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The purpose of this paper is to explore the selection of decision-making approaches at manufacturing companies when implementing process innovations.

This study reviews the current understanding of decision structuredness for determining a decision-making approach and conducts a case study based on an interactive research approach at a global manufacturer.

The findings show the correspondence of intuitive, normative and combined intuitive and normative decision-making approaches in relation to varying degrees of equivocality and analyzability. Accordingly, the conditions for determining a decision-making choice when implementing process innovations are revealed.

This study contributes to increased understanding of the combined use of intuitive and normative decision making in production system design.

Empirical data are drawn from two projects in the heavy-vehicle industry. The study describes decisions, from start to finish, and the corresponding decision-making approaches when implementing process innovations. These findings are of value to staff responsible for the design of production systems.

Unlike prior conceptual studies, this study considers normative, intuitive and combined intuitive and normative decision making. In addition, this study extends the current understanding of decision structuredness and discloses the correspondence of decision-making approaches to varying degrees of equivocality and analyzability.

Significant interest in Integrated Management Systems (IMS), as a key area within ISO-related Management System Standards (MSS) literature, has been evident from both academia and industry over the past three decades. This study aims to map the evolution and current state of IMS research and propose possible directions for future studies.

A comprehensive content and bibliometric analysis of 846 documents from the Scopus database across the period 1995 to 2023 was conducted. This included performance analysis to track publication trends and identify key contributors, and content analysis to specify dominant research methodologies and the MSS most commonly integrated. Furthermore, science mapping techniques—such as co-authorship networks, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and bibliographic coupling—were utilized to outline the collaborative networks and the conceptual and intellectual structure of the field.

The study identifies three principal IMS research themes: the practical implementation of IMS, their role in promoting sustainability and social responsibility, and their impact on continuous performance improvement. It also highlights the field’s evolution and key research constituents—including influential works, prolific authors, leading academic institutions and countries, and top publishing journals. It further reveals that IMS research exhibits strong collaboration across authors and countries, and a rich methodological plurality, notably with a marked increase in empirical surveys in recent years. Additionally, it identifies the most frequently referenced MSS for integration, prominently featuring ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001/OHSAS 18001.

This study is original in its application of a dual analytical approach—bibliometric and content analysis—to provide a holistic overview of IMS research. It offers new insights into the integration of diverse MSS and proposes several promising paths for future research. Among the most prominent are standardizing IMS fundamental specifications, conducting more empirical research with advanced methods to evaluate the effects of MSS integration, providing practical support for organizations in IMS implementation through tailored methodologies and tools, and exploring the potential of Industry 4.0 and 5.0 technologies to advance IMS practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how emergent changes are handled in research and development (R&D) projects. R&D projects’ business potential lies in their exploration of the unknown; conversely, this makes them uncertain endeavours, prone to emergent changes.

Uses a single-case-study design, based on a projects-as-practice perspective and a soft systems methodology (SSM) analysis, to map how ad hoc R&D teams handle emergent changes, specifically the solution identification and assessment phase and the implementation plan. An R&D project in the power industry, involving over 250 engineers, was analysed.

This paper shows how emergent changes are handled differently from initiated changes during the decision-making phase. The system analysis shows that the most critical factors for managing these changes are: collective reflection between project parties; and including experienced engineers in implementation-plan reviews.

The results are of relevance both to R&D managers aiming to improve team performance and to general project management. Informal notions of emergent changes can be formalised in the change request process. Weaknesses in the project team’s organisation are highlighted, and details of how of how to mitigate these are provided.

Combines engineering-design and project-management research on emergent changes, adding to the former regarding people–organisational and strategic issues. Furthers understanding of the projects-as-practice approach and emergent change (deviations) handling by ad hoc teams in a project environment. SSM has not previously been used to explore aspects of projects-as-practice, and this is a novel way of adding to the body of knowledge on project praxis and practise.

Under the current untrusted business environment, digital technologies, such as blockchain technology (BT), show the potential to digitally transform SC processes particularly the sourcing process (SP). Indeed, this process suffers from a lack of digitalization, a lack of trust and a high workload in the automotive supply chain (ASC). Therefore, BT coupled with smart contracts can deal with such issues by fostering trust, transparency, reliability and traceability as a digital solution.

This paper conducts multiple case studies in the automotive sector and interviews 11 managers from two firms. It follows the managers’ perspective to identify and analyze the main issues that occurred while conducting this process using the existing technology.

It proposes a new architecture for the smart sourcing process (SSP) that uses BT & smart contracts to mitigate the identified issues, enable traceability, improve resilience, eliminate intermediaries, automate tasks, and enhance trust and data management. Also, the paper provides a decision tree to help determine which blockchain platform is needed for adopting the SSP solution.

This study is useful for both academics and practitioners as it demonstrates the digitalization of one of the SC processes using BT and smart contracts, as well as develops a roadmap for digitalizing the SP of the ASC, and solves its vulnerabilities.

BT has been used by researchers to digitalize the sourcing process only in the public procurement area. Considering all the faced challenges by the private procurement area, this paper aims to present a new architecture for the digitalization of the SP using BT and smart contracts in the ASC as a private SC.

This paper aims to identify personality trait differences between social and traditional entrepreneurs.

The Durham Business School’s General Enterprise Tendencies (GET) test was chosen to measure an individual’s entrepreneurial personality. The choice was based on the test’s established use within industry and its ability to measure traits most commonly considered “entrepreneurial” by the extant literature. The test was adapted for this study and distributed to both social and traditional entrepreneurs. The results were then statistically analysed to test for significant differences between the two groups.

It was found that social entrepreneurs exhibited statistically significantly higher levels of creativity, risk-taking and need for autonomy than traditional entrepreneurs. The results were then discussed critically in light of the literature.

The modest sample size was the main limitation of the research. In addition, the sample set was fairly culturally homogeneous. It has been recommended that an additional test be carried out with a larger sample size, consisting of a more culturally diverse range of participants, to improve the generalisation of the findings.

This research provides new insights into personality trait differences between social and traditional entrepreneurs and is particularly useful to those with an interest in entrepreneurial orientation and those interested in the identification and development of social entrepreneurs.