Daniele Binci

Purpose: Social enterprises must renew business models while balancing social impact, commercial viability, collaboration, digitalisation, and stricter sustainability and impact demands. Yet dynamic capability and social entrepreneurship education research offers limited guidance on how these pressures translate into human resource roles and competence development across vocational education and training and lifelong learning. This study maps how business-model change reconfigures human resource design and competence needs in European social enterprises, arguing that effectual, partnership-based training builds adaptive capabilities. Design/methodology/approach: Sixty semi-structured interviews with higher-education professors, vocational education and training trainers, and social enterprise managers were conducted in Finland, Greece, Italy and Spain using maximum-variation purposive sampling. Data were analysed with reflexive thematic analysis, using country, role and organisational maturity as lenses. Findings: Business-model hybridisation, platform- and data-enabled coordination, and stronger sustainability and impact-measurement demands prompt role redesign, especially boundary-spanning functions linking beneficiaries and customers, and new mandates for impact modelling, digital coordination and green-transition work. Competence needs combine transversal skills, including collaboration, communication and socio-ethical sensitivity, with digital business models, data analytics, business intelligence, sustainability accounting and impact measurement. Gaps in languages, legal and accounting literacy, advanced data skills and bid writing constrain funding, compliance, experimentation and scaling. Originality/value: The study integrates dynamic capabilities, competence development and effectuation theory to explain capability renewal in hybrid social enterprises. It offers a role-linked competence and training framework, highlighting work-embedded micro-credentials, service learning and co-creation studios as mechanisms supporting capability development among leaders, educators and workers, informed by evidence from four countries.

Purpose: This article examines how five process-management paradigms - Reengineering, Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean Manufacturing (LM), Six Sigma (SS) and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) - interact with and enable Industry 4.0 (I4.0), reconceptualising process management (PM) as a strategic lever by mapping technological and organisational variables for its adoption. Design/methodology/approach: Following PRISMA guidelines for a systematic literature review (SLR), we used Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) and conducted backward snowballing, analysing 120 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2015 and 2025. Findings: The results reveal an I4.0 implementation gap due to limited integration between process-management paradigms and socio-technical variables. We identify and systematise these variables in a structured multidimensional input-process-output (IPO) framework. Research limitations/implications: The inclusion-exclusion criteria excluded grey literature and non-English publications, and framework applicability may differ by sector and firm size, requiring further empirical validation. The IPO framework clarifies the components and interactions between social and technical variables, and provides a roadmap for managing the socio-technical complexity of I4.0 toward holistic integration. Originality/value: This review integrates PM paradigms within a unified socio-technical IPO framework, which goes beyond existing classifications by revealing paradigm-specific contributions, misalignments and complementarities across organisational and technological dimensions of I4.0 adoption.

Digital platforms are increasingly attracting attention in academic and managerial debate. Platforms make market transactions effective by allowing the matching of supply side complementors, third-party collaborations and applications developers with the demand side of end-users’ and customer groups’ needs. Accordingly, this paper aims to explore the role of digital platforms with a focus on the downstream space sector where digital platforms refer to the architectures and infrastructure, but also on the digital technologies that interconnect in-orbit satellite applications with end-users’ needs. We develop a framework by using a qualitative approach, based on the case study method, connecting both literature from the socio-technical perspective and addressing the empirical evidence based on Spacedge™ and the Planetek space digital platform. Our research question moves around the specificities of the sociotechnical perspective with the aim of building a comprehensive framework for exploring the main input, processes and output of the digital platforms in the downstream sector.

Sustainable public procurement is potentially a powerful policy instrument to alter production and consumption trends and achieve favourable environmental and social objectives. Italy has been deemed one of the EU Member States most committed to sustainable public procurement as it has mandatory provisions on all levels of public purchasing. Since 2017, the use of Minimum Environmental Criteria in tenders has been mandatory. This chapter examines the use of sustainability criteria in public food tendering. There are environmental, social and healthy eating criteria which are applicable to tenders for food products and catering services. The chapter gives an in-depth analysis of the mandatory Minimum Environmental Criteria for public food procurement adopted in 2020. It will show how the Criteria taken together comprise a comprehensive sustainable food procurement strategy.

Space Economy (SE) is increasingly becoming relevant for business and management with impacts on many industrial segments (i.e. agriculture, transport, assurance and the environment) but also on sustainable practices (i.e. Agenda 2030). Despite the importance of SE for new business models and value creation processes in the ecosystem, theoretical approaches for the downstream space economy implementation are still quite limited in literature. Accordingly, this paper reports the results of an in-depth analysis of the main factors (i.e. Open innovation drivers and Digital Platform business model) that affect effective implementation of space value chain models

