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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of research and innovation futures, sketch the landscape of recent findings in this field with a focus on new ways of doing and organizing knowledge creation and position the contributions to this special issue within that landscape.

This paper includes a review of literature on the embedding of research and innovation in society, outlines the main domains of current drivers of change and summarises the contributions to the special issue.

Recent controversies about the future of research and innovation draw on a long-standing trajectory of debate about the role of science, technology and innovation in society, and the balance between autonomy in striving for scientific excellence on the one hand and the quest for social and economic relevance on the other. Six major domains of current and expected future changes in research and innovation are identified, and serve as the backdrop for positioning the more specific contributions to this special issue.

The main value of this contribution is to provide a condensed and original look at emerging directions of change in research and innovation practices and their organisational and institutional embedding in society.

A numerical study of heat transfer enhancement due to the deformation of droplets at high Reynolds numbers is described. The two phase‐flow has been computed with a 3D DNS program using the volume‐of‐fluid method. The droplets are deformed because of the surrounding gas stream especially due to a sudden rise of flow velocity from zero to U_i. As the governing non‐dimensional parameter the Weber number of the droplets has been varied between 1.3 and 10.8 by assuming different surface tensions at Reynolds numbers between 360 and 853. The dynamical behavior of the droplets as a function of the Weber and the Ohnsorge number are in good agreement with experimental results from the literature. At the highest Reynolds number Re=853, a significant dependency of Nu on We has been found. The comparison of a Nusselt number computed with the real surface area with a Nusselt number computed with the spherical surface area shows that the heat transfer increases not only due to the droplet motion but also due to the larger surface area of the deformed droplet.

The purpose of this paper is to derive the determinants of young adults’ subjective and objective risk attitude in theoretical and real-world financial decisions. Furthermore, a comparison of the factors that influence young adults’ and older adults’ risk attitude is provided.

The paper relies on an experimental setting and a cross-sectional field study using data of the German central bank’s (Deutsche Bundesbank) PHF-Survey.

Young adults’ objective risk aversion is not constant but increases with stake sizes. Furthermore, young adults’ subjective risk attitude is a better predictor for their objective risk attitude than a set of commonly employed socio-demographics and economics like age or income. Moreover, young adults’ subjective risk attitude works as a mediator for the influence of their investable financial wealth on their objective risk attitude. Although young adults’ subjective risk attitude shows a gender effect, the influence of young adults’ gender on their objective risk attitude decreases with higher stake sizes. Compared to older adults, young adults generally show a similar degree of subjective risk aversion. However, due to stronger financial restrictions, young adults show a higher degree of objective risk aversion.

Although individuals’ financial outcomes depend on the financial behavior established in young adulthood, there is no study that simultaneously analyzes the determinants of young adults’ subjective and objective risk attitude in real-world financial decisions with a focus on young adults as a separate age group. The paper closes this gap in literature and additionally provides a comparison of the subsamples of young adults and older adults. The analysis in this paper reveals that young adults’ lower engagement in financial markets is primarily driven by their tight budget and not by a fundamental different subjective risk attitude.

In mergers and acquisitions (M&As) the culture of the acquired organization often represents a counterculture for the acquiring firm. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of an acquisition of German FAST by the Israeli firm Aladdin, and exemplifies the post‐merger integration issues that arose as a result of the culture clash between amalgamating entities in the high‐tech industry.

The study used a qualitative research design because of the need for in‐depth understanding of the processes, local contextualization, causal inference, and the necessity to expose the points of view of the participants. Triangulation was one of the important means of increasing construct validity and substantiating findings and propositions.

The case study analysis covers the processes that affect M&A performance and elucidates a significance of the post‐merger integration approach that is implemented in cross‐border M&As.

The examination sheds light on the pre‐ and post‐merger processes and provides new insights into both.

The case study describes two international high‐tech companies before their merger, the negotiation process, and the post‐merger integration approach adopted by the acquiring firm. The study extends the existing limited knowledge about integration approach in implementation of international high‐tech mergers.

The importance of leadership in the success of startups is widely recognized. Our study focuses on high-growth startups, which are venture capital (VC)-financed. So far, there is insufficient understanding, which leadership style founders and leaders of these startups deploy. Based on a Grounded Theory approach we derive a leadership framework from interviews with founder CEOs in Germany’s major startup city, Berlin. Our findings suggest that founder CEOs in high-growth, VC-funded startups heavily emphasize employee motivation, personnel development, performance orientation, and growth achievement in their leadership behavior. While our findings relate to a very specific and extreme type of firms, we propose that they are relevant for all kinds of companies as a pattern of a somewhat idealized leadership environment in relentless pursuit of innovation and growth.

