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Starting from a critical analysis of the main criteria currently used to identify marginal areas, this paper aims to propose a new classification model of such territories by leveraging knowledge discovery approaches and knowledge visualization techniques, which represent a fundamental pillar in the knowledge-based urban development process.

The methodology adopted in this study relies on the design science research, which includes five steps: problem identification, objective definition, solution design and development, demonstration and evaluation.

Results demonstrate how to exploit knowledge discovery and visualization to obtain multiple mappings of inner areas, in the aim to identify good practices and optimize resources to set up more effective territorial development strategies and plans. The proposed approach overcomes the traditional way adopted to map inner areas that uses a single indicator (i.e. the distance between a municipality and the nearest pole where it is possible to access to education, health and transportation services) and leverages seven groups of indicators that represent the distinguishing features of territories (territorial capital, social costs, citizenship, geo-demography, economy, innovation and sustainable development).

The proposed model could be enriched by new variables, whose value can be collected by official sources and stakeholders engaged to provide both structured and unstructured data. Also, another enhancement could be the development of a cross-algorithms comparison that may reveal useful to suggest which algorithm can better suit the needs of policy makers or practitioners.

This study sets the ground for proposing a decision support tool that policy makers can use to classify in a new way the inner areas, thus overcoming the current approach and leveraging the distinguishing features of territories.

This study shows how the availability of distributed knowledge sources, the modern knowledge management techniques and the emerging digital technologies can provide new opportunities for the governance of a city or territory, thus revitalizing the domain of knowledge-based urban development.

Money, time and brainpower are being frittered away in the search for knowledge and in reinventing the wheel, all at the expense of efficiency and innovation. Moreover, there is very little understanding of the causes. Proposes to investigate this situation.

Acknowledges that a substantial part of human behaviour is determined by the instinct to survive.

Knowledge management rationalises or idealises human behaviour. However, a large part of human behaviour is driven by the instinct to survive. This instinct makes people egoistic and lazy in a smart way, as they try to achieve the maximum result with the minimum of effort. The same instinct urges them to look after their offspring and their territory, and it makes people as passionate as they are.

It is important to use information technology systems not so much to secure knowledge as to visualise traces of knowledge that people leave behind in their territory and to bring specialists in contact with one another. In organisations, one must make sure that the human scale is preserved and capitalise on people's pride and the way they care for their “offspring”. One must utilise the survival instinct in organisations as it leads to the smarter recycling of knowledge and to innovation.

Knowledge management so far involved technical, business, and learning perspectives. This is the first work on knowledge management acknowledging that a substantial part of human behaviour is determined by people's instinct to survive.

The purpose of this paper is to consider “at home ethnography” and “abroad ethnography” not as labels standing for different kinds of fieldwork “out there” but rather as the poles of a continuum identifying the ethnographer’s situated, relative and ever changing epistemic status.

Building on data from a recent fieldwork in an intensive care unit, the author identifies the different epistemic circumstances that originate from the entanglement of the multiple territories of knowledge at stake in any ethnography of complex organizations.

The analysis shows how the participants’ relative access to knowledge and rights to claim it vary according to the circumstances and the unfolding of the interaction. The discussion advances that the ethnographer oscillates between “being abroad” and “being at home” as if he was constantly moving between the two classical positions of ethnographic work: making the familiar strange as it is typical of ethnographies focusing on the “very ‘ordinariness’ of normality” (Ybema et al., 2009, p. 2), and making the strange familiar as it is typical of anthropologists studying exotic communities.

The paper contributes to the still ongoing debate on “at home” organizational ethnography, by addressing the limits of the “insider doctrine” (Merton, 1972) that still pervades contemporary ethnography and proposes cognitive oscillation as the challenging mindset of any ethnographer-in-the-field.

The study investigates the use of early forms of environmental accounting in the implementation of environmental strategies in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany between the 16th and 17th centuries.

The study adopts the Foucauldian concept of raison d’État to shed light on the ways in which environmental accounting practices were used by Tuscan Grand Dukes to form a detailed knowledge of the territory to be governed and act accordingly.

