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The increasing global competition, worldwide economic and political uncertainities, and continuously changing dynamics in business environment require companies act differently and differentiate via smart strategies in order to have sustainable operations, growth, and profitability. Therefore, firms should be more agile, creative, and adaptive in planning and strategizing their mid- to long-term business objectives.

In that regard, for the last decade globally many firms across all industries seek opportunities to utilize benefits of digitalization. Lately, COVID-19 has also accelerated companies' efforts and investments in digital platforms.

Today, supply chain and procurement functions are expected to have a strategic role for organizations contributing to management decisions. The digital transformation in procurement is promising to enhance and lean the total workflow of operations. Data analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other emerging digital technologies are all highly powerful tools supporting strategic supply and supplier management, providing predictability for demand planning as well as value-based negotiation power to buyers.

On the other hand, there are still challenges and conflicts throughout this transformation process. Level of technological maturity, infrastructure and investment decisions, expertise and competency of procurement professionals, cultural adaptation, and compliance of related stakeholders are some of the key barriers that are addressed with a unique model in this chapter.

Digital era offers a lot of advantages to firms to improve their procurement facilities and practices while it may still take time both for the technologies to fully evolve and also for companies to adapt and embrace digitalization on their benefit.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

Biomimicry is an interdisciplinary approach inspired by the living beings in nature while searching for solutions to solve mankind’s problems. This new approach emerging in the late 1990s has been quite innovative while dealing with basic problem solving processes in a business environment. Biomimicry is a creative solution for such processes as design, transformation, organization and sustainability in business enterprises. The objective of this work is to offer model samples that build a bridge between the nature and business organizations. The principles in nature offer many strategies for a sustainable business performance and thus help us maintain optimization and effectiveness in business management through cooperation.

Purpose: In addition to the liberalisation policy, big data has revolutionised the level of awareness among customers about the quality and prices of insurance products. The rationale behind this study is to underline the issues in managing product portfolios in a disruptive environment, where a sudden and unexpected situation like COVID-19 pandemic is going to challenge the traditional models and insurance covers of organisations as well as individuals.

Methodology: The study is based on secondary data. The scope of the study will only be confined to the top two general insurance companies in India based on year of registration and market share to compare their product portfolios during pre- and post-liberalisation periods ranging from 1985–1986 to 2000–2001 and 2001–2002 to 2018–2019, respectively.

Findings: There is a lack of a balanced product portfolio for fulfilling the varying needs of customers. The insurance companies needed to set up different portfolios and should provide separate covers for natural catastrophes such as floods, earthquakes, landslides, tsunami, and the occurrence of new pandemics like COVID-19.

Significance: The study highlights that the outbreak of COVID-19 and similar pandemics or global emergencies need special preparation from the insurance sector.

In the past decade, the effectiveness and efficiency foreign aid (Aid Industry) has generated considerable debate in both of the academic and popular press. Despite spending billions of dollars in foreign aid well over a billion people remain in extreme poverty. This paper did not intend to question the magnitude of the effort or the motives of donors or aid agencies, but rather why the aid programs have not been more effective.

Certain research in behavioral economics, pathological altruism, and emotional empathy may help provide answers. Common to these theories is the idea that well-intentioned actions or policies may cause unintended, harmful consequences to either the donors or the intended beneficiaries of these actions or policies. This paradoxical result is typically due to the altruist’s inability to properly analyze the situation for a variety of reasons. The Aid Industry may be particularly susceptible to these behavioral biases and thus is likely to suffer to some extent from unintended adverse consequences.

This paper focused on ethical considerations at the microlevel, that is, the paper considered the impact of aid on individual’s economic utility and human dignity as opposed to macromeasures such as gross domestic product. Our purpose was to examine how behavioral theories can improve foreign aid efficiency and effectiveness. Using specific examples and considering ethical arguments based on utility and rights theories, we illustrated how these behavioral theories help explain the Aid Industry’s suboptimal results.

At the nexus of mindfulness and parenting lies the fusion of two influential yet contradictory epistemologies, the Eastern contemplative practices with the Western parenting research. Mindful parenting is a parenting style, which has grown in popularity in recent times to support parents during pregnancy, birth and beyond. The current study is the third stage of a mixed methods study on mindful parenting. The first stage of the study design conducted a systematic review of mindful parenting. The second stage summarized the change processes identified in the systematic review. The aim of this pilot study is to clarify four clinicians’ perceptions of cognitive change processes associated with mindful parenting, particularly how theory is translated to practice. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyze semi-structured interviews. The six higher-order change processes were conceptualized as an anchor. Cognitive processes included intention, attention, attitude, and reflective functioning. Given its methodological limitations, the next future work needs is to survey a large sample of both clinicians and parents to verify the model. This paper makes an important contribution to the development of a more comprehensive theoretical model of mindful parenting.