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The circular economy (CE) has been endorsed as representing a model that is able to achieve environmental protection through decreased use of raw materials, together with changing economic values and social inclusion thanks to its demand for a wide variety of skill profiles. This has motivated many policy initiatives to support the implementation of the CE. The purpose of this study is to follow such policy initiatives in three geographically anchored industry-specific networks.

The study contributes to the research debate on the CE through a spatial approach with a focus on how the implementation of the CE is conditioned by spatial and regional contexts. The authors investigate three different networks in Sweden for CE with different locations and industrial profiles.

The findings reveal the difficulty that exist in relation to the implementation of the CE. The network and support functions in combination with private industry are vital. The risk of sustaining an uneven regional economic development is evident.

Although research on the development of the CE has proliferated, geographical approaches to this development are comparably rare to date. The authors seek to contextualise the strategy development and policy implementation of a CE policy.

Using the lens of Uber’s digital workers in Paris, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the trust-building mechanism is constructed between a digital platform and its digital workers in a foreign market entry.

This is a case study based on empirical data from in-depth interviews with 35 Uber drivers. A cross-disciplinary literature framework from mainly international business and internet geography theory and a reflexive qualitative methodology are applied.

Results show that the relationship between the digital platform and the digital workers is characterized by mistrust and suffers from decreasing commitment levels soon after market entry. Uber mitigates its mistrust via control and scarce mechanisms. The digital drivers’ “illusionary freedom”, a state in which they feel they can log on and log off at any time, enables the digital platform to gradually lower its commitment. The authors find that the mistrust does not seem to hamper the digital platform’s business performance.

The paper mainly covers the digital workers’ perspective and the case of Uber’s market entry in Paris.

This paper implies that digitally conveyed control seems to come at the cost of lowered human trust. Given the pace at which digital control systems are permeating society, this could eventually lower the whole societal trust level.

The authors criticize incumbent international business theory for not being sufficiently able to explain a contemporary digital business logic and the authors challenge the general assumption that successful internationalization is built through trust. The authors contribute with the conceptualization of a new technical market entry mode for digital platforms – “digitally controlled proxies”.

The implemented European Union Services Directive aimed at creating a unified European market for trade in services. However, the implementation of the institutions was not fully successful as to the characteristics of international services caused challenges in the ratification of the Directive. Research on international services is facing similar challenges based on the fragmented, inconclusive, and at times even contradictory findings of international services literature with regard to service characteristics. Thus, each academic field of international business, economic geography, and service management has tried to identify international service characteristics, but no unified characterization is found. The challenges in defining the different types of services, difference in the levels of analysis, and various impacts of policies and institutional environments on the service, cause these differences. The authors see the need for a unified framework that combines the different literatures and considers the policy implications. The authors develop a framework consisting of four components of international service characteristics, that is, the connectivity of service actors to the environment, the configuration of service activities within organizational set-ups, the dyadic collaborative interaction between service actors, and the created value by the services. The authors specifically consider policy and institutions as well as a vast variety of literature streams to support the arguments.

This paper aims to investigate whether Sub-Saharan African countries are catching up with the rest of the world in terms of online usage. Online service usage is an important component of the discourse of the “digital divide”, an emblematic term for the inequality of information and communication technology access.

This paper is a quantitative analysis of internet and Facebook penetration coupled with economic strength (GDP/capita), literacy and degree of rural population.

The findings reveal a heterogeneous pattern with a few African countries being digital oases and close to European levels, whereas the majority of the countries are still digital deserts. A strong correlation is found between economic strength and internet penetration. A generalist picture that Sub-Saharan is on the trajectory of closing the digital divide is an imprecise reflection of the reality.

It is argued that instead of measuring supply-side data, which has been the trend till now, the use of demand-side elements such as online service usage tells more about digital inequalities between countries.

The research encourages internet firms to open up their eyes for Sub-Saharan Africa as an investment opportunity with an untapped gap of online usage.

The three-billion internet users on the planet are unevenly spread and under-represented in Africa. By drawing a heterogeneous online usage landscape, digital policy can be accurately steered toward countries with the largest needs.

There is a paucity of research going into the depth of online usage in Africa. The paper is a contribution to fill that gap.

The paper aims to discuss how services and service innovation are inter‐linked and support organisational innovation. In particular, the reorganisation of operations and the introduction of new organisational arrangements are examined and conceptualised for further empirical analysis.

Based on the analysis of the different, most recent developments in the literature and practical experiences, a conceptual framework is developed that incorporates service and organisational innovation.

The developed conceptualisation focuses on the role of services and service innovation, and the emerging interactions between organisations and services providers, where facilitators play a role. Accordingly, services are no longer a secondary instrument of the value chain. Instead, they have become essential and may add value from their involvement, for example, in product design, business management, procurement in global markets, and support to customers' participation in value creation.

The paper provides a concept derived from an in‐depth literature analysis. In a next step an empirical analysis based on the proposed concept would complete the theoretical findings.

The proposed conceptual framework supports the overall recognition of service and organisational innovation as a powerful mechanism to gain competitive advantage for companies.

This paper proposes for the first time a conceptual framework that shows that organisational innovation turns into a prevailing tool that facilitates the integration of service innovations into the value chains of companies, and thus the increasing level of inter‐connectedness required for firms' competitiveness.