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Scholars and practitioners agree that governance practices are at the core of what differentiates family firms from other forms of business. Yet, there is a lack of consensus in the extant literature about how and the extent to which family governance affects firm performance. This study aims to address the matter by taking a more comprehensive unified systems perspective to explore the pathways through which variations in family governance mechanisms simultaneously affect both the business and the family system.

This study utilises a global dataset sourced from a survey and structural equation modelling to empirically measure several intermediate and final outcomes of family governance.

This study finds that the use of family protocols, as well as formal and informal meetings, have positive effects on the functioning of the family, whereas family involvement in the top management team diminishes the firm's competitive advantage. In turn, this study demonstrates that both family functioning and competitive advantage are positively related to firm performance.

By taking into consideration the complexity of the family and business systems, and measuring their interlinkages, this study advances knowledge by providing a more complete picture of the family governance/firm performance relationship.

It has been two decades since the first academic paper shone a spotlight on non-GAAP earnings. The past 20 years of research investigates concerns over the misuse of these disclosures and resulted in some significant changes to accounting and reporting standards across the globe. This paper aims to document the history of non-GAAP reporting and outline the emerging themes of the now matured practice of non-GAAP reporting.

This systematic literature review searches two popular databases to identify the academic publications relating to non-GAAP reporting between 2002 and 2022. The paper uses bibliographic mapping to present the key statistics of the non-GAAP reporting field of research.

The non-GAAP reporting environment started out as the “wild West’ but, through regulation and public awareness, emerged as an important supplement to the traditional outputs of financial reporting. Current consensus is recent non-GAAP earnings are informative to users but there is lack of research into qualitative non-GAAP disclosures and the vast body of archival research needs triangulating with more experimental studies.

This paper contributes to the literature by documenting the past 20 years of non-GAAP reporting and identifying the important existing and emerging research areas concerning non-GAAP earnings disclosures.

This article describes the development and initial experiences of Design Your Life, a new design approach implementing user-initiated design of technological environments that support autistic young adults to live independently.

This article makes use of a phenomenological Research-through-Design approach. Investigation of possible ways in which a set of four guiding principles could be applied into a design toolkit for autistic young adults and their caregivers by means of three design case studies was conducted. Promising methods from the design practice and literature were applied and contrasted with the lived experiences and practical contexts of autistic young adults and their caregivers.

This exploratory research yielded several important insights for the design direction of Design Your Life. Reflecting on how the guiding principles played out in practice it was noted that: the case studies showed that stakeholders appreciate the approach. The design principles applied cannot be used without the help of a sparring partner. This suggests that caregivers may be trained in design-thinking to fulfil this role. The Design Your Life method will be iteratively developed, refined and validated in practice.

The presented approach puts design tools in the hands of the people who will use the technology. Furthermore, the approach sees technologies as empowering interventions by which a person can strengthen their own living environment. According to this article, this approach is new for this application. It provides valuable perspectives and considerations for autistic people, caregivers, researchers and policy makers.

The purpose of this study was to assess particular student outcomes when design thinking was integrated into an environmental engineering course. The literature is increasingly promoting design thinking for addressing societal and environmental sustainability engineering challenges. Design thinking is a human-centered approach that identifies needs upfront.

In an undergraduate engineering course, Design for the Environment, students have begun to obtain hands-on experience in applying design thinking to sustainability challenges. This case study investigates the association between the use of design thinking and student creativity with sustainability design solutions. Student perspectives on their own creativity and future sustainable design practices as a result of the course were also investigated.

The findings were favorable for design thinking, being associated with a significant difference and medium-to-large effect with regards to solution novelty. A qualitative analysis showed a positive association between design thinking and students’ perceptions of their creativity and future anticipated sustainability practices. Using a content analysis of reflective writings, students’ application of design thinking was assessed for comprehensiveness and correctness. A two-week introductory design-thinking module and significant use of in-class active learning were the course elements that most notably impacted students’ use of design thinking.

This case study preliminarily demonstrates that application of design thinking within an environmental engineering course may be associated with beneficial outcomes related to creativity and sustainability.

A review of the literature did not uncover studies of the use of design thinking for undergraduate socio-environmental challenges to promote creativity and sustainable-practices outcomes, although the literature has been calling for the marrying of these two areas.

