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Young people’s attachment to their smartphones is well-documented, with smartphones often described as prostheses. While prior studies typically assume a clear human/machine divide, this paper aims to build on posthuman perspectives, exploring intercorporeality, the blurring of human/technology boundaries, between emerging adults and their smartphones. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing on assemblage theory, this interpretive study uses smartphone diaries and friendship pair/small group discussions with 27 British emerging adults.

Participants in this study are characterized as homo prostheticus, living with and through their phones, treating them as extensions of their mind and part of their selves as they navigated between their online and offline, private and social lives. Homo prostheticus was part of a broader assemblage or amalgamation of human and non-human components. As these components interacted with each other, the assemblage could be strengthened or weakened by various technological, personal and social factors.

These qualitative findings are based on a particular sample at a particular point in time, within a particular culture. Further research could explore intercorporeality in human–smartphone relationships among other groups, in other cultures.

Although other studies have used prosthetic metaphors, this paper contributes to understanding of smartphones as a prostheses in the lives of emerging adults, highlighting intercorporeality as a key feature of homo prostheticus. It also uses assemblage theory to contextualize homo prostheticus and explores factors strengthening or weakening the broader human–smartphone assemblage.

The study aims to explore how concept stores (theoretically) differ from other experience-based retail formats, and hence, how they (practically) contribute to a diversified retail store portfolio.

Case study based on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with seven IKEA retail managers, three industry experts and 26 customers of IKEA concept stores in London and Stockholm.

The concept store represents a conceptual departure from other experiential store formats. It is neither fully experiential in the sense that it is not only about marketing communications nor is it sales or profit-focused. Its aim is to be an accessible touchpoint that reduces friction on a diversified customer journey with its value to the retail portfolio being that it attracts new and latent customers, mitigates existing inhibiting factors and drives them to other touchpoints.

Ideas about the different characteristics of new store formats and their potential to shape the customer experience are extended. New formats reflect innovation in retailing and are part of a retail portfolio which generates different customer expectations and determinants from traditional store formats which provide the customers' existing reference point.

The contributions of new formats should be evaluated in light of other existing formats in the portfolio and not isolated. This is particularly true when considering format cannibalisation and the potentially extended customer journey that arises when customers use traditional format stores and new concept format stores simultaneously.

Previous research, using sales metrics and market-based results as performance determinants, suggests negative outcomes for format diversification. Our study suggests that the contributions of the concept store format should be viewed from an overall customer journey perspective and the “performance” of different format based touchpoints are not best captured through traditional sales evaluation methods.

While every firm is striving to embrace digital transformation (DT) to form new differentiating business capabilities, there are dark sides to such initiatives, and it is essential to acknowledge, identify and address them. The purpose of this paper is to identify and emperically demonstrate the impact of such darksides of DT. While a firm's DT effort may have many dark sides, the authors identify data breaches as the most critical one and focus on proving their impact since it can inflict significant damage to the firm.

Through the lens of paradox theory, the authors argue that the DT efforts of a firm will lead to increased risk and severity of data breaches. The authors developed a one-of-a-kind longitudinal data set by combining data from multiple sources, including 3604 brands over a 10-year period, and employed a DT performance scorecard to evaluate a firm's DT effort across four key digital selling touchpoints: site, mobile, digital marketing and social media.

The findings of this study show that a firm's DT efforts pertaining to its mobile and digital marketing platforms significantly increase the likelihood and severity of a data breach event indicating that these two channels are most vulnerable and need heightened attention from firms. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the negative repercussions of some DT initiatives may be minimized as the firm becomes more innovative. The findings can help firms re-strategize their DT efforts by promoting security and also encouraging a balanced communication strategy.

This research is one of the first to identify, recognize and empirically illustrate the downsides of a DT effort that is otherwise thought to provide only benefits.

Research on the intersection of start-ups and digital transformation is still in its infancy, but it is gathering speed and has entered a period of ferment that may lead to discoveries and deeper understandings. From a purely descriptive standpoint, the topic has only recently entered an exponential development phase. This study aims to provide an overview of the digital transformation in start-ups.

The research only looked into account papers that mentioned the ((“Digital transformation”) AND (“Startups”) OR (“Entrepreneurship”) OR (“Entrepreneur”)) for the title, abstract and keywords. The R programming language's Biblioshiny package was considered for thoroughly examining the papers.

This study evaluated the overview of digital transformation in start-ups between 2016−2022 using the articles from the Dimension database. The study of digital transformation is increasingly popular, but there needs to be more research focused specifically on the digital transformation of start-up companies. While the overall trend shows a rise in the interest and investigation of digital transformation, the number of studies explicitly addressing start-up digital transformation still needs to be higher. The highest publication and citation related to digital transformation is of Andreja Pucihar. The findings also show that the Sustainability journal has the highest network with other citations. Also, it has been found that the focus on digital transformation addresses the need for more research based on various theoretical perspectives. Based on the prominence percentile, the top three future research topics that can be explored are Product Innovation; Sustainability; Frugality, Digital Transformation; Strategic Alignment, and Cybersecurity; Strategies; Digital Transformation.

The current study may serve as a general guideline for future investigation into this topic.

Regarding the practical ramifications, this study’s findings can help entrepreneurs prepare to launch a business or are already doing so. This study’s results provide a comprehensive framework of success variables that must be considered to improve the venture's performance.

This study’s originality is from presenting a structured and in-depth literature review that describes the current state of the art for digital transformation in start-ups. A complete analysis of the data gathered on its digital transformation in start-ups is offered to establish that it is sustainable.