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With rising public concern over animal welfare, food safety and GM crops, Europe’s farmers, breeders and food processors are caught in the eye of a storm. While some are “returning to the soil” with traditional organic methods, others are breeding crops and animals using biotechnology, for markets as diverse as power generation and pharmaceuticals. For Europe’s policymakers social and ecological sustainability are paramount, but public information is also a prerequisite for meaningful debate.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the role of and relationships between human, structural and relational capital assets for strategic management in a farm business. In particular, it analyzes the interaction between human capital’s creativity skills and the introduction of climate-smart technologies for the competitiveness of the firm.

An explorative case study was conducted on one of the largest Italian farm businesses to gain an understanding of the drivers of intellectual capital (IC) and of their implications for strategic management. Full-time employees’ perception of the skills required to achieve strategic goals and their perception of whether they possessed these abilities were investigated to determine if an alignment was present. The skills were subsequently classified using the framework of Amabile (1988) into domain-relevant and creativity-relevant skills. Then, two linear regression models were used to investigate the effects of training on the acquisition of these two sets of skills.

The analysis confirmed the strategic role of interactions among human capital assets to effectively exploit the structural capital of the company. When investigating employees’ perceptions, a gap emerged about informatics capabilities and knowledge of soils. As the company’s investments in innovation are oriented to ICT technologies, the company could strengthen informatics training to enable its employees to implement effective innovation.

The paper contributes to the literature on IC by highlighting the role of interconnections of assets to align organizations with their strategic goals. Therefore, the provision of IC accounting contributes to the strategic management of human capital.

In February this year the sequence of the human genome was published, opening a new chapter in medicine. Soon genetic testing will be at the heart of diagnosis, epidemiology, drug development and even regenerative medicine. Before we are born there will be new opportunities to remedy genetic defects, and afterwards to make almost lifelong prognoses. The debate will intensify on the use of human embryos in medical research, while the prospect of human cloning will fascinate some scientists and horrify others. Europe needs to be in the vanguard of this new industrial revolution, but a host of ethical concerns must first be addressed – because genomics is as much about privacy as Petri dishes.

A review of recent foresight exercises reveals some important drivers of research in Europe. In this editorial, we introduce five main areas where science and technology will be required to deliver tangible gains for society and the economy in the coming years. It is no longer enough for research agendas to be dictated by the supply of expertise from the science base. Increasingly, they must respond to social values like access and sustainability, and humanize the interface between technology and people.

The paper's aim is to develop a diagnosis of the environment of the agrifood supply chain based on members' perceptions of environmental uncertainty.

Environmental uncertainty is defined as the lack of information about the external environment and is obtained by integrating the perceived dynamism and complexity of the environmental variables. The measurements that are used are the result of applying the Rasch methodology to the information obtained by means of a questionnaire completed by the deciders of firms in the Canary Islands (Spain). Those measures permit the complexity and dynamism perceived by the groups of firms in the supply chain together with the levels of perceived dynamism and complexity of the environmental variables to be jointly positioned on a map.

According to the perceptions of the members of the agrifood supply chain (agriculture, agrifood industry and distribution), the main sources of environmental uncertainty are demand and competitors. The agricultural sector perceives somewhat more uncertainty than agrifood industry sector, while the distribution sector perceives a stable environment.

The paper presents a useful tool for the business population and public institutions to identify which variables are perceived as the most dynamic and complex and how those variables are perceived by each member of the agrifood supply chain.

The paper operationalises the proposal of Duncan by means of a new application of the Rasch methodology. The results reflect the thinking of the members of all sectors of a supply chain. It is one of the first to study the environmental uncertainty perceived in the agrifood supply chain from a strategic perspective as a fundamental antecedent of the promotion of vertical collaboration in the agrifood supply chain.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Where does one need to intervene in to be most effective? The purpose of this study is to rank areas of the resource system, according to how much of a change can be expected from interventions in an area, in relation to the problem of depleting resources.

Principles of structured analysis are used to model how society uses resources. From this model, nine intervention areas are defined. These intervention areas are ranked in terms of effectiveness, through the use of the analytic hierarchy process.

To be most effective, one must prioritize intervention areas as follows: material inputs to the operation phase; process inputs to the operation phase; products’ longevity; process inputs to the manufacturing phase; and material inputs to the manufacturing phase.

Most decisions are not made on the basis of rigorous analysis but by using heuristics (rules of thumb). The results of this study are expressed as rules of thumb. They can help decision makers prioritize what is most important, but without imposing new ways of working.

In the construction domain, heuristics that generalize the impact of actions (content), instead of intervention areas (context), currently seem to prevail. The heuristics of this study generalize the impact of intervention areas. Therefore, they provide an extra perspective for many decision makers. This extra perspective can help reduce mistakes that are typically made by oversimplifying matters.

This paper focuses on innovation in small food‐ and drink‐manufacturing enterprises in two Belgian regions. The aim of the research was to identify patterns of innovative activities. Based on both literature and empirical analyses, a framework was developed to help in understanding some aspects of the determinants of innovation in small food firms. Two conclusions can be drawn from the research. On the one hand, it is clear that innovation was regarded as essential by most small food firms. Such firms tended to continuously introduce new products, develop new processes, make changes in the organisational structure and explore new markets. On the other hand, the research demonstrated that some aspects of innovation depend on the age of the company, company size and regional economic performance.

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) and knowledge-based view (KBV) theories, this study contributes to deepen the knowledge that corporate social responsibility (CSR) exerts on firms' innovation, considering the role played by cooperation. The research also seeks to ascertain the factors that influence the development of business cooperation.

The database used is the Community Innovation Survey (CIS, 2014) applied in the European Union (EU) during the time period 2012–2014. A sample of 7083 Portuguese firms were analyzed through the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results suggest that CSR positively relates with firms' innovation, and business cooperation partially mediates this relationship. The outcomes also reveal that investing in certain types of innovation activities increases the firms' willingness to cooperate.

The findings contribute to encourage an open innovation strategy as an easy and effective way to cope with rapid trends and changes, since it demonstrates the complementary between innovation and cooperation, as sources of value creation. From a triple bottom line (TBL) perspective, it also highlights that CSR must include social, economic and environmental initiatives, and should be a part of the firms' innovation strategy. As a result, managers who intend to contribute for society in the long term should plan, monitor and manage all CSR dimensions.

The purpose of this article is to provide organized, synthesized information related to initiatives throughout the world based on knowledge‐based development (KBD) such as knowledge cities (KCs), knowledge regions, and knowledge countries. A first search was conducted using the Internet and specialized databases under the keywords “knowledge cities”. The information compiled led to other related keywords which branched out the search. All resulting information was then collated and integrated into a number of categories all unified under the field of knowledge‐based development. A compilation of information on the topic “knowledge cities” and other topics related to knowledge‐based development. The information is presented in eight sections: a glossary of KC‐related terms, a list of knowledge‐based development initiatives, a list of associations and organizations related to the topic, a list of urban KBD‐related value dimensions and their indicators, a list of international rankings, a list of special editions on KCs, a bibliography, and a directory of related sites on the Internet. This effort resulted in a public service available at the World Wide Web. The information included in this compilation is limited mainly to public domain information available throughout Internet in both English and Spanish, as well as in selected databases.