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Based on the agency and resource dependence theories, this study aims to investigate whether nomination committee (NC) characteristics could serve as key attributes for reducing environmental, social and governance (ESG) disputes and whether NC composition affects the appointment of ESG-friendly directors to the board.

This study focuses on a sample of 30 global systemically important banks from 2015 to 2021. The authors estimate panel data models with fixed effects, clustering heteroskedastic standard errors at the bank level to account for the serial correlation of the dependent variables for each bank.

Banks’ exposure to ESG controversies can be reduced when NC members have specific skills, in particular when at least one member of this committee also belongs to the sustainability committee and is a foreign director. Moreover, banks’ ESG disputes decrease when the NC members are younger, while the share of independent NC members has a negative impact. Finally, a positive influence of NC composition and its members’ features as well as the appointment of ESG-friendly directors on the board is found.

The findings are particularly useful during periods such as the current one, when there is growing attention to both banks’ corporate governance, the subcommittees’ role and functioning and social and environmental issues. This study shows that the NC is important in reducing the likelihood of banks incurring ESG disputes and in appointing more ESG-friendly directors. NC effective functioning and its members’ qualities serve as a key attribute for fulfilling objective assessment and improving board effectiveness.

Several studies show that identity is a critical success factor in design-intensive industries, leading managers and executives to identify solutions that enable firms to simultaneously innovate while preserving their link with the past. Accordingly, scholars have recently revealed the role of the so-called innovation through tradition strategy. Thus, the purpose of this study/paper is to understand how design intensive firms may exploit knowledge pertaining to the past.

The research contributes to this line of inquiry by conducting a longitudinal analysis of two leading Italian design-intensive firms, B&B Italia and Cassina S.p.A. Specifically, through almost 30 h of interviews with 11 key informants and the analysis of various secondary sources, a unique database of over 900 products covering the period of 1960-2016 was developed.

The findings reveal that both firms leverage knowledge from the past mainly to preserve firm identity, as indicated by the two indicators used to capture the use of knowledge pertaining to the past (i.e., design tradition intensity and design tradition depth). In addition, the study shows that the values of these indicators significantly increase when ownership control shifts from family-based to fund-based.

The paper looks at design artifacts as a source of knowledge, exploring how they can support firms in reinforcing their identity. The original contribution to the design through traditional literature is in unveiling the product signs dimension of this particular innovation strategy.

Design approaches to innovation are booming in both the academic and practitioner worlds. Tech giants are proposing different methodologies to develop technological innovation leveraging design principles, for example, Amazon with working backward and Google with Design Sprint. However, little is known on the role of these methodologies in managing the knowledge translation among different stakeholders. This paper aims to investigate how Design Sprint approaches can face digital challenges and foster collaborations.

Through interviews and participatory observations of ten exploratory cases of SME adoption of the Design Sprint methodology, data were collected, organized, clustered and then validated. Furthermore, by adopting a configuration theory perspective, the data have been processed to contribute to the emergence of two Design Sprint organizational taxonomy.

Competences, type of design challenge and the process followed emerge from the cases as key drivers of different Design Sprint configurations. Moreover, the configuration theory helped in identifying two Design Sprint taxonomies named Willing and Wondering configurations. Finally, the paper provides managers with practical guidelines on how to leverage these configurations to make this approach more effective for SMEs and how this method helps the knowledge translation.

The value and originality of the paper are in defining Design Sprint from a theoretical point of view and offering practical guidelines on how to adapt it to the particular context of collaborative digital environments of SMEs. Moreover, it contributes to enlarging the relevance of configurational theory in the creative industries.

Several healthcare quality assessment tools measure the processes and outcomes of the care system. The actual physical infrastructure (buildings and organizational) aspects are, however, rarely considered. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of validation and weighting of an evidence-informed framework for the quality assessment of hospital facilities from social, environmental and organizational perspectives to complement other assessments.

Sustainable High-quality Healthcare version 2 (SustHealth v2) is the updated version of an existing framework composed of three domains (social, environmental and organizational quality). To validate and establish a relevant weighting, interviews were conducted with 15 professionals within the field of healthcare planning, design, research and management. The study has been conducted through semi-structured interviews and the application of the Simon Roy Figueras (SRF) procedure for the elicitation of weights criteria. The data collected have been processed through the DecSpace web platform.

Among the three domains, the organizational qualities appear to be the most important (W = 49%), followed by the environmental (W = 29%) and social aspects (W = 22%). Relevant indicators such as future-proofing, wayfinding and users’ space control emerged as the most important within each macro-area. Those results are confirmed by the outcome of the interviews that highlight user/patient-centeredness, wayfinding strategies and space functionality as the most important concepts to foster in existing healthcare facilities improvement.

