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Smallholder farmers often deal with lack of information and knowledge, weak financial capacity and limited collaboration and network orientation. This is hampering their ability to adopt or co-develop innovation, and to participate in value chain exchanges. This calls for using intermediary organizations. The purpose of this paper is to understand how innovation intermediaries engage with smallholder farmers and provoke value chain reconfigurations.

The authors systematically review literature to draw cases on intermediaries operating in the agri-food sector in several geographical and socio-economic contexts. The authors then adopt a theory building from cases approach to identify relationships between smallholder farmers and innovation intermediaries, and their effects in the reconfiguration of value chains.

Consultants, knowledge transfer organizations (KTOs) and broker organizations (BOs) are the three typologies of intermediaries identified. While consultants facilitate change by modifying the way smallholders engage in transactions with their buyers and input providers, KTOs focus on farmers engagement in the value chain by stimulating the formation of knowledge platform or partnership. BOs operate in a similar way as compared to KTOs but mainly by forming and facilitating access to informal networks.

The authors build a framework in which relationships between typologies of intermediary organizations and types of innovation processes are connected with changes at value chain level.

The authors highlight how diverse forms of intermediations may stimulate not only smallholder farmers’ participation in innovation networks but also value chain reconfigurations.

This chapter outlines incorporation of voluntary environmental accounting standards into national law as evidenced by the Scandinavian experience. In illustrating such hardening of soft law approaches it highlights difficulties national authorities face when attempting to regulate globalised commercial entities with extra-territorial activities. Adoption at national level of these standards into legally binding obligations illustrates convergence of global governance standards even where there is no central authority or designed codification.

Doctrinal legal research and literature review. To illustrate the incorporation of voluntary standards at a national level, Scandinavian examples (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) were chosen – frequently upheld as best practice in requiring the reporting of environmental information financial reports.

The research shows that the most proactive national authorities in this regard are endorsing certain voluntary standards and rewarding their use with reduced regulatory burden. I first outline certain voluntary environmental standards and then illustrate adoption of these standards into legally binding frameworks.

The main limitation was difficulty in finding English language versions of some national regulations.

This chapter seeks to illustrate a normativisation of soft law frameworks into legally binding national obligations. Viewed through the phenomenon of Global Administrative Law it would seem evident that national authorities are willing to adopt various international voluntary standards to regulate the increasingly globalised actions of companies.

Voluntary standards and the various reporting methods of non-financial information is an extremely broad regulatory sphere with decentralised regulation and parallel regulatory frameworks. This chapter, in illustrating the convergence of environmental governance standards through normativisation of previously voluntary standards, will assist the reader in attaining an overview of the extent of this regulatory convergence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of tacit knowledge within innovative organizations. It addresses what organizations can do to promote knowledge sharing in order to improve successful innovation. Compared to available research material on explicit knowledge, the use of tacit knowledge within companies is relatively unexplored. The use of tacit knowledge is assessed with special emphasis on its significance and implications in the innovation process.

Existing research is structured with the objective of examining how companies make use of tacit knowledge. Key levers for tacit knowledge management are identified and the positive impact of tacit knowledge on innovation success disclosed.

The role of tacit knowledge in innovation management is analysed. Creation, availability and transfer of tacit knowledge within an organization are highlighted. Competitive advantage will be gained when companies value their tacit knowledge because explicit knowledge is knowledge we are already aware of and is public by its nature. Tacit knowledge can be the source of a huge range of opportunities and potentials that constitute discovery and creativity.

As this paper focuses on the transfer of tacit knowledge, barriers to successful knowledge transfer are described and success factors are explored which help to secure and improve the transfer of tacit knowledge.

It is proven that tacit knowledge has a crucial influence on the success of innovation processes in companies and plays a vital role as a company resource and success factor.

The first purpose of this short essay is to respond to Howells and Scholderer’s (2016) harsh critique that organizational unlearning is a superfluous concept. The second purpose is to establish a relationship between organizational unlearning and the learning organization.

To respond to Howells and Scholderer’s critique, the author carefully examines their arguments – focusing on their comments on the author’s previous publications – and checks whether the arguments are logical and coherent. To establish a relationship between organizational unlearning and the learning organization, the author draws on his own research of international joint ventures in China.

