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Social media, such as Twitter, has become the first and the most frequent place to visit in order to gain information and establish situational awareness in emergencies and disasters. The purpose of this paper is to examine public opinion on Twitter in different disaster stages using the case of Hurricane Irma.

More than 3.5m tweets capturing the entire disaster lifecycle were collected and analyzed. Topic modeling was used to generate topics at each disaster stage based on Fink’s (1986) four-stage model of crisis and disaster: prodromal, acute, chronic and termination stages.

The results revealed that media reliance varied across different stages. All topics in the prodromal stage were associated with the early warning and real-time news. The topic of lessons learned from Hurricane Harvey was the most popular at this stage. The acute stage recorded the highest number of daily tweets. The most popular topic was the safety of people and animals. In the chronic stage too, the safety of people and animals remained a major concern. Heroic and anti-social behaviors also received substantial attention. In the termination stage, climate change was the most frequently discussed topic. Politics-related discussions were heated.

The results extended and enhanced the four-stage model of crisis and disaster. These findings can help government agencies and crisis managers address audience needs effectively at various crisis stages in a timely manner.

As firms turn their innovation activities toward collaborating with external partners, they face additional challenges in managing their knowledge. While different modes of intellectual property right regimes are applied in closed innovation systems, there seems to be tension between the concepts of “open innovation” and “intellectual property rights”. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how firms best manage knowledge via intellectual property rights in open innovation processes.

Following a mixed methods approach, the authors review relevant literature at the intersection of knowledge management, intellectual property rights, strategic management of intellectual property rights and the open innovation process. The authors identify success drivers through the lenses of – but not limited to – intellectual property rights and classify them in five distinct groups. Expending the view on open innovation beyond its modus operandi, the authors develop the Open Innovation Life Cycle, covering three stages and three levels of the open innovation process. The authors apply their findings to a case study in the pharmaceutical industry.

The authors provide four key contributions. First, existing literature yields inconclusive results concerning the enabling or disabling function of intellectual property rights in open innovation processes, but the majority of scholars detect an ambivalent relation. Second, they identify and classify success drivers of successful knowledge management via intellectual property rights in open innovation processes. Third, they advance literature on open innovation beyond its modus operandi to include three stages and three levels. Fourth, they test their findings to a case study and show how management leverages knowledge by properly using intellectual property rights in open innovation.

The findings support firms in managing knowledge via intellectual property rights in open innovation processes. Management should account for the peculiarities of open innovation preparation and open innovation termination to prevent unintentional knowledge drain.

This is one of the first studies to view open innovation as a process beyond its modus operandi by considering the preparations for and termination of open innovation activities. It also addresses the levels involved in managing knowledge via intellectual property rights in open innovation from individual (personal) to project and firm level.

Natural disasters are increasingly more frequent and intense, which makes it critical for emergency managers to engage social media users during crises. This study examined emergency official accounts' social media engagement at each disaster stage based on Fink's four-stage model of crisis and disaster: prodromal, acute, chronic and termination stages and linked topics and sentiments to engagement.

Using text mining and sentiment analysis, 1,226 original tweets posted by 66 major emergency official Twitter accounts and more than 15,000 retweets elicited across the life cycle of Hurricane Irma were analyzed.

Results identified the most engaging official accounts and tweets. Most tweets and the most engaging tweets were posted in the prodromal stage. Tweets related to certain topics were significantly more engaging than others. The most frequently tweeted topics by official accounts were less engaging than some seldom tweeted topics. Negative sentiment words increased the engagingness of the tweet. Sadness was the strongest predictor of tweet engagement. Tweets that contained fewer sadness words were more engaging. Fear was stronger in positively predicting tweet engagement than anger. Results also demonstrated that words for fear and anger were critical in engaging social media discussions in the prodromal stage. Words for sadness made the tweets less engaging in the chronic stage.

This study provided detailed instructions on how to increase the engagingness of emergency management official accounts during disasters using computational methods. Findings have practical implications for both emergency managers and crisis researchers.

This monograph summarises the key influences of leadership behaviour on the transformation process associated with creation of an effective and high performing team. It clarifies the key factors that are relevant to a team at each stage of the transformation process and the leadership roles that each team member can play. The role of an organisation's senior management is considered both in terms of the impact it has on the transformation process within specific teams and in terms of creating the necessary organisational environment to make effective teams the norm. Some reasons why senior management behaviour is often perceived as inconsistent and unhelpful are explored. Specific recommendations are made to help senior managers to adapt their behaviour, and in so doing become more context‐sensitive to the needs of the environment as it changes. Some tools and techniques are presented that have been found in practice to help senior managers adapt their behaviour to that most appropriate at a given time, and to create the organisational infrastructure needed to make effective teams the organisational norm rather than the exception. A case study is presented illustrating the networked nature of leadership and the culture change associated with making effective teams “the way we do things around here.”

To show how the key to successfully managing alliances is developing and implementing alliance metrics.

