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Réal Plourde helped to oil the Couche-Tard/Circle K machine for Alain Bouchard, speeding up the pace of acquisitions and smoothing out the integration of newly acquired chains. As an engineer and MBA graduate with extensive international experience, he brought considerable added value to Alain Bouchard's team. Among other things, he helped to train many of the organization's senior executives, including the current CEO, Brian Hannasch, who joined the company in 2001, working closely with Réal Plourde for nearly a decade before replacing him as Head of Operations in 2011 and ultimately taking over from Alain Bouchard as CEO in 2014.

Although officially retired for some years now, Réal Plourde continues to sit on the boards of several organizations. He also chairs the board of an engineering firm employing more than 2,000 engineers. His Foundation has received several awards for its social and community contributions.

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.

Creating organisational resilience and creating a positive social impact is becoming a condition for sustainable business development. The adoption of digital technologies requires specific leadership characteristics to resolve complex societal challenges. The purpose of the research is to identify the critical strategic leadership characteristics for developing organisational resilience while creating social- and financial value. There is a research gap in strategic leadership, digital technologies, social impact, and organisational resilience studies which will be addressed in this research. The methodology embeds a critical literature review, complemented by bibliometric analysis. The adoption of digital technology is seen to be a key driver in the societal question and a tool to boost organisational resilience. Sensing, seizing, and driving digital adoption agenda as well as digital adoption are critical and require unique leadership characteristics where contextual ambidexterity was key to the strategic leader when building organisational resilience and creating social- and financial value. The research results can be used for identifying which characteristics strategic leaders must develop for digital technology adaptation to generate both a profit and positive social impact while boosting organisational resilience.

The purpose of this study is to highlight how people acting as Enduring Power of Attorney (EPoA) abuse their privilege in relation to real estate transactions through analysis of five court cases. This study thereby provides insight into how and why adult children cross the line into the realm of misconduct.

The approach involved a review of various court proceedings relating to elder financial abuse, and the synthesis of the important facts and judgements made that constitute unconscionable conduct, undue influence and passive acceptance of benefit. The cases selected focus on real estate transactions.

The research revealed some key commonalities and that property and living arrangements are the issues highly contested in courts for small estates.

The case review provides some critical findings that are valuable for wealth management professionals or managing an ageing person’s care and living arrangements. It provides practical insights for the importance of independent legal and financial advice when entering real estate transactions. The findings also inform real estate agent practice in helping to reduce elder financial abuse through robust checks if an Attorney is acting on behalf of a Principal. The authors also support improving EPoA guidance and professionalization to assist Attorney’s to carry out their duties with appropriate care.

A review of cases relating to EPoA in relation to real estate is novel and makes an important contribution to developing resources to educate Attorney’s and financial service professionals, including real estate agents.

The research aim of this article is to generate novel insights into how public sector organizations (PSOs) strategically communicate with the public about critical issues on social media. To this end, the study explores the public's experiences of the Swedish Police's sense of safety communication on Instagram in the third largest city in Sweden, where the lack of a sense of public safety is a main societal challenge.

The research was designed as a case study employing photo-elicitation interviews as a method to collect the empirical material. A phenomenography approach was used to analyze public experiences of the Swedish Police's Instagram communication in Malmö, Sweden.

Findings show that the police's strategic communication of safety on Instagram is experienced along the dimensions of a sense of protection, a sense of proximity and a sense of ambiguity. Taken together, these dimensions broaden and develop the knowledge of what communicating a sense of safety in the public sphere entails.

This study adds to previous research on strategic communication in public sector organizations by demonstrating what strategic communication accomplishes at the receiving end outside of the organization.

Virtual Reality (VR) based training is an efficient and promising digital tool. In the construction industry, studies have been conducted on the realisation of VR scenarios for construction operations, but the challenges lie in procedural scenario creation based on the knowledge and digital data of the construction project. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

A new system and interface allowing an automatic generation of a VR scenario for operating procedure (OP) based on 4D Building Information Modelling (BIM) and tasks authoring by the domain experts are presented. The first process, Automatic Scenario Generation, generates assembly tasks based on the BIM metadata. The second process, Expert Scene and Scenario Authoring, allows adding tasks that cannot be modeled in the BIM OP.

With the 4D BIM methodology, the 3D model of building as well as the 3D OPs contain a time dimension representing the construction phases or planning. The evolution in time of the construction site and the tools and procedures adapted to each construction project must be integrated in the VR simulations. Moreover, domain experts should have control over the scenario and should be able to author tasks assigned to the operator in training.

A Unified Modeling Language based framework allows the reuse of BIM metadata to create the scene, VR interactions and the assembly procedure; the assembly procedure is embedded in the virtual environment considering the time (4D) in the construction of the building and is used as a training scenario for the operator; and the training scenario can be refined by adding operational knowledge, such as quality.

The Recast Energy Efficiency Directive 2023 has defined the concept of “split incentive,” also known as “tenant-owner dilemma.” This dilemma refers to the situation where neither landlords nor tenants have incentives to invest in energy efficiency upgrades. Although the Energy Efficiency Directive calls Member States to overcome legal barriers to remove split incentives and to encourage retrofits, the list of possible measures is too vague. This paper aims to discuss tenancy law measures designed to increase the energy efficiency of residential housing and to detect which Member States have already addressed this phenomenon.

This paper analyses, from a civil legal perspective, the possible private law barriers arising from the tenant-owner dilemma when performing energy efficiency works in selected countries and proposes legal reforms in tenancy law and related policies to overcome them. To do so, this paper follows a legal-dogmatic and comparative law methodology.

This paper concludes that some tenancy law provisions, such as the possibility to increase the rent after energy efficiency renovations and long-term leases, may challenge the tenant-owner dilemma in private rented markets, thus promoting renovations and retrofitting for energy efficiency purposes. It also proposes other policies intended to increase parties’ willingness to undertake works.

More research on the economic and legal efficiency to regulate some of the civil law measures to challenge the tenant-owner dilemma should be necessary.

The civil law measures included in this paper may help national policymakers meet the energy efficiency targets, according to what is established in the Recast Energy Efficiency Directive 2023.

Based on the economic theory of the tenant-owner dilemma, this paper investigates the elements of tenancy law that may contribute to less energy-efficient homes, proposing policies for those countries interested in addressing the energy-efficiency challenge from a private law point of view.