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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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how an adequate mix of technological, organisational and managerial tools might support Open Innovation (OI) processes achieved by contests in the food sector.

The methodology of this paper is exploratory in nature. Data have been gathered about the 140 innovation contests launched by the best global food brands (2013 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands) over the last decade.

The research highlights the main changes that have occurred over the last decade, showing that the choice of platform type for contest launches is often neglected or considered as an ancillary element. Indeed, it is a choice that embeds another set of technological, organisational and managerial tools that strongly influence the collaborative behaviour (and the participation itself) of partners throughout the innovation process.

Companies investigated in this paper consist exclusively of top brands in the sector. Future research should strive to obtain larger samples, develop a set of fine-grained hypotheses, and test them by using appropriate statistical techniques.

This paper fills an inexplicable gap in academic literature due to the fact that food companies are those that mainly use contests in order to implement OI but they are scarcely researched regarding this issue.

This study aims to develop a categorization framework for knowledge management systems in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Framework dimensions have been identified as company knowledge domain (organization, marketing and technology) and company innovation behaviour (high and low).

The framework is derived by means of a qualitative approach based on a set of 20 case studies. The cases regard Italian SMEs in the food sector.

Data seem to suggest that knowledge domain and innovation behaviour permit significant distinctions between different kinds of knowledge management systems (KMSs). The features of these KMSs as configurations of technical, organizational and managerial tools are described in this paper with reference to the main knowledge process they are intended to support.

The research provides a variety of insights into new ways of conceptualizing KMSs. Moreover, the paper provides some practical examples of successful implementation of KMSs in SMEs.

Traditionally, benchmarking has been described as a practice that promotes imitation. However, according to a more recent approach, this paper suggests that benchmarking, looking outside the firm boundaries and enabling comparison with others, in terms of both practices and performances, enable the process of acquiring external explicit and tacit knowledge. Such newly acquired knowledge, once integrated with previous internal knowledge of the firm, creates new knowledge that may give rise to improvements and innovations. In order to study the innovative power of benchmarking, this paper presents a three‐year research undertaken in the maintenance‐services sector that is becoming more and more global and competitive. A model that integrates benchmarking, knowledge management and innovation is presented as the main result of the research.

This paper aims to study the role of ideology in brand strategy with reference to large‐scale food retailing. By means of a thorough case study investigation of highly ideology‐focused food retailer Eataly, the paper aims to enrich existing theory on retailer branding. The various elements of Eataly's brand have been studied in order to identify how they enact the ideology for which the retailer stands. This topic is particularly relevant in a context where consumers appear increasingly committed to social responsibility and business ethics. So the final goal of the paper is to identify ideology‐focused brand choices that lead to a preference towards the retailer.

In order to address this paper's research aim, a well known framework developed by Esbjerg and Bech‐Larsen is adopted to conceptualize the retail brand. Case study methodology is applied.

This paper provides both research‐related and practical contributions. From a research perspective, it provides empirical evidence on the role of ideology in large‐scale food retailing, a field which has been traditionally neglected in the ideology debate. From a practical perspective, it provides a contribution to retailers and brand managers. Three main lessons can be mentioned. First, a company's ideology should be pervasively applied to each aspect of a brand and it seems to be primarily situated within tangible and physical attributes, rather than within symbolic features, at least in the case investigated. Second, an explicit ideology is not exempt from risks. Third, ideology can be subject to multiple interpretations that may give rise to unintended consequences.

This study tries to attenuate the reliability issues that are inherent in qualitative research by interviewing multiple informants with different positions inside the company. Triangulation using different types of data sources and systematic data analysis was also employed.

The paper raises the importance of ideology in large‐scale food retailing. It adopts the Esbjerg and Bech‐Larsen framework and introduces the dimension of ideology as a lens through which each aspect of a brand can be interpreted. Moreover, it suggests that a brand's functional attributes play more of a leading role in transmitting ideology than symbolic features, which is somewhat counterintuitive.

