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This research paper aims to investigate the effects of internal audit’s (IA) use of data analytics and the performance of consulting activities on perceived IA quality.

The authors conduct a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment among upper and middle managers where the use of data analytics and the performance of consulting activities by internal auditors are manipulated.

Results highlight the importance of internal auditor use of data analytics and performance of consulting activities to improve perceived IA quality. First, managers perceive internal auditors as more competent when the auditors use data analytics. Second, managers perceive internal auditors’ recommendations as more relevant when the auditors perform consulting activities. Finally, managers perceive an improvement in the quality of relationships with internal auditors when auditors perform consulting activities, which is strengthened when internal auditors combine the use of data analytics and the performance of consulting activities.

From a theoretical perspective, this research builds on the IA quality framework by considering digitalization as a contextual factor. This research focused on the perceptions of one major stakeholder of the IA function: senior management. Future research should investigate the perceptions of other stakeholders and other contextual factors.

This research suggests that internal auditors should prioritize the development of the consulting role in their function and develop their digital expertise, especially expertise in data analytics, to improve perceived IA quality.

This research tests the impacts of the use of data analytics and the performance of consulting activities on perceived IA quality holistically, by testing Trotman and Duncan’s (2018) framework using an experiment.

This paper aims to propose a framework that combines the triple helix model with competitive strategies concepts to capture and guide any innovation-led national development strategies.

This paper adopted a methodological framework based on existing methods and guidelines, the most commonly reported approach for developing a methodological framework. The review of fundamental approaches to achieving fast and sustained economic development, triple helix model and competitive strategies helped develop the methodological framework. The framework was validated and tested using the case studies approach on Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

Kuwait aims to create an innovative environment to benefit from the innovation strategies anchored by the East Asian miracle economies and how they used the triple helix actors at different developmental stages. First, Kuwait’s research institutes and universities need to design interactive programs and activities with industry and community to help innovate solutions to current and prospective challenges. Second, the government needs to provide a competitive business environment and effective policies. Thirdly, the Kuwait industry must be encouraged to innovate and infuse modern technology practices.

Developing countries are trying to use science, technology and innovation as an effective strategy for achieving sustained economic growth. However, since each country has its unique conditions, learning from other success stories proved difficult if not structured in a framework designed to serve a specific purpose such as the one the authors propose in this paper.

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. In Italy, acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is a major cause of hospitalization and healthcare costs. AMI is a myocardial necrosis event caused by an unstable ischemic syndrome. The Italian government has defined an indicator called “AMI: 30-day mortality” to assess the quality of the overall care pathway of the heart attacked patient. In order to guarantee high standards, all hospitals had to implement techniques to increase the quality of care pathway. The aim of the paper is to identify the root cause and understand the mortality rate for AMI and redesign the patient management process in order to improve it.

A Lean Six Sigma (LSS) approach was used in this study to analyze the patient flow in order to reduce 30-days mortality rate from AMI registered by Complex Operative Unit (COU) of Cardiology of an Italian hospital. Value stream mapping (VSM) and Ishikawa diagrams were implemented as tools of analysis.

Process improvement using LSS methodology made it possible to reduce the overall times from 115 minutes to 75 minutes, with a reduction of 35%. In addition, the corrective actions such as the activation of a post-discharge outpatient clinic and telephone contacts allowed the 30-day mortality rate to be lowered from 16% before the project to 8% after the project. In this way, the limit value set by the Italian government was reached.

The limitation of the study is that it is single-centered and was applied to a facility with a limited number of cases.

The LSS approach has brought significant benefits to the process of managing patients with AMI. Corrective actions such as the activation of an effective shared protocol or telephone interview with checklist can become the gold standard in reducing mortality. The limitation of the study is that it is single-centered and was applied to a facility with a limited number of cases.

LSS, applied for the first time to the management of cardiovascular diseases in Italy, is a methodology which has proved to be strategic for the improvement of healthcare process. The simple solutions implemented could serve as a guide for other hospitals to pursue the national AMI mortality target.

