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Emergence is a key concept in service-dominant (SD) logic; however, the literature is neonatal on the underlying mechanisms that lead to emergence within service ecosystems. This study aims to address the call by Vargo et al. (2022) for understanding the role of actor engagement in emergence of novel outcomes, by identifying a process of how various actor roles in entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) emerge as resource through the actor engagement.

Following a longitudinal design, this study conduct interviews from 20 respondents over eight months in three phases (group interviews, post-training, post-funding). This study analyzes the respondents’ engagement in an entrepreneurial service context. This study uses qualitative inductive approach and thematic analysis.

Results show that actor roles emerge as role expectations from essential provider and beneficiary position in a service ecosystem through actor role readiness, manifested as engagement properties in the actor engagement process. This study identifies five actor roles and their corresponding role readiness dimensions that emerge. Based on these propositions through which the authors position generic actor roles emergence within the actor engagement process in a service ecosystem.

This paper advances the understanding of micro-level process in emergence literature in SD logic by providing a conceptual understanding of emergence of actor roles as a resource through actor engagement. By grounding the study in EE, this study provides empirical evidence to the underlying mechanisms at the micro level of resource emergence process in a service ecosystem.

In this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational members do and is useful for understanding the tensions between emergence and formalisation and between planning and improvisation that characterise the everyday communication work of communication practitioners.

The paper is based on an ethnographic study of a record company and on qualitative interviews with various actors from the music industry.

Tensions exist between the emergence of inputs from active consumers that require flexibility and attempts to strategically formalise and continuously adapt plans and encourage consumers to act in anticipated ways. The findings revealed five strategic communication practices—meetings, working in the office, gathering and analysing consumer engagement and related data, collaboration and storytelling—that practitioners used to conduct strategic communication and navigate the tensions.

The study contributes to understanding the role of strategic communication practices in contemporary organisations and how practitioners manage the tensions within them. The study shows that an SAP approach can account for improvisation and emergence, as well as planning and formalisation. It also shows how SAP resonates with emergent and agile strategic communication frameworks.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of innovation in smart service systems to conceptualize how actor’s relationships through technology-enabled interactions can give birth to novel technologies, processes, strategies and value. The objectives of the study are: to detect the different enablers that activate innovation in smart service systems; and to explore how these can lead dynamically to the emergence of different innovation patterns.

The empirical research adopts an approach based on constructivist grounded theory, performed through observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate the development of innovation in the Italian CTNA (Italian acronym of National Cluster for Aerospace Technology).

The identification and re-elaboration of the novelties that emerged from the analysis of the Cluster allow the elaboration of a diagram that classifies five different shades of innovation, introduced through some related theoretical propositions: technological; process; business model and data-driven; social and eco-sustainable; and practice-based.

The paper embraces a synthesis view that detects the enabling structural and systems dimensions for innovation (the “what”) and the way in which these can be combined to create new technologies, resources, values and social rules (the “how” dimension). The classification of five different kinds of innovation can contribute to enrich extant research on value co-creation and innovation and can shed light on how given technologies and relational strategies can produce varied innovation outcomes according to the diverse stakeholders engaged.

This study aims to further develop the CLC stage/path’s identification model that distinguishes between path’s emergence (emergence stage), path’s development (growth stage), path’s sustainment (maturity stage), path’s decline (decline stage) and path’s transformation (renewal stage), and by applying it, define the current stage/path of the Demarcated Douro Region (DDR) cluster. The Port wine industry, which is the dominant industry of the DDR cluster, is at the maturity/decline stage – is the same for the cluster itself?

It is a case study with a longitudinal perspective based on the analysis of the dynamics of the parameters of cluster evolution using available secondary sources (cluster identity/brand; number of firms; number of employees; network; innovation; policies and regulations; and external markets – exports), especially addressing the past decade, that represent the stage of maturity/decline of the cluster’s dominant Port wine industry.

The conclusion is that since the 1990s the Demarcated Douro Region has gone through a “path transformation” where during the following 20 years new “anchors” for the cluster were gradually introduced, such as Doc Douro Wines, new forms of consumption of Port wine, tourism and olive oil. Since 2010 the cluster has entered a growth stage/(new) path’s development, where these “anchors” are in steady growth. The Douro brand is becoming more internationally recognized and established, the number of firms and employees is increasing, the network is restructuring with the creation of cluster-specific official institutions, innovation is especially reflected with increasing heterogeneity through diversification of the clusters into new activities and regulations and policies are supportive for expansion – all these parameters are indicating the rise of the new cycle for the cluster. Thus, the DDR cluster represents an attractive business environment and requires attention from regional policymakers to support the cluster’s development. Especially institutions have been highlighted as internal factors driving clusters growth, European integration as an external factor and firms’ strategies of diversification and internationalization as an appropriate de-locking mechanism for new path’s development.

