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The purpose of this paper is to investigate, through a comparative analysis, the applicability of lean manufacturing practices, such as value stream mapping (VSM), for productivity improvement in recycling centres (RCs) aided by multi-criteria decision analysis.

The study is carried out in five RCs that sort the municipal solid waste of Porto Alegre, one of the main cities in Brazil. Since all of the centres present their labour composed by poor communities’ members, cultural and social characteristics may represent an incremental challenge for lean implementation. Further, these centres are organised in cooperatives, in which decisions are taken through a participatory way and all their members are entitled to vote, undermining and retarding the decision-making process.

The integration of a multi-criteria decision-making tool to the lean practices enables the prioritisation of improvements, complementing the final stage of VSM. In particular, this contribution becomes especially important in cooperatives managed by community, where decisions are often complex and time-consuming. Finally, despite the increasing pressure for better performance of RCs, the existent mindset is still far from the private sector, where lean practices were conceived. Further, the findings suggest that, despite processes similarities, it is not feasible to declare the existence of a one-best practice to such scenario.

In theoretical terms, the authors demonstrate through a multi-case study the adequacy of analytic hierarchy process as a decision analysis tool complementary to the VSM, enabling a broader perspective about this subject. Concerning the practical contribution, the comprehension of the adaptation needs for lean practices implementation within the production context of solid waste RCs provides a framework with guidelines for this sector, when incorporating lean activities. Lean practitioners and eventual municipal authorities involved in improving productivity of community-managed RCs might benefit from this framework, since they will be able to emphasise the development of recommended and already tested lean practices that tend to improve their operational performance.

While academics and practitioners increasingly recognize the impacts of gamification on customer experience (CX), its role in the customer journey remains undeveloped. This article aims to identify how gamification can leverage each customer journey stage, integrate the findings into a conceptual model and propose future research opportunities.

Since CX and customer journey are interrelated concepts, the authors rely on CX research to identify research themes that provide insights to propose the conceptual model. A systematic review of 154 articles on the interplay between gamification and CX research published from 2013 to 2022 was performed and analyzed by thematic content analysis. The authors interpreted the results according to the service customer journey stages and the taxonomy of digital engagement practices.

This article identified five main thematic categories that shape the conceptual model (design, customer journey stages, customer, technology and context). Gamification design can support customer value creation at any customer journey stage. While gamification can leverage brand engagement at the pre-service stage by enhancing customer motivation and information search, it can leverage service and brand engagement at the core and post-service stages by enhancing customer participation and brand relationships. Moreover, customer-, technology- and context-related factors influence the gamified service experience in the customer journey.

This article contributes to a conceptual integration between gamification and customer journey. Additionally, it provides opportunities for future research from a customer journey perspective.

This study aims to examine the determinants of consumer behavioral intention to use the restaurant, concert and education services online during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A conceptual model based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was tested via structural equation modeling by using data collected from a sample of 420 Brazilian consumers.

The results showed that performance expectancy and social influence are the most critical determinants of consumer behavioral intention to use services online during the pandemic. The results also provided evidence that the pandemic has generated significant impacts on future consumer behavior.

This study contributes in a multidisciplinary way to the literature on hospitality, entertainment and education services, by applying the UTAUT theory and testing the model during and after the COVID-19 pandemic context. Moreover, this study provides empirical evidence from Brazil, one of the most affected countries by COVID-19.

This article aims to synthesize and integrate current research on customer experience (CX), identifying the intellectual structure of the field, systematizing a conceptual framework and identifying future research opportunities.

To analyze 629 articles published in peer-reviewed journals in almost four decades, this study employs both bibliometric co-keyword and thematic literature analysis in a complementary way.

This article maps the CX literature by describing its intellectual structure in terms of three research domains (customer, organizational and technological), their corresponding most relevant research themes and topics. Moreover, this study develops a conceptual framework and research propositions to summarize and integrate the CX literature. This work recognizes technology as an important driver for the development of CX research. Lastly, this article provides future research opportunities for moving the field forward, considering an integrative view among domains.