Traditional paradigms of leadership have celebrated decisive top-down control and analytical decision making. But times are changing. The world is becoming more connected, complex, fluid, and interdependent.

Leading people in this age requires empathy, collaboration, curiosity, and creativity. It’s more about designing elegant solutions than mandating feasible ones. It’s more about becoming optimistic beacons of change than authoritative custodians of the status quo. The leaders of tomorrow are not commanders, they are innovators; and in that, they have a natural ally in designers – the poster children of innovation.

This chapter focuses on how leadership can leverage tools and frameworks usually associated with design to innovate, solve complex problems, motivate teams, inspire people, and nurture the next generation of leaders. It discusses design methodologies – user-focused design, lean, design thinking – as potential approaches to optimizing organizational leadership. We elaborate these ideas through real-world examples.

The chapter also offers actionable tips and techniques that designers use to respond empathetically and elegantly to complex human needs, which are rooted deeply in behaviors and attitudes, governed by complex interactions, and therefore, hard to grapple through a purely analytical approach.

It debunks the myth that leaders need to be creative similar to designers to apply Design Thinking. Applying design approaches and practices to organizational leadership is not just about its leaders becoming more creative. It is definitely not about the person at the top coming up with the grand answer. It is a collaborative effort that brings people from all levels together in pursuit of a common goal.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview about the Semantic Web, its importance and history and an overview of recent Semantic Web technologies which can be used to enhance digital libraries.

The paper answers, at least partially, questions like “What is the Semantic Web?”, “How could the Semantic Web look like?”, “Why is the Semantic Web important?”, “What are ontologies?” and “Where are we now?”. Several pointers to further literature and web sites complete the overview.

Semantic Web technologies are valuable add‐ons for digital libraries. There already exist numerous academic and commercial tools which can be applied right now.

The overview of Semantic Web technologies cannot be complete in such an article, therefore we limit ourselves to the most prominent technologies available. However, following the pointers given readers can easily find more information.

The article is of particular value for newcomers in this area.

This chapter provides an overview of the space reimagining that has occurred in a mid-size library that serves both the life and social sciences at a large research university. Projects are introduced that have transformed physical and virtual spaces from preprogrammed areas and services designed to serve librarian-defined needs to an open and flexible architecture that better incorporates and facilitates the projects, ideas, and interest-driven learning initiated by users. As we move from “library as place” to “library as platform” (Bennett, 2003; Weinberger, 2012), the library becomes a central location for users to connect with and learn from one another, create and remix, display and discuss their work, and capture and preserve community knowledge.

The authors examine various initiatives in the library to demonstrate the role of library space. Each initiative is framed as a case study to illustrate how librarians have responded to user needs and the impact that these changes have had on management in libraries.

The change in focus to “library as platform” requires flexible and flat library management, additional staff roles, and changing paradigms of library space and skills.

This chapter adds to the body of case studies examining what the library of the future could look like in practice as well as theory.

The current study gives a quantitative analysis DT literature over the past ten years in domain of management and business where the field has witnessed a proliferation in studies. The study's primary areas of concentration were analyzing historical trends and identifying prospective future research opportunities in the field. Due of the way, it approaches innovation and problem-solving, design thinking has garnered a lot of interest from both academics and practitioners. Promoters and detractors, however, tend to have quite different perspectives on the program's core qualities, practicality and results.

The study adopts a bibliometric approach to a systematic literature review, where the analyses and visualizations are carried out using R Studio (Biblioshiny package) and VosViewer software. The study was conducted on 518 documents extracted from the Scopus database. To identify past research trends in the field, performance analysis based on productivity and/or impact of the research constituents was carried out to understand the intellectual structure of the field.

The study's findings indicated that few areas have received the most attention, which are presented as seven themes. While the emerging themes in the field include areas such as service design, service innovation, customer experience, innovation management, project management and 21st-century skills.

The studies are going deeper by breaking down concepts or processes and analyzing one aspect at a time, codesign and prototyping are such subareas within the realm of service or new product design and development.

This study is the first of its kind where a literature review has been conducted covering design thinking in the area of business management and accounting.