This research contributes to the CLC theory by further developing and applying a CLC stage/path identification model. It provides a better understanding of the dynamics of the DDR cluster that diverge from its dominant industry life cycle, which is relevant for regional policies and firms’ strategies. This study has its limitations. It provides an exploratory application of the theoretical framework proposed, and consequently, no general conclusions are possible yet. More empirical studies with different clusters in different stages are necessary to test the framework.

These findings are useful to policymakers when designing their policies for cluster development but also for clusters’ entities and actors when making their strategic decisions as it allows based on the verification of the established parameter of CLC to identify its current stage/path of development.

The paper presents a theoretically grounded model for CLC identification and for the first time to the best of the authors’ knowledge applies it to a cluster case – the DDR cluster. This case applies the proposed model and illustrates its usefulness. The model provides the tools for a better understanding of cluster dynamics.

This work tries to detect the factors that can impact service innovation in the retail sector according to a service ecosystem (SES) perspective. This paper aims to understand whether it is possible to study innovation focusing on the impact of technology on resource integration practices in SESs and to rank different patterns of innovation by evaluating their effects in terms of value co-creation.

To show up the perception of actors, a case study has been carried out through semi-structured interviews. The aggregates of practices and the service innovation archetypes, drawn from the theoretical background, have been used as categories of analysis.

Service innovation is reconceptualised as the result of the application of new technology to resource integration practices in the retail SES, and it is possible to rank its patterns and outcomes by deepening its effects on the emergence of value co-creation phenomena. Shared intentions have been identified as drivers of service innovation, but greater transparency in systems used to embolden a higher willingness to use could be necessary.

Service innovation has been studied by focusing on value co-creation; for this reason, the willingness to use technology emerged as a determinant of service innovation. This result implies the need for a multilevel reinterpretation of contemporary SES, both regarding the technical features of digital solutions and their adherence to users' skills and the effects of willingness or unwillingness to use on value co-creation.

Within food industry several changes and innovations are affecting the management of the entire supply chain (production, logistics, etc.). As strategy for the survival and competition, digitalization has assumed a crucial role during the pandemic emergence by causing the reconfiguration of traditional chains and business models. Framed in these premises, the research analyses how digital technologies have innovated the sub-chains of bakery products and pasta within food industry with reference to customers' interactions, delivery and marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic emergence.

Moving from a critical literature review about the perspectives of digital technologies within the tradition of food industry, action research has been adopted to analyze in deep a case study of the start-up “ArteBianca Delivery” located in South Italy. Through this method, researchers have been deeply involved within the start-up to face the challenge of transforming the marketing and customer care into digital ones due to the COVID-19 restriction.

Findings provide empirical evidence about the reconfiguration of the traditional business model of a family firm in the food sector into a digital one with the start-up “ArteBianca Delivery”. The marketing, delivery, e-commerce and customer care components of the business models have been supported and enhanced through the adoption of digital tools, such as mobile applications and social technologies useful both for users and for a more urgent digitization of company.

Implications for practice can be identified into the pattern of digital transformation implemented as well as in the opportunity of replication and contextualization of the results to other companies looking for setting up a digital strategy.

Elements of original contribution can be identified into: (1) the exploration of digital transformation in food family firms caused by the pandemic emergence, (2) the contextualization of the digital transformation to the sub-chains of bakery and pasta and (3) the geographical location of the case.

Trust is the glue that holds cooperative relationships together and often exists in an asymmetric manner. The purpose of this study is to explore how to mitigate the issue of losses or increased transaction costs caused by opportunistic behavior in a soft environment where trust asymmetry is quite common and difficult to avoid.

This study focuses on examining asymmetric trust between the government and the private sector in public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Drawing upon both project realities and relevant literature, the primary conditional variables influencing asymmetric trust are identified. These variables encompass power perception asymmetry, information asymmetry, interaction behavior, risk perception differences and government-side control. Subsequently, through the use of a survey questionnaire, binary-matched data from both the government and the private sector are collected. The study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational analysis, aiming to investigate the causal pathways that trigger asymmetric trust.

No single conditional variable is a necessary condition for the emergence of trust asymmetry. The pathways leading to a high degree of trust asymmetry can be categorized into two types: those dominated by power perception and those involving a combination of multiple factors. Differences in power perception play a crucial role in the occurrence of high trust asymmetry, yet the influence of other conditional variables in triggering trust asymmetry should not be overlooked.

The findings can contribute to advancing the study of trust relationships in the field of Chinese PPP projects. Furthermore, they hold practical value in facilitating the enhancement of trust relationships between the government and the private sector.

