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The aim of this paper is to theorize on and empirically extend the understanding of the adoption of codes of ethics within the context of family firms. The authors contend that in family firms the adoption of code of ethics is a process emerging from social interaction.

Through a multiple case study design the authors analyze family firms that have not yet adopted a code of ethics and untangle the process that could potentially lead to that choice.

The authors’ main finding suggests that the institutional context impacts on the adoption of codes of ethics. Furthermore, in first generation the adoption of codes of ethics is hindered by the presence of the founder and the existence of strong family ties. In subsequent generations as founder centrality is reduced the owning-family considers more the possibility to adopt such codes to preserve the family's reputation in the local community.

First multiple views also from external stakeholders could be added; second, an international perspective using cross-country cases could add more nuances on how cultural and institutional aspects shape the adoption of codes of ethics differently across national contexts.

The authors’ findings inform family business owners on the importance of adopting code of ethics to support the formalization of the family value system.

The authors advance the debate on codes of ethics in family firms by disentangling the process through which those codes may be adopted to institutionalize and formalize the family values, history and tradition.

The recent pandemic period (COVID-19), while negatively impacting many companies, has contributed to the growth and adoption of online platforms such as marketplaces and e-commerce. This environment has led many companies, which previously acted only through offline channels, to adopt new technologies and online channels and develop new e-commerce strategies. Small and micro enterprises are most vulnerable due to their limited resources and lack of capabilities. For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to unveil the e-commerce implementation capabilities that micro and small enterprises should build and the challenges they must face when managing an e-commerce strategy.

The authors adopted an inductive qualitative research design approach focused on multiple case studies. The firms operate in the food and beverage industry.

The findings identify several e-commerce implementation capabilities that micro and small enterprises operating in the food and beverage industry should build to manage e-commerce strategies. These are related to outsourcing management, multichannel management, time management, internal stock management and marketplace choice. Moreover, the paper identifies key e-commerce implementation challenges these firms must cope with. These regard distribution management, potential loss of control, fresh product management and lack of resources, time and capabilities.

This research shows that proper capacity management in the implementation of micro and small enterprises e-commerce strategies is critical to achieving efficient results and preventing challenges that threaten such strategies. The research offers guidelines and frameworks for micro and small enterprises to understand how to manage e-commerce and face its challenges.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their positioning among innovation policy measures. A growing number of companies have implemented initiatives to access external knowledge to increase their innovativeness, consistently with the open innovation paradigm. Competition-based approaches have received increasing attention by the private sector as a way to access external knowledge. However, despite their potential role as innovation policy measures, a limited attention has been devoted so far to investigate them from the policymakers’ perspective.

To this aim, a two-stage empirical analysis has been carried out to develop a taxonomy of competition-based approaches. The first stage leveraged a multiple case study methodology including a sample of 20 competition-based approaches, while the second one leveraged interviews with Italian and European key informants.

This paper proposes a novel taxonomy including eight competition-based approaches, which differ among each other in terms of policy strategy, scope breadth and output required. Moreover, this paper enriches a well-established taxonomy of innovation policy instruments with the identified competition-based approaches.

This study contributes to the current debate on innovation policy by providing a taxonomy that includes eight competition-based approaches that can be exploited by policymakers to foster external knowledge search as well as their positioning among the innovation policy instruments. The taxonomy will hopefully support policymakers in identifying of the most suitable instruments in the light of their policy strategy and objectives.

This paper aims to investigate sustainability-led innovation, focusing on the interplay between product and process innovation for sustainability goals and the underlying supplier–customer relationships. Thus, the paper delves into sustainability-led innovation and how it affects supplier–customer relationships, and vice versa, thus providing a twofold perspective.

The textile industry is the empirical context of this study, which is exploratory research based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, managers and experts in the textile industry.

In the textile industry, sustainability-led product innovation concerns mainly product durability and performance, product recyclability and the use of waste for new product development. Process innovation deals with circular economy, traceability and water and chemical use minimization. The paper also shows how sustainability-led innovation is implemented in more technical terms and regarding supplier–customer relationships.

The paper adopts an original perspective on how processes take place in the relationships between suppliers and customers, where there is no dominance of one actor, but innovation emerges from interdependence and interaction. Such perspective allows to provide an in-depth analysis of the supplier–customer relationships and underlying dynamics that affect sustainability-led innovation; moreover, the authors study how such innovation impacts supplier–customer relationships and the underlying relational dynamics. The value of the paper also stands in delivering a real representation of the innovation processes grounded in the textile industry.

This paper examines the relationship between marketing automation emergence and the marketers' use of heuristics in their decision-making processes. Heuristics play a role for the integration of human decision-making models and automation in augmentation processes, particularly in marketing where automation is widespread.

This study analyzes qualitative data about the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics in decision-making models, and it is based on evidence collected from interviews with twenty-two experienced marketers.

Marketers make extensive use of heuristics to manage their tasks. While the adoption of new automatic marketing tools modify the task environment and field of use of traditional decision-making models, the adoption of heuristics rules with a different scope is essential to defining inputs, interpreting/evaluating outputs and control the marketing automation system.

The paper makes a contribution to research on the relationship between marketing automation and decision-making models. In particular, it proposes the results of in-depth interviews with senior decision makers to assess the impact of marketing automation on the scope of heuristics as decision-making models adopted by marketers.