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In the contemporary business environment, companies must constantly consider methods to enhance their competitive advantage and create value for their customers. The purpose of this paper is to develop a research model based on a business ecosystem view. Within a business ecosystem, the authors identified the key factors of co-development and the manner in which these factors affect a company’s innovation performance.

The theoretical hypotheses are confirmed by partial least squares analysis of survey responses collected from information and communication technology (ICT) and hotel industries in Taiwan.

In both industries, the results suggest that a firm’s co-development within its own ecosystem has positive effects on innovation performance. For companies in the ICT industry, collaborative networks and partner selection have significant impacts on the firms’ co-development, but their information technology (IT) capability does not; in contrast, in the hotel industry, partner selection and IT capability have significant impacts on firm co-development, but their collaborative network does not.

This study contributes to the literature of business ecosystem and co-development by offering a co-development model. As both conceptual and empirical research on this topic is still underdeveloped, this study provides fresh insights into collaboration management and offers significant theoretical and managerial implications from a business ecosystem perspective.

Agricultural extension has played a central role in building the capacity of smallholders for decades. In efforts to improve extension outcomes, demand-driven approaches have emerged to better align extension content with smallholder context. The aim of this paper is to explore the challenges facing demand-driven extension in Papua New Guinea.

Exploratory case study methodology was used to explore the challenges facing demand-driven extension from the perspectives of 11 practitioners experienced in community engagement in Papua New Guinea.

Although there is great potential for demand-driven extension, this research found extension services in Papua New Guinea are ill-equipped to introduce and sustain a resource-intensive approach like demand-driven extension. It further found that rural farmers who extension organisations have long neglected lack the necessary skills and trust to gain from these services.

A limitation of this research is that it only reflects the opinions of practitioners working in Papua New Guinea. Further research featuring a broader sample of value chain actors connected to extension would provide a more complete understanding of the potential challenges to demand-driven engagement in this context.

With a growing interest among development projects to utilise demand-driven engagement with farmers, this research is the first study to explore the challenge facing this promising approach in Papua New Guinea.

Smart Manufacturing (SM) lies at the core of Industry 4.0. Operations management research has identified several factors influencing firms’ ability to adopt SM. However, a clear understanding of capabilities needed to progress in SM is still missing. This paper aims to investigate how absorptive capacity (AC) allows firms to advance in SM and explore how managerial antecedents support the capacity to absorb SM-related knowledge at different stages of SM adoption.

This study adopts an exploratory approach through multiple case studies. Twelve firms, operating as part of the automotive supply chain and exhibiting different stages of SM adoption, constitute the sample.

The results suggest that advancement in SM requires firms to progressively reinforce their AC. Firms’ ability to acquire and assimilate SM knowledge is supported by managerial antecedents encompassing integrative capacities to bridge old and SM technologies, managerial cognition through the clear alignment of SM technologies with strategic goals and knowledge development capabilities through practices oriented to provide senior managers with SM competences.

The findings contribute to SM research by suggesting that AC is a crucial dynamic capability for SM adoption. The results also provide evidence-grounded recommendations to firms engaged in the digital transformation on the managerial capabilities needed to support AC and to progress from lower to higher stages of SM.

The purpose of this study is to build a generic model for relational development of a value proposition for a service concept. The study seeks to answer two questions: First, what kind of process is practical for joint development of a service concept in customer–service provider collaboration? Second, what are the functional principles for such collaboration?

A participative, design science approach was used to develop the model for a joint-development process. Researchers developed and analyzed joint activities between a provider of industrial maintenance service solutions and its customer during the process of co-developing a service concept for factory maintenance.

The study suggests that a co-development process has to integrate service blueprinting, a stage-gate philosophy, dialogical interaction principles and elements of joint learning to meet the requirement for both efficiency and relationality.

The study develops a generic model for collaborative development of value propositions that integrates the aforementioned elements of separate streams of research. Applying the developed model to different contexts would further verify and enhance it.

The model can be applied to the development of a value proposition in different collaborative development situations to enhance interplay between efficiency and relationality.

The study illustrates a generic model for joint service concept development and proposes a solution balancing contradictory requirements in such a collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of innovation in smart service systems to conceptualize how actor’s relationships through technology-enabled interactions can give birth to novel technologies, processes, strategies and value. The objectives of the study are: to detect the different enablers that activate innovation in smart service systems; and to explore how these can lead dynamically to the emergence of different innovation patterns.

The empirical research adopts an approach based on constructivist grounded theory, performed through observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate the development of innovation in the Italian CTNA (Italian acronym of National Cluster for Aerospace Technology).

The identification and re-elaboration of the novelties that emerged from the analysis of the Cluster allow the elaboration of a diagram that classifies five different shades of innovation, introduced through some related theoretical propositions: technological; process; business model and data-driven; social and eco-sustainable; and practice-based.

