearly demands something different ‐ we need solution focused products that produce an E‐plus effect. These will increasingly dominate future markets and provide the key to a competitive edge. The challenges, and barriers, are, however, likely to be significant ‐ concurrently the environmental lobby is changing tactics, moving from problem/blame campaigning to preventive/solutions campaigning. Campaigners rightly point to the earth bank balance as continually overdrawn and unhealthy, with life support systems threatened and biodiversity declining. No one appears to re‐invest in this global bank balance. Withdrawals are easy, but investing is not so easy. With the E‐plus concept creativity and innovation will require different patterns of thinking from the people that have hitherto used their talent to create existing new products and markets or to survive hard times. Managers need not only promote a climate of innovation and creativity but do so in directions that are fundamentally different. Business talent and enterprise is poised to become a major player as a social force. The talent is out there and some of the new innovative thinking patterns are explained in this article through the description of simple examples from across Europe.

Market forces are often unable to deal with environmental problems due to the inability of the economic system to internalise environmental costs. Telecommunications around the world are “service” companies that are considered to have little impact on the natural environment ‐ and as such were excluded from participation in EMAS. However, new research into European and Asian telecommunications has revealed extensive environmental impact through consumption of considerable quantities of the global resources. Some telecoms use 1 per cent of their nation’s electricity, consume 1 per cent of national paper or 1 per cent of national GDP. But the rate of change in this sector is greater than any other business sector, and telecoms are now reducing their environmental impact as a result of technical developments, the global market forces of liberalisation, privatisation and competition. The global impact of telecommunications developments on travel and lifestyles is also poised to have a significant positive effect on the environment, through changes in working practices as well as impacting on both indoor and outdoor leisure activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the customer partnering behavior dimensions – operational information exchange, planning, sharing of benefits and burdens, and extendedness – influence goal achievement and goal exceedance at the interface between customer firms and their logistics service providers.

This research develops a conceptual model of relationships between the customer partnering dimensions and logistics outsourcing performance (goal achievement and goal exceedance). The model is then tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that sharing of benefits and burdens has no significant effect on performance, while the other partnering dimensions positively influence goal achievement and goal exceedance. Amongst these partnering dimensions, extendedness demonstrates the strongest effect on both performance dimensions. Furthermore, operational information exchange primarily influences goal exceedance, while planning primarily impacts goal achievement.

The paper extends the extant logistics outsourcing literature by examining the effects of established customer partnering dimensions on performance.

An efficient supplier management is of central importance for successful supply chain management. It begins with the identification of potential suppliers and leads to the controlling of the supplier‐buyer‐connection. This paper aims to design a new supplier‐rating system that fits the practical needs of supplier rating and supports many other steps of the suppliers management process.

An empirical study on supplier rating among 193 industrial companies revealed that the existing methods for supplier rating do not satisfy the needs in practice. This paper describes a multivariate analysis tool for managing a pool of engaged or future suppliers. A constructed ideal supplier serves as a reference to compare all suppliers by means of multivariate analysis methods. A case study illustrates the application of the tool.

The empirical study found out new needs for supplier‐rating methods such as graphical representation of the suppliers. The designed supplier‐rating system uses principal component analysis to create a classification and ranking of the potential suppliers by means of ellipsoid clusters. If this new supplier‐rating system is applied repeatedly, a dynamic observation of the suppliers is guaranteed, always corresponding to real market conditions.

The new system has to run computerized and can be used for pre‐qualification, selection and controlling of suppliers. It is easy to handle and practicable without using manual criteria‐weighting.

The paper describes the method and the results of a pilot‐study on recreational effects of holidays. The objective of the study was to get first insights in the psychological process of recreation during holidays: E.g. How can recreation be measured? What kind of changes in the emotional state do occur during long term recreational processes? Do people perceive themselves as «recreated» during or after a holiday? A sample of 59 German teachers were asked to fill in psychological questionnaires before, during and after their summer holiday 1992. The questionnaires used measured different dimensions of personal condition (mood), individual effects of work load, and some data concerning organisational and motivational aspects of the holiday trip as well as sociodemographic data.