Financial and non-financial information relating to environmental issues enabled the Grand Dukes to “visualise” the territory to be managed as an enclosed disciplinary space whereby the conduct of people living therein could be decisively influenced. Accounting practices as a tool for the implementation of environmental strategies did not merely aim to protect the environment but were a means to reinforce the power of the State.

The paper can inform future works that investigate the ways in which environmental policies and accounting are used to pursue far-reaching governmental goals. It encourages scholars to examine further the origins of environmental accounting and its early forms.

The study documents how environmental strategies and the related use of accounting can have a significant influence on how individuals are allowed to conduct themselves. It also shows that environmental accounting practices can be an important tool in a State’s machinery of power.

The study offers a novel perspective on the use of environmental accounting information as a tool in the exercise of State power. It explores explicitly the interrelations between accounting, sustainability and power. It also adds new evidence to historical research that has engaged with early forms of environmental accounting.

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.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of novelty emergence in the context of an “off-line” open innovation system. Several contributions address novelty generation implying open innovation that is typically mediated by IT systems, while fewer address open innovation that takes place off-line, through new forms of collaboration happening in the so-called “physical spaces” and in widespread creativity contexts involving whole cities and territories. This research aims to clarify what the critical elements for novelty generation are, and how and why they interact in producing novelty.

This paper presents the case study of the Blackshape, a high-tech start-up that has become the Italian symbol of a new bottom-up economy that is grounded on high-education, a mix of territorial competencies and young initiative, and produces the development or growth of territories experiencing present or foreseen economic retardation for various reasons. This is a case in which novelty is emergent and takes place through exaptation. The case is used to elaborate an inductive understanding of the process of novelty generation through exaptation and follows a “conceptual composition” format (Berends and Deken, 2019).

This paper shows that initiatives building widespread creativity on the territory play a prominent role for emergent novelty generation, as they provide the context that sustains the efforts to keep on trying of entrepreneurs, welcomes unforeseen interaction and keeps interesting people on the territory that can be involved in random encounters. This paper adds that crucial contributions for the definition of the innovative project come from contributors that are expected to provide suggestions in other areas. Such prominent contributors are engaged in a sense “by mistake”, and here the randomness perceived by the actors experiencing it, because they are perceived to be able to provide some contributions, while they provide others that are more important to the project. This paper argues that such “perceived randomness” sustains a mechanism of selection of novelty generation partners that allows to go beyond the ability of actors themselves to design and foresee other actors’ contribution into the project. Finally, two other elements play a role: how the project is narrated, as well as, how the entrepreneurial team communicates their entrepreneurial competence for the project.

This theoretical understanding builds on only one case study; further research might validate the critical role of our understanding of novelty generation elements and help develop their dynamics further.

Many elements in our understanding of novelty generation have typically been understood as resulting from luck and randomness, leaving, therefore, very little hope to actors’ interest in supporting them. This paper claims that such elements and such dynamics can be sustained and novelty generation can indirectly be supported, for instance, by suggesting a high openness and sharing of one’s own project even to accidentally encountered actors, as one’s own ability to foresee how they might contribute to the project is very poor.

This paper provides a tentative understanding of the elements and dynamics of novelty generation through exaptation building on theoretical elaboration that is inductively triggered and stimulated by empirical evidence.

This study aims to build a research model from the perspectives of knowledge hiding and idea implementation to examine what factors influence idea implementation and the cross-level moderating role of team territory climate.

Data were collected from universities, 52 (R&D) teams in China via a two-wave survey. The final sample contained 209 team members and their immediate supervisors. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to test hypotheses.

The results indicated that individuals’ knowledge-hiding behavior had a significantly negative impact on idea implementation and creative process engagement, which played a mediating role. Team territorial climate played a cross-level moderating role between knowledge hiding and idea implementation. If team territorial climate was at a high level, then the negative connection between knowledge hiding and idea implementation would be weaker.

Under the perspective of territorial behavior in Chinese cultural, it can help to distinguish territorial behavior and be preventive at individual and team levels. This study not only enables managers to clearly understand the precipitating factors of idea implementation but also provides constructive strategies for alleviating the negative effects of knowledge territoriality on creative process engagement and idea implementation.