The paper embraces a synthesis view that detects the enabling structural and systems dimensions for innovation (the “what”) and the way in which these can be combined to create new technologies, resources, values and social rules (the “how” dimension). The classification of five different kinds of innovation can contribute to enrich extant research on value co-creation and innovation and can shed light on how given technologies and relational strategies can produce varied innovation outcomes according to the diverse stakeholders engaged.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the issues related to the deployment of renewable electricity technologies (RETs) in remote indigenous communities by examining the views of key informants in a remote northern Ontario community through the lens of a wicked problem approach, with the goal to identify policy direction and strategies for the further development of renewable electricity projects.

The paper uses semi-structured interviews with community key informants, informed discussions with community members and energy conference participants and literature reviews of academic, policy and utility documents as complementary data sources for triangulation of results.

According to informants, the complexity surrounding the deployment of RETs in remote Canadian indigenous communities is the result of different stakeholder perspectives on the issues that RETs are expected to address. Furthermore, institutional complexity of the electricity generation system and uncertainty over both the choice of off-grid renewable technology and the future of electricity generation systems structure and governance add to this complexity.

Given the governments’ legal obligation to consult with indigenous people for projects within their territories, community perspectives provide insights for policy design to support both the deployment of RETs and address indigenous communities sustainability goals.

This paper offers views and opinions of community members from an off-grid Canadian indigenous community. Community members describe how they envision their electricity systems and the desired contribution of community owned renewable electricity generation to increase local control and economic development.

In the co-creation process from a network perspective, service is produced, designed, and evaluated entirely by the actors with dynamic roles and with less participation by the firm's employees in the service process. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model that represents environmental stimuli and value perceptions that contribute to service co-creation behaviour in an online network.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of two online programming communities – GitHub and Stack Overflow co-creators, with the data analysed using thematic analysis. The stimulus-organism-response model guided the development of the final model.

Social influence and trust are influential in actor value perceptions, including primary and network value, the interplay of which leads actors to co-production, supportive, and administrative behaviour. Environmental factors do not directly drive actors; rather it is the value that initiates and drives actors, which, by extension, initiates and drives the co-creation of services.

The service co-creation behaviour model provides a basis for future research in the co-creation and co-destruction context to model behaviours within the online network organisation setting and thereby enable improvement of such systems. This model can be operationalised in a network environment through design features.

This paper provides a rich understanding of environmental stimuli and value perception factors that contribute to the co-creation of services, and identifies different types of behaviours in dynamic online networks. This paper presents a new model of different types of behaviours emerging from actor participation in the co-creation process.

Delivering housing to resource-constrained communities (RCCs) is a complex process beset with difficulties. The purpose of this study is to use a complexity lens to examine the approach taken by a social enterprise (SE) in Australia to develop and manage a housebuilding supply chain for RCCs.

The research team used a longitudinal case study approach from 2017 to 2022, which used mixed methods to understand the phenomenon and gain an in-depth understanding of the complex issues and problem-solving undertaken by an SE start-up.

Balancing mission logic with commercial viability is challenging for an SE. The supply chain solution that evolved accommodated the particulars of geography and the needs of many stakeholders, including the end-user community and government sponsors. Extensive and time-consuming socialisation and customisation led to a successful technical design and sustainable supply chain operation.

Analysing supply chain intricacies via a complexity framework is valuable for scholars and practitioners, assisting in designing and developing supply chain configurations and understanding their dynamics. Meeting the housing construction needs of RCCs requires the SE to place societal focus at the centre of the supply chain rather than merely being a system output. The developed business model complements the engineering solution to empower a community-led housing construction supply chain.

This longitudinal case study contributes to knowledge by providing rich insights into the roles of SEs and how they develop and operate supply chains to fit with the needs of RCCs. Adding a contextual response dimension to an established complexity framework helped to explain how hybrid organisations balance commercial viability demands with social mission logic by amending traditional supply chain and governance practices. The case provides insights into supply chain configuration, needed changes and potential impacts when an SE as a focal actor inserts into a traditional for-profit construction supply chain.

This chapter explores the issue of an outsider entering an existing business network in an interactive, interdependent and interconnected business world. Developing the new venture appears a ‘mission impossible’ as the new venture has no relationship in the relevant network or a tenuous one at best. The critical issue and major difficulty for the new company are to make established business actors perceive that there are good reasons to admit the new venture into the existing business network. The fate of the new venture, its acceptance by at least some other business actors, will largely depend on how the incumbents perceive the new company to affect their existing relational assets which result from past investments. In attempting to become a new node of a business relationship, the ‘management’ of the new venture has to address two issues. First, it has to find some actors interested in relating to the new venture and to engage them in developing the initial business relationships. Second, the new venture has to manage the networking that is combining the initial relationships with each other. The authors identify and discuss six spaces for action for new business ventures related to these two challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a framework for clarifying and extending the concept of inter‐firm market orientation (IMO) and to complement the relatively small body of literature related to this concept.

The conceptual framework is informed by empirical research based on a longitudinal multi‐case study.

This research identifies a nexus linking IMO with value creation in inter‐firm partnerships. The findings also suggest that IMO has an impact on companies' performance in terms of knowledge transfer, innovation and market access.

IMO contributes to value creation processes in the context of strategic networks.

A discussion of these findings, together with implications for practice and proposals for further research, is provided.