To present an alternative brand strategy for food retail using a different set of values to supermarket chains.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and recommendation.

Can an ideology that excludes certain products but demands commitment from all consumers make money through its holistic interpretation of the products its customers need? Can food retailers sell good food at fair prices? This review identifies the lack of published research into the ideology of food retailing. It describes a new qualitative methodology that identifies functional and symbolic aspects of the processes and products of the retailer. It proceeds by structured interview and by document analysis to outline the most important factors driving retail success in this market niche, including an elaborate structure of customer feedback. The case study of Eataly is analyzed to include its historical origins in the Slow Food movement, its ideology (or even philosophy), and consumer criticism of its apparent ideological compromises.

A successful food retailer applies its ideology to all the objective aspects of its brands and keeps close to its customers.

An ideology has to be closely matched to commercial decisions if an ethical retailer is to have a significant impact on the food market.

This review shows that small food retailers can develop a different retail model to large supermarket chains and prosper. Its methodology can be applied more widely in the food retail industry, as an ideological interpretation of branding.

In many developing and developed countries, small/medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a very important part of the economy and are commonly referred to as the lifeblood of the economy. SMEs in Nigeria have contributed around 48% of the national gross domestic product (GDP) in recent times and account for about 17.4 million jobs. Considering how much they contribute to national economies, it is expedient to seek ways in which they can derive value from innovative technologies to further strengthen their position. Web 2.0 technologies and associated social media applications such as social network sites, microblogging, weblogs and similar technologies are known to improve communication and collaboration among employees and customers. SMEs typically have a small budget for branding, advertising and corporate communication. Consequently, social media provides a ready and inexpensive tool that can be used to communicate with customers and for internal communication and collaboration. Several studies in the area of diffusion of innovations to SMEs argue that they do not usually use adopted technologies to its full potential and as such do not add as much value to the business. Extant research on corporate communication using social media focuses on large organizations’ adoption and use of the technology with little focus on SMEs. This contribution aims to fill this gap by considering how SMEs in Nigeria adopt and use social media to improve corporate communication.

This study aims at exploring how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can implement a more open and co-creational business model by actively collaborating with startups.

Because of the novelty of the SME–startup collaboration phenomenon and to the depth of the investigation required to grasp the mechanisms and logic of an open and co-creational business model, a single-case study has been performed related to investigating a collaboration between an SME and a startup.

The authors provide detailed empirical evidence on how SMEs may structure a “systematic” approach to design and execute an open business model enabled by startup collaboration. Moreover, this study suggests that the business model innovation process represents a necessary forerunner of an open business model. Finally, the authors contend that research on open business models should entail a broader perspective beyond the innovation process, to include business model validation through testing approaches like the lean startup.

This study takes as the locus of investigation the original perspective of the external partner of a focal firm willing to innovate. This study offers a unique contribution because, to date, few studies adopted such view within a relevant and under-remarked empirical setting linking SMEs and innovative startups.

The purpose of this article is to develop a model to assess entrepreneurial ecosystems. Specifically, the authors examine how to measure value creation and value capture mechanisms from a single participant's perspective and at the ecosystem level through a strategic value network-based approach.

Building on extant research on strategic networks, value networks and business models and leveraging a qualitative survey, the authors develop and test an assessment tool to measure value creation and capture within the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The authors show that value-based measures on entrepreneurial ecosystems provide a systemic approach to assess how ecosystems operate, which can guide policymakers, entrepreneurs and all the other stakeholders of entrepreneurial ecosystems in their strategic decision-making process.

The authors provide an original model grounded in the strategic management and entrepreneurship literature for entrepreneurial ecosystems' assessment as few studies have done before. Besides, the authors provide an illustrative attempt to show how to empirically apply the original model by assessing the San Francisco Bay Area's entrepreneurial ecosystem.