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Healthcare innovation, exemplified by genomic medicine, requires increasingly sophisticated understanding of the interdisciplinary-organizational context in which new innovations are implemented. Deliberative stakeholder consultations are public engagement tools that are gaining increasing traction in health care, as a means of maximizing the diversity of roles and interests vested in a particular policy or practice issue. They engage participants from different knowledge systems (“cultures”) in mutually respectful debate to enable group consensus on implementation strategies. Current deliberation analytic methods tend to overlook the cultural contexts of the deliberative process. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This conceptual paper proposes adding ethnographic participant observation to provide a more comprehensive account of the process that gives rise to deliberative outputs. To underpin this conceptual paper, the authors draw on the authors’ experience engaging healthcare professionals during implementation of genomics in the care for pediatric oncology patients with treatment-resistant glioblastoma at two tertiary care hospitals.

Ethnography enabled a deeper understanding of deliberative outcomes by combining rhetorical and non-rhetorical analysis to identify the implementation and coordination of care barriers across professional cultures.

This paper highlights the value of ethnographic methods in enabling a more comprehensive assessment of the quality of engagement across professional cultures in implementation studies.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the topic of agency problems in service ecosystem for innovation. It specifically explores the corporate policies aimed at encouraging collaboration, so as to prevent opportunistic behaviors within the innovation hub, where service exchange is central for innovation creation.

The authors apply the agency theory framework to the hub as a service ecosystem in order to understand how it would be possible to address agency problems between the firm (principal) and the other actors of the hub (agents), involved in peer-to-peer interactions. The research explores the case study of a high-tech leading company, which is a pioneer in the use of the hub for supporting its innovation process. Data are collected through semi-structured interviews to some key informants of the Hub Program regarding structure and organization; participation; incentives and monitoring.

In service ecosystems, corporate policies are based on commitment, psycho-social incentives and social control may encourage collaboration among the actors, thus contributing to align their own interests to the hub’s innovation common goals.

Given the exploratory nature of the research, the paper is based on a single case study. Thus, it is not possible to either generalize the results or evaluate any statistical correlation.

The paper provides a wider awareness about the benefits and risks related to service ecosystems for innovation, and advise both managers and practitioners about appropriate corporate policies to better address the agency problems.

This study enhances the literature on service ecosystems, highlighting the importance of corporate policies in preventing opportunistic behavior of actors in order to ensure the value co-creation process. It also extends the agency theory application to informal and not-hierarchical contexts. Besides, it suggests practitioners a way to reconcile the different interests of the firm and the other hub’s participants.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent and under which conditions R&D projects benefit from team members’ participation in spontaneous and work-related communities of practice (CoPs).

This is a quantitative empirical study. R&D projects are the unit of analysis. Data are collected through interviews to 121 informants who are members of 60 R&D projects and participants in 195 CoPs.

The participation of project team members in work-related CoPs positively affects the R&D project performance. This positive effect applies also to radically innovative projects. The diversity in the institutional affiliation of CoPs members is also highly significant and positively correlated with the project performance.

The paper considers only work-related CoPs, thus neglecting the knowledge transacted through other types of CoPs.

Practitioners should support the autonomous participation of project team members to spontaneous and work-related CoPs that cut across the organizational boundaries. Team leaders may enhance team innovative capabilities and performance by ensuring diversity of knowledge and skills from CoPs whose members work for institutions that differ from each other.

First, this study provides quantitative evidence of the CoPs ability to support innovation. Second, this research is focused on spontaneous and work-related CoPs within business environments. Third, this study does not analyze CoPs performance, but it postulates a connection between innovative organizational units (i.e. R&D projects) and spontaneous CoPs that cut across the firms’ boundaries.

Even in established economies, empirical studies on the relationship between business incubation and firm performance do not show unequivocally positive results. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate based on the empirical evidence from the under-researched Central and Eastern European region in which no similar study has been conducted before. Due to the shorter experience with the management of business incubators and less developed institutions, business incubators may not be so effective in supporting their tenants in this region.

The authors utilise firm-level data from incubated Czech enterprises (n=205) founded after 2003 and compare them with those that have not received support from incubators. The authors implement three matching techniques to pair incubated and non-incubated companies. The outcome variables measured sales, price-cost margin, assets turnover, value added, size of total assets and size of personnel costs.

Compared to the control group, incubated firms reported on average lower values of the above-mentioned indicators. Presented study shows that Czech incubators have not been successful in supporting growth of incubated firms.

The study suggests that there is a clear room for improvements. Incubators should improve in attracting and selecting high potentials and in providing more effective support focussed on tenants’ growth, whereas policymakers should exercise stricter control regarding the money spent and effectiveness of incubators.

The empirical analysis was conducted based on the research gap in the studies related to the impact of business incubation in the under-researched Central and Eastern European region. It also shows that positive results from similar studies done in established economies cannot be taken for granted as they depend on the quality of institutions in a particular country.

The paper presents the main results of a benchmarking project involving eight Italian hospitals. The project sought to examine and compare the organisational processes adopted in different operating blocks, i.e. complex organisational units comprising many different actors whose performance often has a significant influence on the level of work of the overall structure. The organisational survey was carried out by means of interviews with head nurses, surgeons and anaesthetists. In order to identify the managerial significance of activities and processes, a theoretical model of the operating block was developed, together with an appropriate performance measurement system. On the basis of this model and using analytic hierarchy process, we together with experts from the sector were able both “to measure” the strategic importance of the activities and to identify the best practices.

