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The small Brazilian companies are responsible for a large part of national GDP and formal jobs in the country. This expressiveness is contrasted with the specificities of companies of this size possess, including the need to innovate to survive. Research shows that 83 percent of Brazilian SMEs have launched new products and services, obtaining positive results through this innovative process. This competitive advantage is weighted by a great feature of the small organization: resource constraint. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Research was carried out in three stages: one qualitative research (by using focal groups) and another two quantitative research works (descriptive and cross-sectional).

The author identified three factors that are important for teenagers when influencing the purchase of the family car: safety, sportiness and comfort. The identification of these factors shows that the millennial generation tends to emphasize aspects of individual interest, such as status and performance, and family context, such as safety and comfort, rather than social aspects, such as the type of fuel and environmental impact.

The authors recommend the development of automobiles that prioritize the three factors mentioned herein in order to reverse the trend of declining car purchase.

The authors presented the relevant attributes in buying decisions of family cars according to teenagers. The authors also indicated which automobile attributes are relevant for a more informed, connected, and with an increasing purchase power generation in contrast with previous generations, whose social context was prior to the emergence of social media.

This paper investigates how sustainability requirements modify supply strategies at different levels in the food industry companies. The paper integrates single supply decisions into firm-level supply strategy and views supply strategy as one coherent strategy in which the decision-making is based on the values and principles of a firm.

The paper captures the decade of change and studies the renewal of supply strategy by utilising two qualitative data sets with a ten years of difference. The data contain 41 interviews from a retailer and 5 of its food supplier companies.

Results confirm that a decade ago only minor attention was channelled towards sustainability whereas today sustainability is a key driver behind supply decisions and supply strategies because firms need to respond to sustainability requirements and challenges. The study presents a framework for analysing different levels (firm, category and supply market levels) of changes and sustainability requirements faced by food companies and their supply strategies.

Previously, sustainability has rarely been connected to firm-level supply strategy. This study presents the supply strategy elements that were important for Finnish food industry companies over a decade ago and matches these elements to the needs of today’s firms. As a result, the study incorporates the concept of sustainability with the supply strategy frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the servitization phenomenon of product-centric companies, by identifying the resources, capabilities and organizational aspects needed to successfully deploy a servitized business model (BM).

By adopting a literature-based approach, this paper develops a servitization maturity model (SeMM) aimed at assessing and positioning companies in the servitization journey. The paper also illustrates the model application to two small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), a machinery and a forklift truck company.

The SeMM identifies a set of 85 critical requirements that are used to evaluate the servitization level of product-centric companies, through a specific five-stage measurement scale. The requirements are categorized into: five maturity dimensions (organizational approach, process management, performance management, tools, capabilities) and nine BM Canvas components. The empirical application exemplifies how the SeMM can support managers in identifying and bridging the gaps in their servitization journey.

The SeMM adopts an original bi-dimensional approach and provides an operationalization of the servitization process through the identification of specific critical requirements framed on established BM and maturity dimensions taken from the literature. Moreover, the model responds to a call for research to develop practitioner-oriented tools and guidelines to support the servitization process, in particular for SMEs, and to the need to go beyond to measures of servitization based on indicators about number of services offered or their turnover.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the antecedents of perceived customer value, such as the perceived quality and perceived sacrifices, and the effects on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty (CL) in the restaurant industry.

Based on an extensive literature review, a research model and questionnaire were designed. To assess the hypothesised relationships, data were collected in a field survey. Partial least squares regression (a variance-based regression analysis of SEM) was selected to analyse the relationships within the research model.

The findings of this study indicate that the perceived monetary sacrifice (PMS) and perceived service quality were found to be antecedents of perceived value (PV), whereas PMS was the major precursor of PV. Further, PV was found to have a substantial influence on customer satisfaction and CL.

The study provides a better understanding of the price–value–satisfaction–loyalty relationships in the restaurant context in a more holistic sense and recommendations to move this research stream forward.

This paper presents the concerns in manufacturing supply chain. Further this study investigates the role of information technology (IT) and information sharing (IS) in manufacturing supply chain and determines its impact towards supply chain integration (SCI), supply chain performance (SCP), and manufacturing firm performance (FP) in Malaysia. The theoretical framework was proposed for the study on the basis of existing literature. The study administered a survey questionnaire to collect data from manufacturing firms in Malaysia with 112 respondents. A multiple regression analysis is conducted to establish the relationship between IT, IS, SCI, and FP. The study finds that IT and sharing has significant positive effect towards and performance. Firms that use IT and practice IS across partners in the supply chain are more likely to integrate their internal and external value chain for better performance both within and across the manufacturing firms in the supply chain. This study can be of interest to the manufacturing industry as well as other industry practitioners interested in improving the performance of the organization and supply chain in total. For supply chain practitioners, this results indicate that the firms should adopt IT and IS practices to strategically improve SCI. This in turn will also improve the supply chain network and firm’s performance. This study employs a newly developed framework which depicts the causal relationship between IT, IS, SCI, Supply Chain Performance, and FP in Malaysia. Furthermore, it closes a gap in existing literature by examining the effect IT and communication (ICT) practices toward manufacturing firms’ performance and SCP in a single setting. In addition, the current study attempted to construct a model which would estimate and interpret SCP and FP simultaneously, and to evaluate this model in an empirical fashion.

Block chain technology (BCT) has apparent capability of handling information in digital format, which has dragged attention of the practitioners for its utility in industrial and manufacturing practices. Conversely, the managerial adoption of BCT is relatively limited, which motivated the authors to identify crucial dimensions that can persuade the acceptance of BCT from an executive perspective. Thus, the present study is aimed to conduct to understand crucial barriers under BCT for managerial implementation in supply chain management (SCM) of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The present study investigated evident barriers to understand implementation of BCT. A questionnaire based survey is performed to collect primary data from service and manufacturing based companies in India. Survey responses are received online and the data is analyzed in a scorecard. The scorecard embedded the scribed entries of Likert scale to determine the relative score.

In present study, sixteen barriers from three categories named as technological, organizational and environmental are evaluated, where, five sub-barriers from technological domain, seven sub-barriers from organizational domain and four sub-barriers from environmental domain are evaluated. The findings of the study determined that the three factors, i.e. “complexity in setup/use”, “Security and privacy concern” and “Technological awareness” mostly affect the adaptation of BCT in SCM. Conversely, “Market dynamics”, “Scalability” and “Cost” do not influence the intention to adopt the technology.

Only few studies have endeavored to ascertain the BCT adoption in SCM of SMEs in developing country like India. Thus, the study is filling a momentous gap of mapping BCT dimensions in the scholastic literature. The findings are expected to enable SMEs to understand important factors to be considered for adopting BCT in their curriculum. Furthermore, the study may benefit the BCT developers and suppliers to endure customized solutions based on the findings.

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.