Innovation management in the healthcare sector has undergone significant evolutions over the last decades. These evolutions have been investigated from a variety of perspectives: clusters, ecosystems of innovation, digital ecosystems and regional ecosystems, but the dynamics of networks have seldom been analyzed under the lenses of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). As identified by Cao and Shi (2020), the literature is silent about the organization of resource allocation systems for network orchestration in EEs. This article investigates these elements in the healthcare sector. It discusses the strategic role played by entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) in resource allocation and elaborates on the distinction between sponsored and nonsponsored ESOs in EEs. ESOs are active in network orchestration. The literature explains that ESOs lift organizational, institutional and cultural barriers, and support entrepreneurs' access to cognitive and technological resources. However, allocation models are not yet discussed. Therefore, our research questions are as follows: What is the resource allocation model in healthcare-related EEs? What is the role played by sponsored and nonsponsored ESOs as regards resource allocation to support the emergence and development of EEs in the healthcare sector?

The article offers an explanatory, exploratory, and theory-building investigation. The research design offers an abductive research protocol and multi-level analysis of seven (sponsored and nonsponsored) ESOs active in French healthcare ecosystems. Field research elaborates on semi-structured interviews collected between 2016 and 2022.

This article shows explicit complementarities between top-down and bottom-up resource allocation approaches supported by ESOs in the healthcare sector. Despite explicit originalities in each approach, no network orchestration model prevails. Multi-polar coordination is the rule. Entrepreneurs' access to critical technological and cognitive resources is based on resource allocation modalities that differ for sponsored versus nonsponsored ESOs. Emerging from field research, this research also shows that sponsored and nonsponsored ESOs manage their roles in different ways because they confront original issues about organizational legitimacy.

Beyond the results listed above, the main originalities of the paper relate to the instantiation of multi-level analysis operated during field research and to the confrontation between sponsored versus nonsponsored ESOs in the domain of healthcare-related innovation management. This research shows that ESOs have practical relevance because they build original routes for resource allocation and network orchestration in EEs. Each ESO category (sponsored versus nonsponsored) provides original support for resource allocation. The ESO's legitimacy is inferred either from the sponsor or the services delivered to end-users. This research leads to propositions for future research and recommendations for practitioners: ESO managers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new class of information workers, the “information have-less” has risen. This class of workers alleviates the influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolution on poverty and unemployment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the presence of this class of workers in Egypt and assess the size and potential growth of this category of workers.

The study clarifies the conceptual framework of the new division of labor, in the information age. The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and Information and Decision Support Center websites provided secondary data for this study. These data are used to assess the size of “the information have less” in Egypt.

The division of work and class, in the 21st century, depends on the level of skills possessed to work with ICTs. So, class and labor nowadays could be divided into self-programmable labor (Innovators). Information have-less labor class, adding value to the economy by learning skills and presenting repetitive work. Generic labor class, who cannot work with ICTs, and work in jobs, that do not need computers or other ICTs. The study has shown that the “information have-less” labor class is present in Egypt since the beginning of the 21st century, in all its categories; entrepreneurism, the service sector and the manufacturing sector. There are approximately 50% of this labor class in the service sector and only 13% of the information have-less works in manufacturing sector despite the great opportunities that Egypt has to expand manufacturing to absorb more employment. The inclusion of information technology (IT), in all domains, has not decreased employment in Western countries but has reallocated information have-less employment toward the service sector, and there would probably be the same effect in Egypt.

The study highlights the need for Egyptian policymakers to encourage the manufacturing and service sectors to provide huge working opportunities. The Egyptian government has to change the educational policies, at all stages, to include digital learning skills so IT can be incorporated in a wide range of economic activities. Further research includes: conducting a survey to measure the contribution of the entrepreneurial part of the information have-less employment in Egypt. In addition, a model may be developed, by the researcher to examine the reallocation of employees in Egypt.

Studying employment, in Egypt, using the conceptual framework of the information age is rarely being done.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral education. Pandemics throughout history have generated new educational theories and practices, accelerated some trends and signalled the abrupt end of others. The unpredictable effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have particularly impacted upon First Nations and transcultural communities and People of Colour throughout the globe. A second significant recent global trend that occurred at the height of the pandemic was the reignited #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) protest campaign. This campaign drew attention to the vast inequities faced by black, transcultural (migrant, refugee, culturally diverse and international) and Indigenous peoples and triggered rapid action in higher education institutions against racism and unconscious bias.

This conceptual paper draws upon postcolonial/decolonial theory to demonstrate how the COVID pandemic and #BLM movement prompts us to revitalise doctoral education.

These two issues have created renewed urgency around the need to decolonise higher education and a desire to transform the “business-as-usual” geopolitical power dynamics that continue to privilege Northern knowledge over culturally diverse knowledge systems from First Nations and transcultural contexts. A key site where special opportunities exist to effect this transformation lies in doctoral education. Doctoral education is a significant location of new knowledge creation and the development of the world’s future researchers.

Applying post/decolonial theory enables one to rethink how doctoral education should be changed to work towards greater decolonisation.

This study applies Santos’ ideas about “the sociologies of emergence” in the global South to think about how doctoral education should be reconstructed as a liberated zone of decolonisation and epistemic justice.