Despite the popularity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) concept, research on its value-adding activities receives less attention. Thus, in this article, the authors investigate the role of EEs in supporting global value chain (GVC) activities.

The authors employ the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) technique to identify practical configurations of EE’s framework and systemic conditions spurring GVC activities in 80 countries.

The findings suggest different configurations of EE`s framework and systemic conditions necessary for various GVC activities regarding input-output structure, geographical scope, upgrading, and forward and backward participation.

This study contributes to the extant literature by pioneering the EE approach to explaining GVC development. Moreover, the findings provide novel insights for understanding the EE – GVC interplay. As a result, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of how the EE supports GVC activities.

This paper aims to propose a stepwise method to improve the sustainability of manufacturing processes.

The proposed approach is based on an extensive literature review and research around the environmental, economic and social pillars of sustainability in manufacturing firms. Considering the lean approach, the manufacturing processes are mapped in a value stream and analyzed through the extensive identified sustainability criteria.

The findings reveal the consumption and waste of natural and nonrenewable resources, through going beyond the existing boundaries and focusing on relevant derived production pieces and tracing to their origins. The findings also present the effect of the time value of money on sustainability by using the cost–time profile as a sustainability criterion. This research finds out the employees’ impacts on sustainability improvement through an effective focus on technical, cultural and personal aspects.

The research outcomes provide operations managers and decision-makers in the field of sustainability with a practical platform to comprehend and assess the factors contributing to the manufacturing process sustainability and to plan relevant corrective actions accordingly.

The extended view of sustainability criteria in this research as well as its visual-analytical approach will help practitioners to assess and improve sustainability in their operations in a more holistic way.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the lean principles and the challenges of building refurbishment. To have an in-depth investigation of the application of lean principles to address the challenges of refurbishment projects, ten expert interviews following a qualitative research approach were utilised in this research. Data were analysed using manual content analysis to derive the framework.

The refurbishment of buildings has attracted the attention of the present construction industry. However, uncertain project characteristics, information deficiency, limited space for construction activities and less stakeholder involvement make it complex. Since the lean concept effectively deals with complex and uncertain projects, this study focusses to investigate the application of lean principles to overcome the challenges of refurbishment projects in Sri Lanka by developing a framework.

It was found that the five main lean principles of customer value, value stream, value flow, pull and perfection are appropriate for building refurbishment projects in Sri Lanka. Precise identification of clients and end-users, value adding and non-value adding activities, interruptions and stakeholder communication chains, setting scope, examining the possible technologies and taking measures to deliver the exact product to ensure the successful application of lean principles for refurbishment projects. Further, 27 benefits of five lean principles were identified which can be used to address the 13 identified challenges of building refurbishment of projects. Finally, a framework has developed portraying the application of lean principles in building refurbishment.

The framework developed is beneficial for the building refurbishment project team to address the barriers of refurbishment projects by applying lean principles.

This framework can be used as a guideline for the implementation of building refurbishment projects by addressing their challenges with lean principles.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an early assessment of India’s South-South cooperation for trade and technology (SSTT) with East Africa, focusing on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It aims to analyse the role of SSTT in providing support to targeted sectors.

The paper examines SSTT, focusing on India and East Africa over a specific period (2000–2016) of its emergence, and extends the public sponsorship literature in international business (IB) to better understand the relationship between SSTT and value addition – applying to a particular case study of SSTT interventions in spices.

The paper highlights SSTT as a pathway to support value addition in global value chains (GVCs). Trade between India and East African countries has grown, with three developments over the period of analysis in particular: shifting trade patterns, growing share of intermediate goods trade and differences in GVC insertion. However, East African exports are largely of lower value. Capacity building to support processing capability and thriving markets can encourage greater value addition. Preliminary findings suggest early gains at the margins, as SSTT interventions have been focusing on capacity boosting with buffering and bridging mechanisms for increased volume of trade. Moving up the value chain however requires that specific value-enhancing activities continue to be targeted, building on regional capacities. Our high-level case study for spices suggests that activities are starting to have a positive effect; however, more focus is needed to specifically target value creation before export and in particular higher levels of processing.

