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Emerging from 20 years of violence and terrorism, the city of Medellin, Colombia, has used social transformation to improve civic culture, leading to a renaissance. The purpose of this study is to explore how social transformation can lead to urban transformation, forming the basis for sustainable, post-conflict tourism.

This case study is based on available descriptive data and direct observation supported by secondary sources.

The results of the research help to provide a better understanding of the conditions needed to develop and manage sustainable tourism in post-conflict environments. In so doing, it should be possible to make better policy decisions, with particular reference to social and urban interventions on planning, design and entrepreneurship.

The transformation of Medellin’s civic culture can be a model for destination with similar histories that present significant destination image and branding challenges – though each will take different paths.

This paper is one of the first on post-conflict tourism that analyzes the impact on a destination and country of internal turmoil due to narco-terrorism and insurgency over a lengthy period.

The purpose of this paper is to profile the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) theme issue ‘How can communities manage rapid tourism growth? The experience of Macao and other destinations?’ with reference to the experiences of the theme editor and writing team.

This paper uses structured questions to enable the theme editor to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question, the starting point, the selection of the writing team and material and the editorial process.

The paper observes that involving authors with different academic and professional backgrounds in fields as diverse as urban planning, economics, transportation and heritage management is daunting but valuable. The outcomes of a broad-ranging collaboration yield fresh insights, a deeper understanding of the issues and an array of possible responses to the theme issue question.

The theme issue outcomes provide lines of enquiry for others to explore and reinforce the value of WHATT’s approach to collaborative working and writing.

The collaborative work reported in this theme issue offers a unified but contrarian response to the theme’s strategic question. Taken together, the collection of articles constitutes a provocative yet authorative call to action in response to the problems highlighted.

Despite the increase in studies focused on analyzing the potential of big data analytics capability (BDAC) as a driver of product and process innovation, it is still necessary to understand how the use of insights generated by BDAC in innovation may be maximized through articulation with individuals' intellect and other processes involving the assimilation and transformation of knowledge. This study thus aims to analyze the impact of BDAC's deployment on innovation capability (IC – process and product innovation capabilities), taking absorptive capacity (AC) as mediating variable in this relationship.

Structural equations were used to test the research model with survey data from 112 firms located in an emerging country that is one of the digital transformation leaders in the region.

The results show that 37% of process IC variance is explained by the indirect relationship via the variable mediator (AC), while in the case of product IC this percentage is 34%.

These results allow us to ascertain the extent to which individuals continue to be relevant to generating product and process innovation in the digital age at a time when the literature anticipates a total loss of prominence due to the arrival of new digital technologies. However, in the case of the relationship between BDAC and ICs, the existence of a partial mediation of AC indicates that individuals continue to play a role that, albeit not being the most prominent, remains relevant in ensuring that a company maximizes the assimilation and transformation of the insights generated by BDAC in new products and processes.

The purpose of this paper and the contribution to this special issue is to build on Kim and Watkins’ (2018) recent finding that ‘leaders mentor and coach those they lead’ is the item in the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) that is most highly-correlated with performance. Given the criticality of providing strategic leadership for learning and, more specifically, the consistent associations between leaders who mentor and coach and work-related performance outcomes, a better understanding of the associations between the learning organization concept and managerial coaching is warranted. Watkins and Kim (2018, p. 22) contend that ‘future directions for learning organization research include a search for the elusive interventions that would create a learning organization’. In response to this call for research, a research agenda for assessing managerial coaching as a learning organization (LO) intervention is proposed.

This conceptual paper briefly reviews literature on the learning organization and the DLOQ instrument, followed by a more in-depth review of the managerial coaching literature and suggestions for how future research could be conducted that more closely integrates these two concepts.

Existing literature suggests that to ‘provide strategic leadership for learning’, a dimension in the DLOQ, is one of the most pivotal dimensions for creating learning cultures that build learning organizations. Specifically, an item within this dimension, ‘leaders who mentor and coach’ has been recently identified as one of the most critical aspects associated with strategic leadership for learning.

The extant managerial coaching literature offers a solid foundation for more closely integrating and mainstreaming the developmental intervention of managerial coaching into learning organizations. Directions for future research that identifies fine-grained perspectives of the discrete facets of managerial coaching in learning organization contexts are suggested.