This paper aims to illustrate how open innovation is implemented in practice in a large multinational corporation and to discuss how masculine discourses of rational control and competition are reinforced during such a process.

An exploratory single case study approach has been employed. Qualitative empirical data (interviews and documents) are derived from a four year longitudinal research project on open and distributed innovation processes in the automotive industry.

Masculinity enters the discourse of open innovation through prescribed classical management ideals in line with auditing and bureaucratisation. The paper illustrates how these masculine discourses are reproduced rather than challenged by open innovation. It also highlights how the preoccupation with control and conquest tends to silence alternative (feminine) discourses which could otherwise enrich the radical and creative features of the open innovation paradigm.

The paper is suggesting that the potential disruptive force in the open innovation paradigm tends to be watered down when appropriated by classical managerial ideals. It shows how difficult it is for managers to incorporate alternative (feminine) discourses when acting within a strong masculine hegemony.

The open innovation paradigm leans on aspects such as “openness”, “collaboration”, “creativity” and “intuition” – much in line with feminine discursive connotations. But when masculine norms govern the company setting, these alternative modes of organising tend to be either marginalised or appropriated and transformed in ways that ensure they are compatible with discourses and practices of masculinity.

This study provides insights into how discourses of masculinity play out and manifest themselves in the management of the firm. By doing so, it challenges the underlying and often uncritical assumptions of open innovation's disruptive force on contemporary managerial practice.

The purpose of this study is to explore if and how informal governance mechanisms are used for coordinating actors of digitalized supply networks.

A multiple case study analysis of ten German firms in digitalized supply networks is conducted. Data are collected through semi-structured expert interviews with interviewees having notable years of professional experience in purchasing or sales.

This research shows that reduced personal contacts in digitalized supply networks decrease the ability to coordinate with informal governance mechanisms. However, the need for informal governance in digitalized supply networks remains when facing supply network disruptions or building new business relationships.

This is the first study examining the role of informal governance mechanisms in digitalized supply networks. Theoretical and practical insights on the changing abilities and needs to use informal governance after the digital transformation are given.

J.D.C. Hemsley, a Director of OMI International Corporation's manufacturing and marketing business in the UK, has been elected President of The Institute of Metal Finishing for a two‐year term commencing July 1984.

Nowadays, innovation appears as one of the main driving forces of organisational success. Despite the above fact, its impact on the propensity of an organisation to develop and sustain a competitive advantage has not yet received sufficient empirical investigation. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the existing empirical literature by focusing on the antecedents of innovation and its impact on competitive advantage. It proposes a newly developed conceptual framework that adopts a three-step approach, highlighting areas that have rarely been simultaneously examined before.

The examination of the proposed conceptual framework was performed with the use of a newly developed structured questionnaire that was distributed to a group of Greek manufacturing companies. The questionnaire has been successfully completed by chief executive officers (CEOs) from 189 different companies. CEOs were used as key respondents due to their knowledge and experience. The reliability and the validity of the questionnaire were thoroughly examined. Empirical data were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique. The study is empirical (based on primary data), explanatory (examines cause and effect relationships), deductive (tests research hypotheses) and quantitative (includes the analysis of quantitative data collected with the use of a structured questionnaire).

Results indicate that knowledge management, intellectual capital, organisational capabilities and organisational culture have significant direct and indirect effects on innovation, underlining the importance of their simultaneous enhancement. Finally, the positive effect of innovation on the creation of competitive advantages is empirically validated, bridging the gap in the relevant literature and offering avenues for additional future research.

The causal relationship between innovation and competitive advantage, despite its significant theoretical support, has not been empirically validated. The present paper aspires to bridge this gap, investigating the impact of innovation on the development of competitive advantages. Moreover, the present study adopts a multidimensional approach that has never been explored in the existing innovation literature, making the examination of the proposed conceptual framework an interesting research topic.