The study highlights important structural and organizational aspects that hospital managers and planners can consider when dealing with healthcare facilities’ quality improvement.

The use of the SRF multicriteria method is novel in this context when used to weight an assessment tool with a focus on hospital built environment.

Mastering innovation in highly regulated markets might require companies to overcome significant barriers. Rules, laws and limitations on social, economic and institutional dimensions can hinder the ability of a company to transfer knowledge within and across organizational boundaries. However, as recent research in innovation management increasingly advocates user involvement and early understanding of user needs as best practices, the inability to freely interact with customers due to highly regulated market restrictions can hinder the company’s capability to innovate. Hence, this paper aims to shed light on how an emerging managerial approach, such as Design Sprint, can support companies operating in highly regulated markets to overcome user involvement limitations and boost human-centered innovation.

This paper sheds light on how to boost innovation in a highly regulated market by leveraging an in-depth case study. The study investigates the use of the Design Sprint approach adopted by the pharmaceutical multinational Johnson & Johnson to revise the way its R&D department orchestrates the new product development process, overcoming the user involvement challenges of highly regulated markets.

In analyzing six different projects undertaken in the past two years, the findings illustrate three microfoundational dimensions of the Design Sprint approach in highly regulated markets, the so-called 3T model: team, time and tools. Indeed, deploying the Design Sprint in a highly regulated market has proven that being able to experiment in the early stages, building rough prototypes in real-time and openly collaborating with partners is crucial to boost innovation and anticipate constraints.

The paper sheds light on the Design Sprint approach by initially grounding an emerging managerial approach on organizational and management theory, leveraging the lens of microfoundations. In doing so, this study suggests how Design Sprint is based on the pillars of experimentation, knowledge transfer and co-creation usually neglected in highly regulated markets where user involvement is challenging. Finally, this study discloses the importance of using a design-based methodology in fostering innovation in highly regulated markets.

The new Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has prioritised a new healthcare model that will establish the additional community healthcare facilities (CHFs). The paper proposes a methodology for supporting decision-making on location of the future facilities according to new parameters that consider how proximity to healthcare benefits communities. Rethinking the spatial parameters for locating future CHFs, focusing on fragile areas, creates a novel decision support system.

The methodology is based on multifactor analysis and on geographic information system (GIS) mapping to simulate the potential and risks associated with the proposed location of CHFs, focusing on territorial contexts of metropolitan cities, medium-sized cities, and Inner Areas, characterized by different fragilities. This method aims to innovate urban planning practices by updating the practice of per-capita urban planning standards and promoting implementation of the 15-minute city model.

The method defines new spatial parameters useful to inform the appropriate location of CHFs in Italy's Inner Areas. This offers a new integrated approach to spatial design mixing urban planning and healthcare dimensions.

The methodology will bring about an integrated urban planning approach, which guides both transformative urban choices and health services' implementation according to the needs of communities.

Innovation dynamics have been the object of study of several researchers, focusing in particular on technological innovation and the emergence of a dominant design. However, these models have been challenged by how the pervasiveness of digital technologies is speeding up the pace at which innovation evolves. On the other hand, a growing body of literature in innovation management has started underlining the relevance of new product and service meanings as a source of innovation.

This research aims to study the different innovation dynamics within an industry, investigating not only how companies react to fast-changing functional advancements but rather how their behavior changes as shifts in meaning occur. To properly assess the phenomenon, this longitudinal study analyzes the social media industry, strongly subjected to continuous functional advancements, through a deep dive in the 160 innovations introduced between 2003 and 2017 by the eight leading players in the industry.

Our results illustrate the co-existence of different approaches to innovation within an industry and hint that consequent and fast cycles of innovation in both functionalities and meanings discourage the emergence of a dominant design.

Our results help managers and innovators acknowledge the possibility to leverage not just on the technological dimension of innovation but also the reason why people use a given product or service, innovating its meaning. Furthermore, our results recognize the co-existence of different innovation streams upon which innovators can act.

This research contributes to the extant literature in innovation management, extending the classical models of innovation dynamics by including the evolution of innovations of meaning in relation to technological innovation.

The purpose of this study is to explore how luxury companies can use knowledge embedded in tradition to set up effective business models.

Given the limited coverage in previous literature regarding the manner in which tradition can be leveraged by companies to create and capture value, this paper adopts a qualitative approach, i.e. the exploratory analysis of a single case study, namely, that of the high-end Italian hotel Borgo Egnazia.

Within a focus on luxury firms, this paper conceptualizes the tradition-driven business model highlighting activities aimed at creating and capturing value by using knowledge embedded in tradition. Combining value creation and value capture with tacit and codified knowledge, the authors are able to highlight the components of a business model that uses tradition as its main distinctive resource.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore how companies use tradition to create and capture value.