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With the continuous improvement of public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the participants' value creation goals are not only limited to achieving the basic performance objectives but also to realising value added. However, the effect of traditional contract management on realising the value creation objectives of PPP projects is limited. According to the view of multifunctional contract, joint-contract functions that integrate contract control and flexibility are likely to be effective in enhancing the value creation of PPP projects. This study aims to explore the effects of joint-contract functions on PPP project value creation and relevant influencing mechanism by investigating the mediating effect of in-role behaviour and extra-role behaviour.

After collecting 258 valid questionnaires from PPP professionals in China, this study used structural equation modelling to validate the hypotheses.

Contract control and flexibility can improve PPP project value creation. Specifically, contract control improves the achievement of the basic contract objectives of PPP projects, whereas contract flexibility enhances the achievement of the value-added of PPP projects. Moreover, only in-role behaviour mediates the effect of contract control on value creation. In addition, the mediating effect of extra-role behaviour on the impact of contract flexibility on value creation is stronger than that of in-role behaviour. The mediating effect of in- and extra-role behaviour is mainly reflected in the realisation of basic and value-added performance, respectively.

The findings of this study can help realise value creation in three ways. Firstly, new perspectives for PPP project value creation should be proposed by combining the improvement of contract objectives and the realisation of the participants' implicit demands. Secondly, the effects of different contract functions on value creation should be analysed instead of a single dimension of contractual governance. Thirdly, the mediating effects of different types of cooperation behaviour that may influence the relationship between contractual governance and value creation should be evaluated.

This study verifies the impacts of different contract functions on PPP project value creation. In addition, cooperative behaviour is embedded as a mediating variable, and the mediated transmission path from contract function to cooperative behaviour and further to PPP project value creation is systematically analysed.

Transaction cost economics sees a broad spectrum of governance structures spanned by two types of economic adaptation: autonomous and cooperative. Stakeholder theorists have drawn much inspiration from transaction cost economics but have not paid explicit attention to the centrality of the idea of adaptation in this literature. This study aims to address this gap.

The authors develop a novel conceptual framework applying the distinction between the two types of economic adaptation to stakeholder theory.

The authors argue that the idea of cooperative adaptation is particularly useful for describing the firm’s collaboration with primary stakeholders in the joint value creation process. In contrast, autonomous adaptation is more relevant for firms interacting with secondary stakeholders who are not directly engaged in joint value creation and may not have formal contractual relationships with the firm. Accordingly, cooperative adaptation can be seen as vital for resolving team production problems affecting joint value creation, whereas autonomous adaptation addresses how the firm maintains legitimacy within the larger stakeholder environment.

Similar to its significance for transaction cost economics, the distinction between the two types of adaptation equips stakeholder theory with a new systematic understanding of a potentially broad spectrum of firm–stakeholder collaboration forms.

This study focuses on the self-organized cooperative consumption of platform participants on social media platform, and reveals how the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to achieve value co-creation.

The authors adopted a case study approach to explore how a Chinese beauty startup developed collaborative networks from 2013 to 2022, and tracked the the changes of network structure and cooperation mechanism.

The study finds that the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to integrate resources and establish diverse relational trust, which enhances the evolution of a heterogeneous collaborative network for value co-creation.

The study builds upon traditional dyadic actor-to-actor interactions between providers and customers, develops a novel interaction framework of actor-to-network to explain the value co-creation by collaborative networking, reveals the self-organized mechanism of cooperative consumption on social media.

This paper aims to study historical intercultural transfer by examining the case of the Mouvement Desjardins, a Quebec, Canada-based cooperative bank founded in 1900 by Alphonse Desjardins. The aim of the cooperative was to support the hitherto marginalized French–Canadian population and to initiate their economic and entrepreneurial activities.

The authors focus on a historical single-case analysis. This conducts them to analyse primary data from letters exchanged between Alphonse Desjardins and European actors, as well as company documents of the Groupe Desjardins.

The intercultural transfer of the cooperative bank model and its implementation in North America as a successful, self-sustaining model is owing to recontextualization and strategic decisions of the social entrepreneur Alphonse Desjardins based on intensive written correspondence with European bank directors who promoted the cooperative system.