This paper aims to assess whether governance processes that are taking place in the Chinchiná River basin, a coffee culture region in the Andean region of Colombia, are adaptive to climate variability and climate extremes.

A mixed research method was used by reviewing secondary research sources surrounding the institutional governance system of water governance and disaster response and semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with producers and members of organizations within the institutional governance system.

This study found that there is a low response to extreme events. Hopefully, the growing national awareness and activity in relation to climate change and disaster will improve response and be downscaled into these communities in the future. Although, some learning has occurred at the national government level and by agricultural producers who are adapting practices, to date no government institution has facilitated social learning taking into account conflict, power and tactics of domination.

This paper improves the understanding of the vulnerability of rural agricultural communities to shifts in climate variability. It also points out the importance of governance institutions in enhancing agricultural producer adaptive capacity.

The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the main elements that affect the social responsibility (SR) business value generation in the small and medium firms (SMEs) context. In the SMEs, basically three elements are related with the business value of a SR approach: the top management SR orientation, the SR focus on the business critical issues and the SR alignment with the business strategy.

In order to achieve this objective, different valid and reliable SR measurement scales are developed and an ad hoc survey is answered by a sample of 245 SMEs out of a population of 1,317 SMEs, a representative sample with a 5.76 per cent error.

This paper concludes that SR can be a source of value for the business and that the business value generated by an SR approach is associated with certain conditions: the firm must believe in SR behaviour further than a mere economic and legal perspective; the SR activities must be focused on the critical issues that heavily conditions business competitiveness and, finally, the SR must be embedded in the firm's business strategy.

The empirical evidence obtained would not only support theoretical development about SR and SMEs, but it is also relevant to practice. The study of how SR must be developed in order to generate value for the firm helps SMEs to engage more effectively in SR and generates incentives for the stable, coherent and long‐term development of this kind of activity.

To determine the differences, as represented by information horizons mapping, in the health information-seeking behavior from a group of participants between March 2019 and April 2020 of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

In March 2019, the author conducted a study on health information-seeking behavior in which 149 participants drew information horizons maps in a health-related context. They also took health and information literacy assessments. This exact study was replicated using the same population in April 2020 to determine the differences in what the participants drew on their maps and how these changes interacted with their health and information literacy, their age and their education.

There is a statistically significant difference in the increased number of sources and the ranked quality of the sources that people used during the pandemic. Participants were much more likely to use credible sources and news sources, especially if they were older, more educated and had higher literacy levels – both health and information. They also relied heavily on social media. The participant group in the pandemic had a much heavier reliance on sources that are often used in a passive encountering way but engaging with them in an active information-seeking manner. The health information-seeking behavior in this study did not adhere to other research that found issue with information overload, avoidance and cyberchondria in response to crisis situations.

This article utilizes information horizons methodology to explore pre- and post-pandemic information-seeking. It is completely unique in this approach.

The paper aims to investigate the standpoints and practices of university members from European developing countries regarding the harnessing of the intellectual capital (IC) within online academic social networks.

A questionnaire-based survey with 210 university members was conducted, with the indicators adopting prior measurement scales which were further adapted to a network framework.

The organizational policies and practices relate positively and highly significantly with the valuation of the network-based IC components. Moreover, 63 per cent of the professional and organizational competitiveness of higher education institutions is determined by the exploitation of the IC embedded in online academic networks.

All survey respondents were from the European developing countries, which may limit the general applicability of the findings. Also, the emphasis is laid solely on online academic networks.

This paper brings to the fore both the potential and the state-of-the-art in leveraging the IC of online specialized networks which are indicative of the academic field. When acknowledged as such, the network-based IC is liable to generate substantial competitive advantages at the professional and organizational levels at the same time.

This research adds to the extant literature in two main ways. First, it advances a new construct – network-based IC – in the context of the online academic social networks. Second, it proposes a research model for addressing the network-based IC from a competitive advantage perspective.

Marketing has been seen as one of the greatest problems faced by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but simultaneously one of the most important activities for their growth and survival. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine the importance and role of entrepreneurial marketing in SMEs.

To reach this goal, a qualitative approach was adopted, with two case studies (SMEs) selected. As data-collecting instruments, interviews and documentary analysis were used, and the data-treatment technique was content analysis.

The empirical evidence obtained shows that the importance of entrepreneurial marketing is recognized, but that it differs considerably according to firm size. In the SMEs studied, marketing is informal and reactive to market opportunities and the founder-entrepreneur has an influence on the decision-making process.

The study contributes to the existing research about the role the founder-entrepreneur can have in the firm's ability to develop entrepreneurial marketing activities. From a practical viewpoint, the study has found that entrepreneurial marketing is based on networking to build and support marketing activity and it is associated with the use and development of the marketing management competencies of their entrepreneurs.

The study is innovative because the authors are able to outline empirically new issues for future investigation in this area of scarce research. Second, an integrative and holistic model is proposed for entrepreneurial marketing in SMEs and this represents the primary contribution of the study.