The case of “Acme Manufacturing” (a composite of several firms) is used to illustrate the theory and reasoning behind the creation and tracking of alliance metrics appropriate to the life cycle of the partnership. These ideas are then applied to the ongoing Avnet/HP alliance.

Understanding and applying unique metrics at each stage allows management to anticipate alliance challenges and increase flexibility and adaptability when faced with changing economic and market conditions. Across the life cycle stages the partners must learn to monitor two types of measurements – development metrics, commonly employed in the start‐up and high growth stages, and implementation metrics, engaged throughout the professional, mature, decline, and sustain stages of the life cycle.

This is a case study produced by a consultant specializing in alliance management. It has been peer reviewed but has not been subjected to independent audit.

Proactively managing alliances helps partners ensure value extraction, financial and non‐financial. Development metrics and implementation metrics can help alliance stakeholders understand and plan for the stages of the alliance life cycle while considering their knowledge transfer.

As the cases of Acme Manufacturing and Avnet/HP show, an understanding of alliance life cycles, cultures, and metrics can lead to successful planning, launching, and maintenance of a company's alliances.

The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the influences that computer‐mediated communication (CMC) has and could have on the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. In doing this, ethical dilemmas and implications that arise from the technical affordances offered to CMC participants are discussed. Relational maintenance is integral to people's everyday lives. Yet, the ethical issues involve in using CMC to support this have not been explicitly explored.

The concept of relational maintenance will be explored independently and as it relates to CMC and ethics. This paper will examine current literature and briefly discuss a pilot study relevant to these areas. The pilot study consisted of a survey distributed to undergraduate students in non‐platonic long distance and short distance relationships.

The exploration of prior literature and the findings of a pilot study support the notion that, with the increase of CMC use to maintain relationships follows the potential increase of unethical behavior in this medium. A number of ethical questions have risen that can be used to inform and direct future research.

This paper is original as it explores the concept of ethics from a relational maintenance perspective through electronic communication. It adds value by integrating these three areas and enhancing the understanding of this integration, while providing information of both theoretical and practical relevance.

Several studies have focused on the development of relationships between buyers and sellers; however, we still have a limited understanding of the interaction processes of the relationships between competitors over time. This paper aims to explore the development of relationships between competitors adopting an interaction and network approach.

This study examines nine relationships between competitors that are part of two multi-actor alliances in the pharmaceutical industry. The study builds on nine longitudinal case studies supported by 24 in-depth interviews.

The findings reveal that the development of the relationships between competitors within the alliances comprises exchange and coordination processes. The cases show that relationship development is a “never-ending process” within the alliance that includes five phases: co-existence, formation, development, dormancy and dissolution. A third party is identified as having a catalyst role in relationship development.

Supported by a comprehensive literature review on relationship development models, this study highlights the value of applying an interaction and network approach for studying relationships between competitors.

Weight‐management programmes to address obesity are an important strategy for improving community health. Some enrollees in this type of a programme are long term, repeatedly enrolling term after term, while others are short term, enrolling on average for two terms. This paper describes and compares the experiences of long‐ and short‐term enrollees of a community weight‐management programmes. Six long‐term and six short‐term enrollees in the maintenance stage of their behaviour change volunteered to participate in interviews. Both groups found the programme to be beneficial and enjoyable, and said they had learned strategies for weight control that empowered them to manage and sustain their weight loss. Long‐termers identified they had greater need for weight monitoring and ongoing support. The recommendations are to review aspects of such programmes, address ongoing support outside the class and investigate further the greater reliance of long‐term enrollees on external support.

In this article, we report on an empirical study conducted in the USA to determine the performance measures project managers commonly use to evaluate the success of their projects. Specifically, we identify project managers’ orientations toward using internal and/or customer driven measures of performance. We also investigate the priority given to these measures at different stages of a project by identifying the primary objective at those stages. In general we find that project managers’ primary success measure is quality and their most important objective is meeting customer needs. The priority given to this objective does not change during various stages of a project regardless of the project type and industry classification. The choice of performance measures, however, is influenced by project type and industry classification.

This paper aims to study the factors influencing online social network (OSN) information diffusion under different themes helps to understand information diffusion in general.

This study collects data from the Web of Science, use the strategic consulting intelligent support system for word frequency analysis and use keyword clustering to classify themes, then research information themes as influencing factors of OSN information diffusion.

Five themes of “natural disaster”, “political event”, “product marketing”, “sport and entertainment” and “health-disease” have been identified. It is found that the research objects, research methods and research theories used by scholars under different themes have different focuses, and the factors affecting information diffusion are different.

The limitation of this paper is that it only focuses on five typical themes, and there may be more themes.

The research helps other scholars to conduct in-depth research on the diffusion of OSN information under different topics and focus on the content of the research on OSN information diffusion under different topics.

The research helps other scholars to conduct in-depth research on the diffusion of social network information under different topics, so as to better understand and predict the law of information diffusion.

The research summarizes the research on information diffusion in OSNs from the theme level and analyses the key points and theories and further enriches the research system on information diffusion in OSNs.