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This study aims to explore how manufacturing firms master customer lock-in through value creation by servitization innovation strategies from the perspective of asset specificity.

A multiple case study with triangulation fashion is adopted to identify servitization innovation strategies. Several manufacturing firms were investigated, which are distributed in different positions of the value chain. Content analysis and abductive approaches are adopted to analyze the data. Moreover, an in-depth interview and participatory observation were conducted to refine the analysis results.

This study identified four different focusing points of servitization operations. Based on these, the paper further induces an innovative servitization strategy matrix of customer lock-in, concerning communion, intellectual, existential and insubstantial strategies. Furthermore, a conceptual model of customer lock-in by servitization innovation from the perspective of asset specificity is elaborated. It is suggested that companies can use tangible or intangible resources by sharing or storing operations to create servitization value.

This study theoretically proposes a conceptual model to extend servitization innovation as an intangible asset and adopt the new perspective of asset specificity to illustrate the value creation in servitization to generate customer lock-in.

Lockdowns and the forced closure of certain industries during the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted workers, particularly entrepreneurs, who were financially and emotionally involved in their businesses. Two studies have shown that entrepreneurs have a lower willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19 than employees. In this study, the authors try to replicate the vaccination gap between the two groups. Second, the authors study whether the difference persists when controlling for demographics, vaccination attitudes and the COVID-19 context, including the financial impact of the pandemic, its effect on the wellbeing of workers, and government attitudes. Third, the authors study whether there are differences in how the context of the pandemic relates to vaccination willingness for entrepreneurs and employees.

The authors conduct regression analyses using three large datasets. The authors study vaccination status (February 2022) in a 27-country Eurobarometer sample, vaccination intention (December 2020) in a Dutch sample from the LISS panel and vaccination status (July 2021) in a sample from the Understanding America Study (UAS).

All datasets confirm that entrepreneurs have lower vaccination intention and coverage than employees. Even when controlling for the variables described in the LISS and UAS datasets, this negative difference remains. The study results also indicate that demographics, especially vaccination attitudes, are much more important than contextual influences in the decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

The authors are the first to dive further into the vaccination differences between entrepreneurs and employees. They advise further research into the drivers of this gap, specifically relating to the role of personality and social normative influences.

This article studies the role played by sustainability operations management (OM) practices in the relationship between governance and environmental and social performance adopting the lenses of the upper echelons theory and the resource-based view. In particular, the authors study three main relationships: (1) the impact of governance on the implementation of sustainability OM practices, (2) the impact of sustainability OM practices on sustainability performance and (3) the mediating role of sustainability OM practices in the relationship between governance and sustainability performance.

To test this study’s research model, the authors retrieved secondary data of 430 firms from the United Stated (US) and Europe and analyzed it using partial least squares (PLS)-based structural equation modeling (SEM).

This study’s results suggest that sustainability OM practices are needed to achieve higher social and environmental performance outcomes from governance, highlighting the key role of the OM department in the achievement of a sustainability strategy.

This paper adopts the environmental, social, governance (ESG) neglected focus and aims to provide a better understanding of and reveal the interrelationship between governance and sustainability OM practices (i.e. environmental and social).

Although previous studies have examined the influence of celebrity involvement in behavioural intentions, the role of celebrity dimensions such as attraction, self-expression and centrality in influencing tourists’ intention in the context of developing countries such as Tanzania remains largely unaddressed. This study, therefore, examined the relationship between celebrity involvement and domestic tourists' intentions to visit tourist attractions, attitude being the mediating variable.

A questionnaire was self-administered on a convenient sample of 279 domestic tourists in the Tanzania’s four largest regions, namely, Dar es Salaam, Mbeya, Arusha and Mwanza. Employing a quantitative research approach, structural equation modelling was performed to test the cause-and-effect relationships between celebrity involvement and tourists’ intentions before testing the mediating role of attitude in such a relationship. Confirmatory factor analysis was also performed to test the measurement models.

Attraction emerged to be the main determinant of the celebrity dimension that significantly influenced domestic tourists’ travel intentions, whereas attitude partially mediates such a relationship. Moreover, Bongo Fleva musicians, particularly Diamond Platnumz, one of the leading celebrities in this genre, were found to influence most of the respondents’ travel intentions – he posted a picture on his Instagram account of him touring the Serengeti National Park.

The study focused on domestic tourists residing in four of the Mainland Tanzania’s largest regions, hence excluding those residing on the islands of Unguja and Pemba. Due to cultural differences, including the islands not only could unleash new perspectives on celebrity involvement dimensions but also could have introduced new determinants of travel intentions.

This study offers guidance to tourism businesses on designing their marketing campaigns that they should harness celebrity’s attractive qualities effectively. The focus should be directed not only towards linking destinations with celebrities but also on stimulating positive perception of those destinations, aligning with the attitudes of their followers.

The study has set out a new perspective for researchers, practitioners and tourism businesses to refine their promotional strategies and for academicians to gain a deeper understanding of visitor behavioural intention dynamics.

This study has proposed and verified that attraction is a dominant determinant compared to self-expression and centrality in explaining tourists’ travel intentions and attitudes, which play a significant role in explaining such a relationship. Although the study employed a modified theory of planned behaviour in a celebrity involvement study, the findings have broadened the understanding and its applicability in the context of a developing country.

Independent directors are important corporate decision participants and makers. Based on the Chinese cultural background, this paper interprets the listing order of independent directors as independent directors’ status, exploring their influence on the corporate research and development (R&D) behavior.

This paper studies A-share listed firms in China from 2008 to 2018 as the sample. The main method is ordinary least square (OLS) regression. We also use other methods to deal with endogenous problems, such as the firm fixed effect method, change model method, two-stage instrumental variable method, and Heckman two-stage method.

