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This paper aims to investigate the current value chain activities grounded on Porter’s value chain theory and to examine the drivers of strategic environmentalism that influence sustainable value chain adoption. This study further constructs a prescriptive model to reveal the extent to which information communication technology (ICT)-based industries are adopting sustainable value chain practices.

Data were collected using questionnaire from selected ISO 14000/14001-certified ICT-based firms in Malaysia and analyzed using partial least square-structural equation modeling.

Results reveal that the primary activities positively influence sustainable value chain. Moreover, results indicate that support activities significantly influence sustainable value chain adoption in ICT-based firms. Results further show that strategic environmentalism drivers have an impact on sustainable value chain adoption.

Data were collected from ICT-based industries in Malaysia only. Additionally, this research extends the body of knowledge and offers theoretical implications for ICT-based industries in Malaysia and other emerging economies in adopting sustainable value chain activities.

Practically, this study assists ICT-based industries to change their current paradigm from the traditional operations to a more holistic approach toward supporting practitioners to simultaneously achieve social responsibility, environmental and economic growth.

This study offers social implications for ICT-based industries to implement cleaner operations by decreasing CO₂ emission, lessening energy usage, diminishing cost incurred and minimizing usage of natural resources, thereby increasing product recovery and recycle-ability of IT hardware.

This study is one of the first to address the issue related to sustainable value chain in ICT-based industry by providing a roadmap on how practitioners can implement sustainable initiatives or more significantly, how to infuse these initiatives in their current chain, while concurrently enhancing competitiveness. Furthermore, this paper examines the current activities implemented by practitioners toward sustainable value chain adoption and explores the correlation of the drivers of strategic environmentalism with regard to sustainable value chain.

This paper aims to highlight the challenges and opportunities of sustainable global value chain governance, it demonstrates strong theoretical deficits in this field and offers new pragmatist conceptual perspectives.

The empirical analysis is based on document analyses, 47 expert interviews and on field observations in Ghana, Africa.

Based on an in-depth analysis of a US firm operating a fair trade value chain in an intercultural environment, the authors show that universalistic value chain-oriented governance instruments often fail because of strong institutional and cultural distances. Against the prevailing strategies of top-down management, the authors suggest a more bottom-up, pragmatist and collaboration-based approach to sustainable global value chain governance.

The results of an in-depth case study are not generalizable. Instead, they provide holistic insights into a so-far insufficiently examined field and an empirical fundament for further research on sustainable governance in global value chains. In particular, research on pragmatist, collaborative, dialogue based, bottom-up approaches of sustainable value chain governance will be of great value to further theoretical development of this field.

This study is relevant to researchers and practitioners in the field of sustainable value chain governance. It reveals several misunderstandings about the effectiveness and impacts of sustainable governance in less developed countries and thus builds a foundation for better and more effective problem-solving approaches in international sustainable management activities.

Nontransparent supplier networks and (illegal) sub-contracting, as well as the strong influences of institutional, cultural and sub-cultural factors, make responsible value chain management a challenging task for any firm with international value creation activities. This leaves workers in local factories vulnerable to infringements of their fundamental human rights and the environment unprotected against long-lasting damages. Addressing these challenges and developing new solutions, therefore, can have strong impacts on the lives of workers in international supply chains.

The authors contribute, first, a differentiated empirical description and analysis of a sustainable value chain approach in a less developed country in Africa. Second, using an example of the field study, the authors highlight limitations of value chain-related governance theory based on a field study by illustrating the challenges and barriers and a lack of existing concepts concerning effective sustainable governance in global value chains. Third, the authors show different managerial responses to these cultural and institutional challenges between universalism and relativism, and, fourth, the authors suggest a more collaborative, bottom-up and pragmatist approach to sustainable value chain governance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the adaptation of Michael Porter's Value Chain as part of a total value and performance-based framework to help identify and prioritize process improvement projects.

This paper developed a framework and then applied it by using a notional company's performance numbers.

The proposed framework can be easily applied to a real-world business setting by using the methodology proposed. The author used basic Microsoft Excel skills to perform this work.

This paper's’ strength is that it provides business managers and quality improvement practitioners a viable and straight forward method to identify and prioritize their improvement efforts.

This paper is original in its concept. It takes and established framework and it applies it to a process improvement application.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiary capabilities are influenced by the firm-specific advantages (FSAs) of the parent company, as well as by cultural and geographic distance between the home and host country.

This paper assesses how the effects of the parent FSAs, cultural distance and geographic distance on subsidiary capabilities vary for different value-chain activities, with an empirical application to 60 foreign subsidiaries operating in Canada.

This paper uncovers distinct, three-way interaction effects among parent-level FSAs, cultural distance and geographic distance for upstream versus downstream activities in the value chain.

We find that in special cases, high levels of distance can be positive for MNEs, in terms of driving the creation of stronger subsidiary capabilities.

The paper provides a holistic overview of already available academic literature of mobile banking, business model innovation and ecosystem and activity system perspective of business model concepts. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to initiate a debate for future research in the agenda highlighted in this paper.

In this paper, mobile banking business ecosystem of Easypaisa is used as an illustrative case to understand mobile banking business model innovation in the context of business ecosystem and activity system perspective.

Based on Porter’s view of mobile financial service (MFS) industry, it is suggested that patterns of business model innovation can be explained through business ecosystem and activity system. The notion of business model innovation can also be explained through integrated value chain of mobile network operator and its partners in the supply chain of MFS.

This paper provides preliminary overview of the exiting academic literature on business model innovations, business ecosystem and activity system in the in the context of value network. Since this is only a literature review paper, therefore, no primary data have been collected for this case study through interviewing from the relevant people.