While findings are preliminary, policy implications emerge to guide SSTT interventions. There is capacity for building higher value-added supply chains as is evident among East African countries that trade with each other – future SSTT programmes could tap into this and help build capacity in these higher-value value chains. Future SSTT programmes can take a comprehensive approach by aiming at interventions at key points of the value chain, and especially at points that facilitate higher value addition than initial processing. An example is that Ethiopia and Rwanda are likely to benefit from an expanded spice industry, but the next phase should be towards building processing for value-addition components of the value chain, such as through trade policies, incentivising exporters to add value to items before export. From a development perspective, more analysis needs to be done on the value chain itself – for instance, trade facilitation measures to help processers engage in value chains and to access investments for increasing value add activities. (iv), Future research should examine more closely the development impacts of SSTT, namely, the connection between increased trade, local job creation and sustained innovation, as it is these tangible benefits that will help countries in the Global South realise the benefits of increased trade.

The paper underlines how the SSTT approach can contribute to the critical IB and GVCs literature using a theoretical grounded approach from public sponsorship theory, and with a unique lens of development cooperation between countries in the global south and its emerging impact on development outcomes in these countries.

The main goal of this paper is to examine the evolution of Latin American productive integration in terms of the regional value added incorporated in intra-regional exports of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. In addition, the study traces the trade and productive integration trajectories for each of these countries from 1995 to 2015.

Based on the use of OECD’s global ICIO input-output tables, this paper applies the methodological framework by Wang et al. (2018) for the analysis of trade flows at the bilateral level, which allows breaking down the value of gross exports of each sector-country, depending on the origin of the value added contained in exports, as well as their use.

The estimates show very low shares of value added from regional partners in the intra-regional exports of the countries studied. Conversely, the weight of the value added incorporated in these exports by countries outside the region has increased in tandem with China’s expanding involvement in Latin America. This development, along with the downward trend in domestic value added incorporated in exports, indicates a lack of a regional integration process of any depth.

This article addresses an economic problem of conventional importance from a global value chain perspective using a novel methodology based on the use of global input–output tables.

The aim of this study reported in this paper was to explore the application of operational excellence methodologies in a global context.

A qualitative interview approach was used to understand the current state, benefits, challenges, success factors, tools and techniques of operational excellence methodology implementation with relevance to logistics companies worldwide. About 16 interviews were undertaken with practitioners working in leading companies and with leading academics in Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America and Australia.

The findings show that operational excellence methodologies including Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma and Agile can apply in logistics firms to improve operations and productivity and save costs. Top management support and involvement play an important role in the success of operational excellence projects in the logistics service.

The findings will be of interest to top and middle managers and logistics practitioners, with a dual aim of improving logistics performance and saving costs.

The present study has been one of the first global study attempts to explore the implementation of operational excellence methodologies in the logistics sectors.

The authors investigate the impact of standards compliance on the participation in the global value chain and labour value-added of Vietnam’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The authors use a three-period panel dataset of SMEs combined with Vietnam’s Provincial Competitiveness Index. The authors also use multiple econometric models; and with each model, the authors include all independent variables that are available from the study's data and that are suggested by the literature.

The authors find that standards compliance by Vietnam’s SMEs improved their participation in the global value chain via subcontracts with FDI multinational firms. The authors also find that standards compliance improved the value-added of labour in Vietnam’s SMEs, which is robust to the choice of econometric models.

The study's results suggest that better outcomes for firms and society will be possible if standards are recognised and respected.

This paper complements scant literature on the impact of standards compliance on global value chain participation via subcontracting work and labour value-added, especially in developing countries.