(1) Higher independent directors’ status attribute to more effective exertion of supervision and consultation function, and positively enhance the corporate R&D investment. The increase of the independent director’ status by one standard deviation will increase the R&D investment by 4.6%. (2) The above effect is more influential in firms with stronger traditional culture atmosphere, higher information opacity and higher performance volatility. (3) High-status independent directors promote R&D investment by improving the scientificity of R&D evaluation and reducing information asymmetry. (4) The enhancing effect of independent director’ status on R&D investment is positively associated with the firm’s patent output and market value.

This paper contributes to understanding the relationship between the independent directors’ status and their duty execution from an embedded cultural background perspective. The findings of the study enlighten the improvement of corporate governance efficiency and the healthy development of the capital market.

To date, research on migration and entrepreneurship has rarely focused expat-preneurs. Based on recent developments in both fields, this paper aims to investigate the under-researched phenomenon of Chinese self-initiated expatriates who choose to temporarily live and do business abroad on their own volition.

To address this research gap, 15 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Chinese expat-preneurs living in Portugal were conducted, exposing their narratives about their multiple challenges.

The findings corroborate the theoretical need to look beyond narrow economic explanations for why individuals engage in transnational entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial itinerancy. A collective identity and ethnic community are important because they influence how opportunities are identified and pursued.

This is a qualitative and interpretative study in a limited geographical area, which does not intent to ensure generalizability. More research is needed to further understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurial itinerancy in Europe and among other ethnic communities.

The findings provide insightful inputs to Portuguese policymakers and locals on how to support ethnic entrepreneurship. Chinese expat-preneurs also benefit from understanding how to strength their ethnic social ties in connection with local communities.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurship and international mobility literatures by providing new insights into the nature and dynamics of Chinese “expat-preneurs”, including their entrepreneurial itinerancy, necessary to properly understand entrepreneurs’ diversity and assist in extending transnational entrepreneurial theory.

The paper intends to show the role of fear of COVID-19 and the relevance of customer empowerment (CU_EMP) and customers’ perceived value of digital service transactions (CU_PV_DST) in promoting green bank service purchase intention (GBS_PI), despite the antagonistic impacts brought in other sectors and the relevance of customer empowerment (CU_EMP) and customers’ perceived value of digital service transactions (CU_PV_DST) as important mediating variables of the relation.

The structured questionnaire helped collect survey data from 323 small business people. The model relationship was assessed through EFA, CFA by SPSS-AMOS and SEM using bootstrapping procedures in Smart-PLS.

The findings of this study show that there is a significant effect of fear of COVID-19 pandemic (F_COVID-19P) on CU_EMP and GBS_PI. CU_EMP influences GBS_PI, whereas F_COVID-19P influences GBS_PI indirectly via CU_EMP. Furthermore, there is a substantial effect of F_COVID-19P on CU_PV_DST and GBS_PI. Thus, F_COVID-19P significantly influences GBS_PI indirectly via CU_PV_DST.

Capitalizing on the COVID-19 wave by empowering customers technologically, improving the legal framework and increasing the perceived value of green service by using an innovative mechanism. In addition, fostering cultural change and emphasizing altruistic values through green advertisements have been explored in this study.

Green services are healthier for smart/green economy and are health-protective for coping with health risks.

This study helps in understanding the theories used in this context by linking them to F_COVID-19P with CU_EMP, CU_PV_DST and GBS_PI and contributes to the literature of both. Furthermore, this is the only study that has used SEM to study this kind of interrelation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel data-driven approach for predicting energy performance of buildings that can address the scarcity of quality data, and consider the dynamic nature of building systems.

This paper proposes a reinforcing machine learning (ML) approach based on transfer learning (TL) to address these challenges. The proposed approach dynamically incorporates the data captured by the building management systems into the model to improve its accuracy.

It was shown that the proposed approach could improve the accuracy of the energy performance prediction compared to the conventional TL (non-reinforcing) approach by 19 percentage points in mean absolute percentage error.

The case study results confirm the practicality of the proposed approach and show that it outperforms the standard ML approach (with no transferred knowledge) when little data is available.

This approach contributes to the body of knowledge by addressing the limited data availability in the building sector using TL; and accounting for the dynamics of buildings’ energy performance by the reinforcing architecture. The proposed approach is implemented in a case study project based in London, UK.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the current state of research on the integration of blockchain and building information modelling (BIM) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry as a means of identifying gaps between the existing paradigm and practical applications for determining future research directions and improving the industry. The study aims to provide clear guidance on areas that need attention for further research and funding and to draw academic attention to factors beyond the technical dimension.

A mixed-method systematic review is used, considering multiple literature types and using a sociotechnical perspective-based framework that covers three dimensions (technic, process and context) and three research elements (why, what and how). Data are retrieved and analysed from the Web of Science and Scopus databases for the 2017–2023 period.

While blockchain has the potential to address security, traceability and transparency and complement the system by integrating supporting applications, significant gaps still exist between these potentials and widespread industry adoption. Current limitations and further research needs are identified, including designing fully integrated prototypes, empirical research to identify operational processes, testing and analysing operational-level models or applications and developing and applying a technology acceptance model for the integration paradigm. Previous research lacks contextual settings, real-world tests or empirical investigations and is primarily conceptual.

This paper provides a comprehensive, critical systematic review of the integration of blockchain with BIM in the construction industry, using a sociotechnical perspective-based framework which can be applied in future reviews. The study provides insight into the current state and future opportunities for policymakers and practitioners in the AECO industry to prepare for the transition in this disruptive paradigm. It also provides a phased plan along with a clear direction for the transition to more advanced applications.