This study constructs a cross-level model to explore the relationship among knowledge hiding, creative process engagement and idea implementation at individual and team levels in the context of Chinese R&D enterprises. Additionally, the study analyzes the influence of territoriality on idea implementation under boundary conditions.

Purpose – Adapting local areas to climate change is a wicked challenge for local administrations. A participatory research is applied to explore how local experience shared by local experts can inform decision and adaptation planning by taking into account local area characteristics and their interrelationships.

Methodology/approach – We turned to local actors, who live or work in the city and who can be seen as urban experts. Their experiential knowledge has given us a better understanding of the characteristics of their communities. These experts are likely to possess a representation that reflects the local territorial sensitivities, which can help us determine how these characteristics might be impacted by climate change.

Findings – A participatory approach bears many benefits such as mobilizing local stakeholders to find collective solutions. It also allows us to focus on common practices in the urban context, which are likely to be altered by changes in mean temperatures, precipitations, etc. It offers the additional benefit of putting into perspective the relations between a variety of urban issues.

Research limitations – A participatory approach means relying on subjective assessments of the possible effects of climate change, which could challenge the relevance of perceived risks and the scope and types of actions taken.

Originality/value of paper – The number of the available adaptation planning processes involving community stakeholders and assessments of these processes is very limited. A participatory process such as the cross-sectoral initiative organized in Québec City can have significant repercussions on local engagement in climate change adaptation. This provides evidence of the potential of deliberation or interaction of territorial actors to improve their understanding of the issues and their adaptive capacity. On a methodological level, the participatory process in itself and the steps to organize it offered a planning frame that can be reproduced.

The present study focuses on the role of PDO certification in fostering the quality perception of certified-food consumers – highlighting the difference between quality brands and environmental labels. The case study of Mozzarella di Gioia del Colle DOP was taken into consideration to evaluate the opportunity of supporting a food product suitable for all families and promoting it worldwide through a quality certification.

The authors made a qualitative analysis on local Apulian consumers and, for testing our hypotheses, structural equation models were applied to evaluate the effect of familiarity on the relationships between perceived risk, trust, satisfaction, loyalty, resolution to pay a higher price and intent to purchase a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) certified food product.

The authors observed managerial implications which seek to improve the collaborative network between the subjects employed in the phases of the production process, the stakeholders and the consortia, in order to plan a holistic development territorial strategy. It is useful to start a process of knowledge and evaluation of the benefits of the quality mark in the territory of origin of the PDO food product.

The authors provided theoretical and managerial implications which aim at improving the collaborative network between the subjects employed in the phases of the production process, stakeholders and consortia, in the outlook of territorial development strategies.

According to the analysis of the theoretical background, the opportunity to recognise the origin of a certain product allows the consumer to easily appreciate its intrinsic quality, relating a combination of factors to the territorial matching. It also focuses on the analysis of a different feedback at a local level from consumers, showing a lower intention to pay by consumers living in the same area where the PDO product comes from rather than other food goods.

This study aims to assess knowledge retention of the graduates of the online graduate certificate on local development planning, land use management and disaster risk management (PDLOTGR, the abbreviation of the certificate's Spanish title). The certificate was offered to practitioners and faculty members of Latin American countries since 2016.

The authors reviewed the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) method to develop a specific approach, which included the preparation of a KAP survey, a composite KAP index and three sub-indices. The survey targeted two groups: (1) experimental group, composed of the certificate's 76 graduates, and (2) control group, comprised of 25 certificate's candidates, who had not yet undergone the training/intervention. The statistical analysis included a one-way multivariate analysis of variance to compare the mean scores on the KAP index and sub-indices for individuals in the experimental and control groups.

The study results showed significant differences in the knowledge sub-index between those who had completed the PDLOTGR training and those who had not, while the attitudes and practices sub-indices did not show significant differences. When using the KAP index, a statistically significant difference was also observed between the two groups.

Perceived knowledge assessment offers an acceptable and non-intimidating option for evaluating continuing education and professional development programs associated to disaster risk. It is particularly helpful in determining whether an intervention or program has a lasting impact. It is not, however, a substitute for direct knowledge assessment, and the use of other methods to evaluate the performance of a capacity building program's graduates.