So far, no research has been conducted in Pakistan to address business model innovation in mobile banking sector in the context of business ecosystem and activity system perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to employ an inductive approach to explore how small, nascent, firms in the craft brewing industry use cooperative behaviours with direct competitors to achieve their goals.

Data were gathered from interviews with the founders of seven small, newly established, craft brewers in a Midwestern city in the USA for this exploratory study. Data analysis followed the general tenants of inductive coding. Porter’s value chain model was used as a framework to organise and conceptualise the coopetitive behaviour uncovered.

The firms engage in cooperative behaviours with their direct competitors in areas such as process technology development, procurement, inbound logistics and marketing. A particularly interesting and common collaborative activity was breweries recommending/promoting competing breweries to their own customers.

This study provides clear examples of how relationship building with competitors could be advantageous and help small, nascent firms overcome the liabilities of newness and smallness.

Research on coopetition has called for a greater understanding of the nature of cooperative behaviours in small firms, start-ups and firms outside of high-technology industries. Moreover, research has called for finer-grained approaches to conceptualising coopetition. This paper fills these gaps and shows how Porter’s value chain is a useful tool for organising the types of collaborative behaviours that can be part of coopetition. The findings enhance understanding and facilitate future research by illustrating a broad array of cooperative activities that occur between direct competitors.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the organizational impacts of enterprise mobility and the configurations of mobile information technology (IT) impacts in companies with various value creation logics.

An exploratory approach combining semi-structured interview and repertory grid method was used to evaluate managers’ perspectives on the effects of mobile technologies.

The qualitative findings unearth managers’ perspectives about the organizational impacts of enterprise mobility, which are categorized into six intermediary dimensions and two fundamental impacts. A further analysis of material collected from interviews also shows the differential context-related configurations of mobile IT impacts in companies.

This study contributes to literature on the business value of IT in general and mobile IT in particular by examining managers’ cognitive constructions of the organizational impacts of enterprise mobility and highlighting the complexity and context-related variety of mobile IT impacts.

This study provides valuable insights for managers and decision makers that enterprise mobility shows promise in enhancing a firm’s operational and marketing performance.

Different from prior literature, this study is an exploratory attempt to investigate complex enterprise-mobility-performance relationship and preliminarily uncovers that the mechanisms with which mobile IT influences firm performance vary in different organizational contexts.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the environmental and organizational factors that influence the intensity of electronic business adoption by contemporary organizations, and provide evidence regarding the relationship between e‐business adoption and organizational performance.

The study develops an integrative conceptual model of the antecedents and performance outcomes of e‐business adoption. The research model is subsequently tested empirically using data collected from 154 hotel companies. Structural equation modeling procedures were used to assess the psychometric properties of measurement scales and test research hypotheses.

The study findings indicate that customer power has the greatest impact on the intensity of e‐business adoption, followed by organizational learning ability, adhocracy culture, and top management emphasis. The results also suggest that companies that use the internet more extensively to perform a range of value‐chain activities achieve superior e‐business performance, and e‐business performance has a significant positive effect on organizational performance.

E‐business adoption can provide substantial benefits to companies including increased revenues, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and relationship development. A thorough understanding of the factors that facilitate (or inhibit) e‐business adoption, and the provision of clear evidence regarding its potential impact on business performance, is critically important for firms that should invest significant financial and human resources in order to successfully implement these innovative technologies. The present study adds to the limited empirical work done in this area by simultaneously investigating the antecedents and outcomes of e‐business adoption, within the context of a highly competitive and rapidly evolving industry.

In the UK regions that are structurally more vulnerable are less able to respond to economic shocks (McCann, 2017). An economic downturn for a poorer region like the North East of England (Jenkins, Pike, & Tomaney, 2019) will mean it enters recession earlier and emerges from recession later than significantly wealthier regions like London and South East region in England or Amsterdam City region in the Netherlands. We ask, what can be done to improve the impact of policy interventions that support and develop weaker regional economies? Behind this chapter sit two elements of research study: a question, which asks, what if you develop a “great” policy, that is well researched and designed; however, it fails because the people who deliver it don’t have the right culture, values, or knowledge? The second element is that the authors are interested in a range of factors that affect not only policy implementation including entrepreneurship but also economic culture and social capital, looking at the problem from different disciplinary viewpoints (Baker & Welter, 2018). This chapter makes a comparative study between the North East of England and the Amsterdam City region to explore how policy implementation might be improved as other factors of place cannot be easily altered, these factors include major infrastructure, political systems, and budgetary control as well as overall economic wealth. What this means is that practical research and studies have to find factors that can be improved in order to achieve change and a greater economic impact on Places in this context, the North East of England.

This research investigates performance determinants of service sector foreign-owned subsidiaries located in an emerging market. The focus is on the two dimensions of organizational networks (Who do you know?) and competencies (What do you know?).

Data were collected via a large-scale survey of managing directors located in the midrange emerging economy of Taiwan. The data are analyzed using partial least squares structured equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) techniques.

The results show the importance of intraorganizational network strength as a key determinant of subsidiary performance, and that combinations of interorganizational network strength and competencies can determine performance in several subsidiaries.

This article offers new insights by testing a theoretical framework based on network perspective and the competence-based view of the firm in an emerging market context. It also offers an additional twist by employing symmetric (PLS-SEM) and nonsymmetric (fsQCA) methods to test the framework. This allows to arrive at robust conclusions about the complementarity and substitutability of the applied theories. This research also contributes to the current literature by providing fine-grained insights into the nature and impact of competencies and networks. It is also one of the few studies to focus specifically on service sector subsidiaries.