This research instigates an impulse to extend our knowledge of intercultural transfer by looking into other historical cases to provide validation or add subtleties to our understanding of intercultural transfer dynamics.

This paper expands the current understanding of intercultural transfer and its powerful influence, namely, how an implemented cooperative bank system can contribute through successful recontextualization to institutional change and societal improvements. It also provides new insights into the creation and growth of social enterprises based on shared values within communities and coordinated strategic intentions across communities.

Scholars have affirmed that a conceptualization of value co-creation in business relationships should reflect the nature and characteristics of interactional processes that occur in use. The advent of sales and marketing technologies, however, is changing the nature and dynamics of interactions. New trends in digitalization have played a significant role in emphasizing and facilitating the occurrence of business-to- business (B2B) collaborative or sharing economy. The B2B sharing economy and value co-creation are closely intertwined, as businesses harness the power of shared resources and collaboration to generate value in diverse ways. This study highlights the importance of going beyond value co-creation in studying B2B collaborative economy, unpacking the interconnected value processes that influence value co-creation. It also aims at showing the activities that characterize multiple joint value spheres among actors.

The study consists of 49 qualitative interviews with managers operating in different industries.

The paper shows that when considering digital B2B contexts, five joint value spheres in business relationships should be considered: a value co-creation, a value appropriation, a value communication, a value measurement and a value representation sphere. Each one is characterized by specific activities that are relevant from a managerial point of view.

This study highlights that value co-creation has often been over stressed when discussing business interactions, also with the advent of new technologies. Rather, this study offers a more comprehensive view of value co-creation that includes different value processes occurring in joint value spheres. These further processes are relevant because failure and success in business relationships within the B2B sharing economy are often dependent from activities outside the value co-creation process, which strongly affect it. Such knowledge will also open up new research venues and opportunities to better contribute to the practice of value management in business relationships.

This study aims to examine the impact of Lean 4.0 practices on value co-creation in the dairy ecosystem.

Data collection were carried out through a questionary application with 126 professionals linked to the dairy ecosystem, including milk producers, milk cooperatives and milk transporters. The data were analyzed using Cluster Analysis, Mann-Whitney test and Chi-Square test.

A strong relation was found between the use of Lean 4.0 tools and the increase in operational performance, in addition to milk quality. Moreover, it can be noted that the use of digital technologies from Industry 4.0 has a strong relation with dairy production optimization, in other words, it is possible to be more efficient in the dairy process via Lean 4.0 adoption.

The study is limited to analyzing the Brazilian dairy ecosystem. The results presented may not reflect the characteristics of the other countries.

Once the potential empirical impacts of the relation between Lean 4.0 and value co-creation are elucidated, it is possible to direct strategies for decision-making and guide efforts by researchers and professionals to deal with the waste mitigation present in the dairy sector.

Lean 4.0 proves to be a potential solution to improve the operational performance of the dairy production system. Lean 4.0, linked to value co-creation, allows the integration of the production sector with consumers, through smart technologies, so new services and experiences can be provided to the consumer market. Additionally, the consumer experience can be stimulated based on Lean 4.0, once the quality specification is highlighted based on data science and smart management control.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes the interrelationship between the Lean 4.0 philosophy and the value co-creation in the dairy ecosystem. In this sense, the study reveals the main contributions of this interrelation to the dairy sector via value co-creation, which demonstrates a new perspective on the complementarity of resources, elimination of process losses and new experiences for the user through digital technologies integrated with the Lean Thinking approach.

This study aimed to understand coopetition in the context of Brazilian specialty coffee grower Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), based on the need to differentiate the beans in and outside the farm level, taking into account the stakeholders’ influence.

In this study twenty semistructured interviews were carried out with coffee growers and managers of cooperatives, associations and supporting institutions involving two Brazilian coffee geographical indications. Data were analyzed using a mixed grid composed of qualitative, semantic and categorical factors.

Strategic moves undertaken by coffee growers and stakeholders have shaped the pathway of coopetition among coffee growers, as determinants to frame it as a deliberate or emergent pattern (intentional or unplanned, respectively). Our findings provide evidence that coopetition development among firms is deliberate when influenced by firms’ or stakeholders’ cooperative moves and emergent when influenced by firms’ or stakeholders’ competitive moves.

