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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of consumer-brand engagement and brand experience on behavioural intentions (i.e. intent to re-purchase, willingness to accept brand extension, willingness to pay a premium price) in relation to food brands.

The authors propose a conceptual model comprising five latent variables and 26 manifest variables. A questionnaire with questions relating to pasta and coffee was given to an Italian consumer sample (n=400). The model was tested using structural equation modelling of the resulting data to examine the research hypotheses.

The empirical study confirms the predictive role of the two selected drivers of brand value. Both consumer-brand engagement and brand experience influenced behavioural intentions, but these brand constructs had different roles in the two product categories examined in the study, pasta and coffee.

This study does have limitations. First, the generalisability of the findings should be considered. The study refers to only two product categories in a specific country. It would be interesting to investigate the issue of food brand engagement and brand experience in different countries, and to compare the results. Furthermore, it would be valuable to investigate the impact of brand engagement and brand experience in other product categories.

The results have an important implication for marketing managers: they should develop long-term and strong brand relationships. Such consumer engagement and/or experiential actions can be key competitive advantages for food companies.

The study provides empirical support for the effect of consumer-brand engagement and brand experience on consumers’ behavioural intentions in the food industry.

Building upon multiple theories (i.e. agency, signalling and human capital), this paper aims to explore the effects of directors’ education on audit fees and to assess the mediating role of audit committee (AC).

The authors use an econometric analysis of Italian-listed non-financial firms during the period 2012–2015 using single-mediator models through ordinary least squares and logit regressions. Moreover, the authors apply the path analysis with the bootstrap method to test the mediating effect.

Findings show that the directors’ level of education improves audit fees. Additionally, the presence of an AC and the financial expertise of its members mediate this relationship.

By offering insights into the implications for audit pricing of the board and AC human capital, the paper helps regulators and policy-makers to understand which characteristic of such governance bodies improves auditing quality and the provision of better financial reporting.

The study uses a unique data set hand-collected from multiple sources and advances the auditing literature by shedding light on the reasons behind the influence of directors’ characteristics on audit fees and on the role played by the AC.

This study aims to analyze the impact of event experience on event satisfaction and intentions to return and recommend the destination.

Relationships among constructs were tested on data gathered from 542 tourists during the America's Cup World Series held in South Italy in April 2013 by using a structural equation modeling approach. Moreover, a multigroup analysis was developed to test the possible moderator factors.

The results revealed that event experience and event satisfaction had positive impacts on the intentions to recommend and return to the host destination. Moreover, nationality, gender and trip motivation emerged as important moderating factors in the relationships among the latent constructs.

The findings of this paper enrich the existing literature and help tourism destination marketers and managers consider the triggering factors of a satisfying mega-sports event for the host destination and the marketing power of the on-site experience.

Practitioners should draw on the insights provided by this study to design destination strategies, particularly by paying attention to how an event experience causes an attendee to return to and recommend the host destination.

This study enriches the existing event literature in several ways. First, it emphasizes the importance of the event experience to the satisfaction level and willingness to return and recommend the host destination for a vacation, supporting the link between an event and its destination. Second, it provides a moderating analysis that offers new insights for marketing the event experience. It offers a multilevel model of mega-event tourism legacy, which opens up new avenues of research. Third, complementing the consumer-based analysis, this research includes the trend of visits (after 2013 to the present) to examine how a mega-sport event has brought about more postevent visits.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept of innovative performances for science parks as a framework for understanding how effectively human and structural capital (i.e. intellectual assets) are leveraged. The key point is fostering main determinants to investigate and/or make sense of key management activities/factors shaping the evolution and performance of knowledge creating processes.

The study was based on the quantitative and qualitative values, for the period 2000-2011, gathered from a sample of 901 public and private organizations located in the 21 European Union (EU) countries. With regard to the methodology, the hypothesis testing first required an analysis of the correlations between the investigation variables, and then the use of regression analysis to study the relationships between the innovative performance of the research institutions, and the financial, organizational and knowledge characteristics of the science parks investigated.

The empirical research shows that: the allocation of public resources does not influence most of the selected indicators of performance, with the exception of the negative effect seen for the number of patents; the resources provided by venture capitalists have a positive effect on all of the indicators of performance of the science park; the science parks of greater dimensions have better performances; the positive impact of the systemic relationships seems to have an effect that is limited to the increase in the number of contracts stipulated with industry; the number of publications produced by researchers of the science parks seems to have an unclear effect on the innovative performance; and an increase in the number of researchers enhances the innovative performance of the science parks.

It seems appropriate to suggest some research lines that arise from the limits of this work. In particular, it should be stressed that there is a need to enlarge the sample investigated to embrace local innovation systems outside the EU, so as to provide further validation to the empirical results of this research.