Howells and Scholderer seriously miscited the ideas in one of the author’s publications, and their main arguments are blatantly flawed. Moreover, they are unaware that many of the faults they find in the organizational unlearning literature are also present in the organizational learning literature. As to the second part of this essay, the study of the acquisition type of joint ventures clearly indicates the presence of organizational unlearning. Moreover, for such ventures to be learning organizations, the unlearning step has to be well managed.

As mentioned, the author’s response to Howells and Scholderer’s critique focuses on their comments on the author’s publications. It is highly likely that they have made other erroneous arguments that this essay fails to capture. The author’s discussion of unlearning and learning organizations is constrained by the context of acquisition joint ventures.

This essay forcefully rebuts Howells and Scholderer’s critique, which can become an obstacle in the development of organizational unlearning research. The dynamics of knowledge transfer in acquisition joint ventures suggest that skills of unlearning, and not just learning, are essential to reaching the goal of being a learning organization.

Though KIBS constitute only a small proportion of all services, researchers frequently accord them a significance beyond that indicated by their share in employment or value added (Tether & Hipp, 2002; Gallouj, 2002). For example, KIBS are held to play ‘an increasingly dynamic and pivotal role in ‘new’ knowledge-based economies’ (Howells, 2000, p. 4), as sources of important new technologies, high-quality, high-wage employment and wealth creation (Tether, 2004). Unfortunately, while much of the rhetoric seems intuitively reasonable, one inevitably encounters definitional difficulties in delimiting the specifics of innovation in KIBS, with a variety of, more or less operational, working definitions employed by the academic literature (Wong & He, 2005).

The attrition rate within post-secondary institutions is unsettling. Due to a number of factors affecting their wellbeing, students are choosing to escape the pressures of higher education, many within their first year. Focusing on literature regarding the student experience, transformational learning, student engagement, and mentorship, this chapter will explore what encourages first-year students to stay and flourish in university. In addition to current literature, primary case study research conducted with a first-year cohort at a small, private university in Atlantic Canada during the 2021–2022 academic year will also be reviewed. While engagement is often treated as a personal issue, it is also a systemic issue, one that institutions would be smart to address through programming and policy development.

The purpose of this paper is to facilitate understanding of the interaction between tacit knowledge and innovation.

The paper addresses the puzzle related to the impact tacit knowledge has on innovation. It appears that tacit knowledge has both negative and positive effects on innovation. The authors argue that solving this puzzle might find its solution in moving away from a one‐dimensional view of both tacit knowledge and innovation. Hence, they develop a typology of tacit knowledge to facilitate our understanding of the interaction between different types of tacit knowledge and different types of innovation. In conducting an aspect of a cybernetic theory of tacit knowledge and innovation, the authors develop a number of propositions for the influence different types of tacit knowledge have on different types of innovation.

The authors' argument is that different types of tacit knowledge hold different potential abilities for different types of innovation. The negative effect (a decrease in number of innovations) found in the tacit knowledge's conservative element might be explained in that the lower level of experience are more tied up in rule, procedures and analysis, than is the case for higher levels of experience.

In developing a typology of tacit knowledge and relating it to different types of innovation, the paper contributes to a new understanding of the complexity between tacit knowledge and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover processes and the corresponding social mechanisms promoting innovation in organisations.

It is the integration of organisational learning, the internal knowledge base of the company and its external knowledge base, viewed in relation to innovations in organisations, which are the main elements discussed in this paper. In the present paper, it is the systemic angle of incidence which will be used.

An increased focus on information, knowledge and organisational learning, has provided a deeper understanding of factors and processes conducive to innovation and eventually to sustainable competitive advantages. However, little attention has been given to social mechanisms triggering innovations, which are uncovered in this paper.

A conceptual model, which represents a synthesis of the social mechanisms which influence those processes affecting innovation in social systems is presented.

The idea is that when several knowledge domains (practical, theoretical, internal and external) are connected for one specific purpose, the inherent variety may release what is creatively new, igniting innovation in social systems.

We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.