Increasingly, dynamic market environments lead to growing complexity in manufacturing and pose a severe threat for the competitiveness of manufacturing companies. Systematic guidance to manage this complexity, especially in the context of Industry 4.0 and the therewith rising trends such as digitalization and data-driven production optimization, is lacking. To address this deficit a case-based reasoning (CBR) system for providing knowledge about managing complexity in Industry 4.0 is presented.

First, the explicit knowledge representation for managing complexity in IT-based manufacturing is introduced. Second, the CBR process step to retrieve knowledge from an artificially composed case base with in total 70 cases of data-based complexity management in the context of Industry 4.0 is set out. Third, knowledge transfer alongside several maturity levels of information technology capabilities of manufacturing systems for reuse in new problem scenarios is introduced.

The paper comprises the conceptual approach for designing a CBR system to support data-based complexity management in manufacturing systems. Furthermore, the appropriateness of the CBR system to provide applicable knowledge for reducing and managing complexity in corporate practice is shown.

The presented research results are evaluated in the course of an embedded single case study and may therefore lack generalizability. Future research to test and enhance the appropriateness of the developed CBR system will strengthen the research contribution.

The paper provides a novel approach to systematically support knowledge transfer for data-based complexity management by transferring the well-known and established methodology of CBR to the rising application domain of manufacturing systems in the context of Industry 4.0.

This chapter critically discusses the many positive aspects that are ascribed to gazelle firms by exploring the external effects and dark sides of high firm growth. On the background of the more general debate on purpose versus profit as a firm’s mission, the chapter theoretically elaborates on the dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative growth of gazelles. This is followed by a case-based illustration and exploration as to how quantitative and qualitative growth interrelates in gazelles and what are impediments for high growth that is purpose driven. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Janus-faced nature of gazelles and how their corporate citizenship can be enhanced.

The need to flexibly react to changing demands and to cost-efficiently manage customized production even for lot size of one requires a dynamic and holistic integration of service-based processes within and across enterprises of the value chain. In this context, this paper aims at presenting ODERU, the authors’ novel pragmatic approach for automatically implementing service-based manufacturing processes at design and runtime within a cloud-based elastic manufacturing platform.

ODERU relies on a set of semantic annotations of business process models encoded into an extension of the business process model and notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard. Leveraging the paradigms of semantic SOA and XaaS, ODERU integrates pattern-based semantic composition of process service plans with QoS-based optimization based on multi-objective constraint optimization problem solving.

The successful validation of ODERU in two industrial use cases for maintenance process optimization and automotive production in the European project CREMA revealed its usefulness for service-based process optimization in general and for significant cost reductions in maintenance in particular.

ODERU provides a pragmatic and flexible solution to optimal service composition with the following three main advantages: full integration of semantic service selection and composition with QoS-based optimization; executability of the generated optimal process service plans by an execution environment as they include service assignments, data flow (variable bindings) and optimal variable assignments; and support of fast replanning in a single model and plan.

Biofortification of staple crops is a promising strategy to alleviate micronutrient deficiencies in rural populations of the developing world. The possibility to sell biofortified crops at “a good market price” plays a vital role for the acceptance by smallholder farmers. This study is therefore focused on non-farming consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for biofortified crops.

Specifically, we elicited non-farming consumers' WTP a premium for the improved iron content (+30% iron) in a 1kg finger millet bag using a 2nd price Vickrey auction with six auction rounds and one health- and one process-related information treatment. Due to multiple bids per subject, premiums were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects model, controlling for market feedback and auction round.

Despite more than half of the respondents being skeptical toward new crop varieties, the acceptance rate was very high (98% with a WTP above zero). The average premium amounted to 27% and could be significantly increased with the provision of health-related information. In contrast, information about the breeding method was ineffective. The WTP was significantly higher for higher income and lower for higher age, education and skepticism toward new crop varieties and increased with increasing rounds.

Our results suggest that non-farming consumers are willing to pay “a good market price” for iron-biofortified finger millet. Our analysis also confirms the importance of health-related information for raising consumers' WTP. This information supports the further development and introduction of biofortified crops to alleviate micronutrient malnutrition.

This study adds to the still limited literature on consumers' WTP for iron-biofortified crops in India, focusing on non-farming consumers to assess the price such crops can achieve on the market.