This research has some practical implications of notable interest at the level of European policies. Interventions of public policies supporting innovation should not be concentrated on the increase of public funding but on increasing private capital investment.

This paper aims to extend literature about factors explaining the financial, organizational and cognitive performance of science parks in Europe.

As the complexity and scope of technical and social challenges increase, solutions to those challenges must be addressed by collaborative research and intellectual capital sharing efforts involving multiple organizations. One prominent type of research collaborative is the government-university-industry R&D partnership, an organizational form found in many countries. These collaboratives pose special management challenges, as they must combine the efforts of researchers coming from very different institutional and organizational cultures in order to capitalize their own intellectual capital. Many such partnerships have failed due to the inability to bridge these cultural gaps. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for establishing and managing these partnerships, using principles and constructs drawn from institutional theory, organizational learning, alliance theory, and innovation management.

The examples of the NASA Laboratories, which are incubating several companies, are analyzed to show how this framework can highlight key attributes of successful research collaboratives.

The recurring pattern from these diverse case studies shows that the presence of internal and external champions, appropriate technology, and patient risk capital make a difference in winning in a competitive environment. However, part of the same pattern perhaps is the lack of any identifiable recipes for success - critical factors appear to be situation specific.

In light of the findings from the seven case studies the authors presented, they recommend using a hybrid portfolio approach in assessing the success of technology transfer and commercialization efforts.

The study aims to assess the relative impact of intellectual capital (IC) as opposed to tangible assets on profitability and employee performance in hotels in Serbia before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The current study was undertaken in 2019, the year before COVID-19, and 2020, the year of COVID-19's major impact. This study utilizes the Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) as a measure of efficient use of IC. Financial data were collected from 163 hotels in Serbia. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that IC was a relevant factor for both profitability and employee performance before and during the COVID-19. However, the study reveals a negative moderating effect of tangible capital efficiency (TCE), meaning that with the increase of TCE, the relationship between IC and performance becomes weaker.

The main limitation of the study is rooted in VAIC's ability to fully incorporate all elements of IC, leaving the relational capital out.

To achieve better performance, hotel management should direct resources more towards IC and less toward tangible assets, which implies doing more with less.

The results indicate the importance of IC in a period of crisis for the industry and economy that are not recognized as knowledge intensive. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no other study has attempted to assess the relative contribution of tangible assets and IC before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organizations and their members operate in increasingly complex, dynamic and even disruptive environments, with risk and uncertainty being major challenges. To that effect, data, information, knowledge, and respective competences are increasingly instrumental in enabling and sustaining organizational intelligence that translates into resilience in the shorter and sustainable excellence in the longer term. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the artifacts and routines in a sustainable organizational excellence context.

An extensive literature review was used to develop the context of the paper, focusing on big data and organizational intelligence for enterprise excellence and resilience. In addition, a thematic literature review method was used to study the role and impacts of routines and artifacts in organizational change, policies, structure and performance.

Although many traditional management practices retain their validity, knowledge management must give a clearer view of the existing connection between firm-level competitive advantage in open economies flows and difficult-to-use knowledge assets. The proposed framework studies knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation as organizational phenomena opposed and mutually incompatible.

The paper presents a first attempt to study the linkages of organizational routines and artifacts as a cycle wherein knowledge acquisition and learning competencies form and enhance a firm’s organizational intelligence, leading to robust competitiveness and sustainable entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to investigate, inside the private sector of transport, a model for the diffusion of knowledge-sharing technologies with non-uniform internal influence that has been developed by Easingwood et al. (1983).

The authors performed an empirical evaluation of the performances of the model by Easingwood et al. (1983) by analyzing data gathered from almost 230 taxi drivers joining two of the biggest taxi brokers operating in the Southern Italian city of Naples.

Such an analysis reveals that the model by Easingwood et al. (1983) provides an excellent agreement with the empirical data and allows to obtain interesting predictions on the future evolution of the sector performances in terms of increasing use of knowledge-sharing technologies within the taxi drivers’ community of practice (CoP).

In particular, the authors show that a unique solution always exists, which is defined on the whole (positive) set of times and, in the long run, tends to a steady-state equilibrium. A first limit of the present research is certainly the use of a sample restricted to the taxi companies from only one city: future investigations should consider a larger sample by interviewing taxi companies from multiple regions as well. Another limit is that the model performed does not take into account all the factors influencing the diffusion of knowledge-sharing technologies within the CoP. Finally, the research design is not considering the impact of the diffusion of knowledge-sharing technologies on the customer relationship management.

The research shows the application of a valid model both for evaluating the diffusion of technologies for sharing knowledge within a CoP and for estimating its development trend. It represents the first original study in Italy that empirically investigates the diffusion of technological innovations for the knowledge management in an industry typically dominated by tacit codes of knowledge-sharing: the taxi companies.