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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on how multinational company (MNC) headquarters (HQs) can manage the existing coopetition paradox to ensure innovation within the MNC. In contrast to the rather scarce previous research, the authors argue that HQ needs to solve the coopetition paradox under the sway of a parenting paradox. Hence, HQ faces a dual paradox.

Drawing on the literature on HQ’s role during MNCs’ innovation processes, this conceptual paper revisits the previously suggested HQ measures to enable coopetition among subsidiaries. By applying a sheer ignorance perspective, the authors contribute with a more nuanced understanding of the HQ’s role in innovation activities.

The article identifies four challenges as the HQ faces a parenting paradox that hinders its ability to solve the coopetition paradox: context specificity of subsidiaries’ innovation work, normative expectations of subsidiary managers, potential opportunistic behavior of HQ manager and HQ underestimation of needed resources. The article suggests that HQ needs to become more informed and preferably even embedded in the local innovation networks of its most important subsidiaries and that coopetition should not be managed solely on an HQ level.

Advocating a sheer ignorance perspective, the article pioneers in discussing the role that HQ plays in managing coopetition among subsidiaries in innovation activities.

The aim of this paper, which analyses the use of sports celebrities in advertising discourse, is to understand the strategic use to which brands put them in their commercial and corporate communication on Instagram.

To this end, a content analysis was performed on the Instagram posts of the brands Santander, Movistar, Red Bull and Iberdrola during the period 2021-2022.

The results indicate that, strategically speaking, these brands use the celebrity endorsement strategy to pursue emotional objectives and to adopt a position depending on the type of user. Likewise, these findings show that they single out uniqueness as the principal celebrity characteristic, while also mainly leveraging sports values, especially competence. These values represented by sports celebrities are markedly social in nature, which implies that they enjoy a degree of public recognition that is transferred to the brand to which they lend their image.

The conclusions connect celebrity endorsers with strategic branding issues and aspects of sports.

An empirical approach is followed here to study the representation of sports celebrities in the advertising of well-known brands linked to the sports world.

The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature regarding the open innovation management approaches that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can use to access digital technologies and incorporate them into their organizational processes. The research question is: What organizational and process-level managerial actions do SMEs take to successfully access and implement digital technologies within their organizational processes?

Using Guertler et al.'s (2020) Action Innovation Management Research (AIM-R) framework, this study examines the digital transformation experiences of 10 European SMEs to gain insights into the managerial actions that foster successful digital transformation.

The findings of the paper reveal two major contributions. First, a digital transformation roadmap for SMEs is proposed, with a focus on accessing external resources and reconfiguring internal ones to ease their digital transformation journey. Second, three distinct paradoxes that influence the digital transformation process in SMEs are highlighted, providing useful insights into the challenges and tensions SMEs face during this journey.

This paper provides a unique perspective on the digital transformation of SMEs by examining the managerial actions required for successful technology adoption and revealing the paradoxes that may emerge during this transformative process. The findings form the basis for future research, deepening our understanding of digital transformation in SMEs and providing actionable advice to managers and practitioners navigating this journey.

While women are increasingly in senior positions in accountancy firms, a century after gaining entry to this once exclusively male field, they are still struggling to achieve career success. The concept of possible selves and a model of career crafting are activated in an analysis of how a set of New Zealand professional accountants have pursued their careers. This paper aims to focus on how people actively craft career selves in the context of organisational and gendered constraints, some of which are self-imposed, and therefore, can be modified and revised.

Interviews with 36 male and female accounting professionals in New Zealand – 21 working in private firms and 15 in academia identify how careers are shaped by contexts, cultural understandings of gender, organisational structures within which accountants are located and wider environmental factors.

Women accountants in this study are both agential and responsive to a range of constraints they encounter. These women challenge the notion that professional achievement requires single minded allegiance to a career; their strategic career crafting demonstrates how career and family commitments are not irreconcilable but can be skilfully integrated to nurture multiple selves. Their strategies are considered alongside those of a comparable set of male accountants.

This paper contributes to the literature on possible selves and the complexity of gendered lives through the application of a career crafting matrix to explore how accounting professionals forge careers and construct multiple selves.