This paper complements other reviews on CX by using a novel methodological approach (co-keyword and thematic analysis) that enables the identification and visualization of the CX intellectual structure. In addition, the study explores the increasing connection between technology and CX research, by raising evidence that technology, by continuously modifying services and consequently CX, has become a transversal component in the research field. These outcomes may be useful for academics and practitioners.

This study aims to examine the impact of the servitization on the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Brazil.

The study uses data from Brazilian SMEs and applies partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the research hypotheses.

The findings suggest a positive relationship between servitization and SME performance. It is found that the strategy of offering base services does impact SME performance. Furthermore, servitization aims to promote a fit between environmental pressures and SME performance.

SMEs can use servitization to increase their performance in spite of their resources restrictions, size limitation and low level of service revenue. However, the adoption of servitization should be accompanied by managerial adjustments in servitization practices.

This paper is dedicated to investigating the servitization-performance relationship in the context of SMEs, which is not a usual research publication. Moreover, it adds to the servitization theory by demonstrating that it is not necessary to reach a critical mass of services to be profitable and base services may be also a source of revenues and profits.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) associated with the Six Sigma (SS) implementation in companies operating in Brazil.

The research was tested based on survey questionnaire responses from a sample of 45 Brazilian manufacturing and services companies that have implemented SS programmes. An exploratory factorial analysis (EFA) was conducted to statistically identify conclusions regarding CSFs in SS implementation.

Based on the survey of empirical data, the investigated individual CSFs were reduced in five main critical factor categories: data availability, prior infrastructure and training, goals and gains, implementation of the solution and resistance to change. They have been shown to be the extremely important factors for SS implementation in Brazilian companies.

This study helps SS managers focus on the most effective factors (best practices) in SS implementation. Consequently, this may guide a company’s resources allocation and efforts to guarantee a successful SS implementation.

Despite a vast body of literature in SS CSFs, this paper demonstrates those factors within a Brazilian context. Moreover, the tested content of this study fills the research gap by providing reliable and useful CSFs of SS implementation, which contributes to increase the external validity of the SS construct. On top of that, although the results reinforce the importance of well-known, traditional CSFs in SS implementation, they also identify contingent factors related to risk perception, which are barely mentioned in previous literature.

This study investigates the intellectual structure of the front-end of innovation (FEI) research field and elaborates a lifecycle model, which embraces the FEI progress and conceptual development.

This study analysed 355 papers published from 1987 to 2020 in the Scopus and Web of Science databases through bibliometrics, network analysis and content analysis.

This study reveals FEI research themes and topics and explores their evolution through three periods. In addition, following a lifecycle approach, it also sets the research field foundation and discusses the maturity and potential progress of the FEI intellectual structure.

This study complements the existing FEI reviews by capturing the most relevant topics in the area, showing how these topics relate to each other to form the intellectual domain and providing insights concerning the research progress through different lifecycle stages. It also extends the FEI database used in the other literature reviews.

This study aims to evaluates a public policy program that finances projects for the development of innovative technological solutions. This paper analyzed the influence of human and social capital on the development of the projects, under the perspective of the policy’s effectiveness and efficiency. This specific policy adopted the funding model of economic subsidy by means of grants, which shows the significant engagement of the public sector in applying nonrefundable resources more directly through loans, assuming the role of an entrepreneurial state, according to Mazzucato (2011, 2018) and Tavani and Zamparelli (2020).

This is a quantitative-descriptive study, according to Marconi and Lakatos (2017). This study is descriptive, for presenting information on innovation projects funded by FUNCAP (Ceará Foundation for Support to Scientific and Technological Development). In addition, this study is quantitative, by establishing multivariate relationships among the variables that relate to human capital and social capital, which are relevant to technological and innovative development, and by introducing variables on technological evolution, proposed as measures of the program’s effectiveness (DTRL, MkTRL) and efficiency (ETRL).

This paper sought to contribute on public policies for innovation, more specifically on analyzing variables that may affect the development of technological and innovative projects in knowledge-intensive companies. The authors studied capitals potentially important for these companies in the development of innovative projects. Specifically, the authors sought to understand the importance of human capital and how it reflects in technical and scientific knowledge of the project team and of social capital and how it reflects the connection and social relationship among different team members. The results presented that the degree of efficiency of the public funding program depends on how much the teams of the benefited projects have accumulated knowledge, skills and technical capacities – the so-called teams’ human capital.