Although the firm/stakeholder relationship is often approached as a joint wealth creation effort, stakes are not always fairly distributed, so one of the parties may be negatively affected, with consequences for the development of coopetition. Underpinned by a stakeholder-oriented resource-based theoretical lens, this investigation of the development patterns of coopetition linked to the strategic actions undertaken by firms and stakeholders has resonance on competitive advantages.

We explore how NGO’s local entrepreneurial initiatives to empower women entrepreneurs can compensate for weak state policies for women in a context of male-dominated socio-cultural norms.

We use the case of a local entrepreneurial initiative launched in the Atlas region of Morocco, the Empowering Women in the Atlas Initiative (EWA). We collected data through 51 semi-structured interviews of women entrepreneurs in three cooperatives which exploit the natural resources of their region to establish a social venture. Our data are longitudinal as they were collected at two time periods: before and after the initiative.

The findings of this study suggest that local entrepreneurial initiatives can have a significant impact on rural women entrepreneurs’ empowerment. The improved perception of empowerment has not only helped them develop capacities to leverage the business opportunities linked to the natural resources of their region, but it has also increased their status and role within their family and community.

We make recommendations for policymakers to encourage this type of initiative to compensate for the absence of supporting policies geared toward women.

Our study is one of the first to look at empowerment as a policy instrument to develop women entrepreneurial activities in rural areas of developing countries. Our paper uses a unique hierarchical perspective and a multidimensional framework for analyzing social cooperative ventures and rural women entrepreneurs’ empowerment. Our paper unravels interesting insights for women entrepreneurs’ narration strategies.

In banking services, how customers interact with their bank – whether it’s through the physical branch or online – plays a significant role in how they feel about the experience. It’s not just about performing the service; it’s also about building trust, keeping them committed and getting them engaged so that a long-lasting relationship is developed. While there’s abundant research about trust and commitment in banking, not many studies have looked at how customers see both the online and offline sides of banking, especially in credit unions. Credit unions emphasize proximity with members, so it’s important to understand how these different ways of interacting affect how much people trust the credit union and stay committed to it and how engaged they feel as members. This study aims to explore this issue.

A quantitative survey was conducted using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The survey was answered by 195 members of one of the most traditional credit unions in Brazil.

The results suggest that both face-to-face and digital channels’ dimensions impact trust, which in turn influences commitment. Engagement is influenced by both trust and commitment, providing inputs to the value co-creation process.

The research presents relevant contributions to academia by deepening the understanding of the role of different service channels in value co-creation and customer engagement. It also offers significant contributions to the cooperative, which can improve the member experience in interaction channels to consequently develop lasting relationships and stimulate the engagement of its members.

The purpose of this study is to recognize the empirical inhibitors of knowledge management (KM)in value co-creation in the dairy production context.

This study undertook a qualitative multiple-case study strategy. The datas collected comes from five players in the dairy sector that jointly co-create value. In addition to in-depth interviews with the actors, this study considers complementary documents, with reports, management flowcharts. Content analysis was conducted based on Bardin (2011).

This study identified three empirical barriers for KM in managing value co-creation in dairy production. The inhibitors observed were related to ineffective communication among stakeholders, organizational culture and high competitiveness. This study identified that sharing and KM among actors is a way to stimulate innovative solutions via value co-creation in dairy production.

This study explores the context in the Center-South of Brazil; therefore, it is not generalizable.

The findings help the managers to deal with the KM inhibitors in the value co-creation context and define actions based on the strategies listed to overcome the barriers identified in dairy production. This study can also help managers to change the mindset of organizations by adding KM to the organizational culture, as it identifies existing barriers in the sector and contributes by suggesting attitudes and tools capable of overcoming such difficulties.

Professionals in the dairy sector, especially the small rural producer, can have access to knowledge and professional training through the value co-creation among actors in the dairy sector. In this sense, the milk quality, for example, the nutritional characteristics and traceability of the milk, can be improved for the final consumer.

This study reveals the empirical inhibitors of KM presents in the value co-creation in the dairy production context. Additionally, insights to deal with the lack of sharing information and knowledge among multiple actors.