It is important to address the research sample as a research limitation, which had 72 responses obtained, from a submission rate of 284. Another study limitation is on the qualitative analysis of the topics addressed from the companies and policymakers perspectives, considering that the quantitative nature of the study does not allow for a deeper understanding of the qualitative perspective of the actors involved in the phenomenon studied. As recommendations for future studies, it is suggested to conduct qualitative studies on the aspects studied here. In this sense, it is possible to conduct case studies for specific companies, or policymakers, to clarify and deepen the relationships between the themes addressed here.

As for the practical implications of the research, both for managers of public funding programs and for company managers, the benefits of human capital, related to innovative project development teams, are important in programs that deal with technological development projects. In practice, this means that the greater the human capital of academic background of the members of the supported project teams, the more efficient the projects are in the process of developing their technologies by using the resources provided (Ashford, 2000; Chen et al., 2008; Lerro et al., 2014).

Hence, the authors conclude that the evaluated innovation-funding program through grants achieved acceptable results in terms of promoting the technological evolution of the benefited projects and bringing the technologies closer to the market. Its efficiency was the least favorable result, showing that the program needs to focus on improving this specific aspect. Within the investigated program, the issue that needs enhancement (efficiency – ETRL) was the one that presented significant relationships with the human and social capital of the benefited projects’ teams. Thus, it is possible that, by selecting more projects that have teams with high capital, the efficiency of the public policy, in this case the development of projects with high technological and innovative potential, will be possibly reached.

The findings strengthen the need for innovation public policies designed and implemented in a systemic way in the science, technology and innovation ecosystem, to provide a technological infrastructure and human capital necessary for developing projects with high technological and innovative potential (Ergas, 1987; Audretsch and Link, 2012; Caloghirou et al., 2015; Edler and Fagerberg, 2017; Silvio et al., 2019).

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to assist the selection of certification bodies in the implementation of quality management system (QMS) based on ISO 9001 taking into account a set of criteria organized in a multi-level hierarchical form. To deal with this complexity, the multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM) analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used in this research.

The research was conducted in small and medium-sized companies certified to ISO 9001. The MCDM method AHP was used as a method for developing the model to support the selection of certification bodies.

This paper provides a framework for companies seeking to hire certification bodies, mainly for ISO 9001 certification, which help identify the companies that best fit the certification objectives. Additionally, a ranking of the main criteria to select certification bodies for ISO 9001 was obtained.

The decision-making method was applied to Brazilian companies from different sectors. As the results can vary between regions and sectors, this is a limitation of the research. In addition, the number of ten respondents could be higher to increase the robustness of the results.

The model assists companies looking for certification, mainly ISO 9001, in the selection of certification bodies contributing in the search for deeper implementations of QMS.

This work has the originality of the application of a decision-making method in the final process of ISO 9001 certification, scarce in the literature. In addition, it defines weights for the criteria involved in the process of selecting certification bodies.

This paper aims to identify the interrelationships among critical factors for digital servitization (DS) implementation.

A multi-method research was used. Critical factors for a successful DS implementation were identified using a systematic literature review and expert interviews. The interpretive structural modeling (ISM) method was used to develop a hierarchical model of the identified factors, followed by the fuzzy Matrice d’Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliqués à un Classement (MICMAC) analysis to assess their dependence and driving powers.

A total of 23 factors for DS implementation were identified, and the ISM model was developed. Based on MICMAC analysis, the factors were also grouped under four categories (dependent, driving, autonomous and linkage). A conceptual framework is proposed, highlighting that DS implementation relies on three main layers of critical factors: crafting alignment, scaling the change and achieving results.

The ISM and fuzzy MICMAC methods used in this study provided valuable insights into the interrelationship among the identified DS factors through a conceptual framework. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is one of the first to identify critical factors influencing DS implementation and develop hierarchical relationships among them.