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the agile project management (APM) approach through the contextual ambidextrous lens by overcoming the traditional perspective that separates projects within the opposite planned-exploitation- and emergent-exploration-oriented forms.Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a grounded approach to five different agile-oriented companies for discovering how agile adoption shows both emergent (exploration-oriented) and planned (exploitation-oriented) tensions in a perspective that connects, rather than separates, them.Findings: This study discovers five main categories, namely, approach, objectives, boundaries, leadership and feedback, that capture the tensions between planned and emergent issues of agile projects. The identified variables interact with different intervening conditions of the APM attributes (i.e. road map, product backlog, team backlog and solution delivery), activating different response actions (“exploitation embedded in exploration” and vice-versa), requiring, as a consequence, the need for contextual ambidexterity.Research limitations/implications: This study identifies different implications based on real project contexts, as the importance of a more complete picture of the APM approach, which also considers the combination of planned and emergent aspects of projects and, as consequence, the needs for dual capacities (T-shaped skills) both at project management and team levels.Practical implications: This study identifies, in real project contexts, the relevance of integration between the corporate level and the agile project team. This implies the search for constant dialogue, with feedback exchange spread across all levels, also enabled by an integrated leadership approach.Originality/value: This study highlights agile tensions in a real-world project context by describing how APM connects both explorative and exploitative aspects of change within the same APM initiative, in order to manage such tensions, which differs from previous studies that consider APM in alternation with a linear project management approach as stage-gate.

Purpose: Digital transformation (DT) is a priority for the healthcare sector. In many countries, it is still considered in the early stages with an underestimation of its benefits and potentiality. Especially in Italy, little is known about the impact of digitalization – particularly of the Internet of Things (IoT) – on the healthcare sector, for example, in terms of clinician's jobs and patient's experience. Drawing from such premises, the paper aims to focus on an overlooked healthcare area related to the chronic heart diseases field and its relationship with DT. The authors aim at exploring and framing the main variables of remote Monitoring (RM) adoption as a specific archetype of healthcare digitalization, both on patients and medical staff level, by shedding some lights on its overall implementation.Design/methodology/approach: The authors empirically inquiry the RM adoption within the context of the Cardiology Department of the Casilino General Hospital of Rome. To answer our research question, the authors reconstruct the salient information by using induction-type reasoning, direct observation and interviewees with 12 key informants, as well as secondary sources analysis related to the hospital (internal documentation, presentations and technical reports).Findings: According to a socio-technical framework, the authors build a model composed of five main variables related to medical staff and patients. The authors classify such variables into an input-process-output (I-P-O) model. RM adoption driver represents the input; cultural digital divide, structure flexibility and reaction to change serve the process and finally, RM outcome stands for the output. All these factors, interacting together, contribute to understanding the RM adoption process for chronic disease management.Research limitations/implications: The authors' research presents two main limitations. The first one is related to using a qualitative method, which is less reliable in terms of replication and the interpretive role of researchers. The second limitation, connected to the first one, is related to the study's scale level, which focuses on a mono-centric consistent level of analysis.Practical implications: The paper offers a clear understanding of the RM attributes and a comprehensive view for improving the overall quality management of chronic diseases by suggesting that clinicians carefully evaluate both hard and soft variables when undertaking RM adoption decisions.Social implications: RM technologies could impact on society both in ordinary situations, by preventing patient mobility issues and transport costs, and in extraordinary times (such as a pandemic), where telemedicine contributes to supporting hospitals in swapping in-person visits with remote controls, in order to minimize the risk of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) contagion or the spread of the virus.Originality/value: The study enriches the knowledge and understanding of RM adoption within the healthcare sector. From a theoretical perspective, the authors contribute to the healthcare DT adoption debate by focusing on the main variables contributing to the DT process by considering both medical staff and patient's role. From a managerial perspective, the authors highlight the main issues for RM of chronic disease management to enable the transition toward its adoption. Such issues range from the need for awareness of the medical staff about RM advantages to the need for adapting the organizational structure and the training and education process of the patients.

This paper aims to analyze e-procurement adoption projects with specific focus on the Italian market. E-procurement adoption is critical for organizations, both for its internal efficiency and for the deep impact on sustainability issues. E-procurement adoption, however, is a complex journey as its implementation deals with various obstacles and the adoption costs can limit the overall organizational performance. Advisory services can support organizations in reaching the overall benefits of the e-procurement solution also by reducing the setbacks related to low technology literacy of end-users. Accordingly, we analyze adoption of e-procurement, its main variables and outputs, by focusing on a comparative case study based on an exploratory-inductive investigation of two Italian leading providers. The data have been collected through primary (semistructured interviews) and secondary (companies’ internal documents and companies’ websites) sources. Results highlight that when firms decide to adopt e-procurement, advisory services have an enabling role that can support them into implementation, and particularly for overcoming barriers and helping them to achieve the expected benefits.

This chapter focuses on Smart Working (SW) adoption and its related leadership styles. We particularly aim at understanding how SW adoption requires an ambidextrous approach based both on directive and empowering leadership. Our theoretical framework, particularly, contextualizes the leadership approach by highlighting that within such blended context (off-site and on-site working mode), leadership should be ambidextrous, according to the specific working mode and, therefore, according to the opposite related dynamics, such as autonomy vs. control or task vs. objectives focus. The model, moreover, focuses on the importance of enabling an approach that implies new relational skills (or new combination of such skills) both for the leaders and the workers that, regarding their remote or physically approach, should evaluate to be more or less directive (or empowering). However, other contingencies should be analysed in order to have a deeper view for a successful SW adoption. Leaders and followers, therefore, need to be cognizant and aware about such contingent approach that claims for their flexibility and variety of behaviors, and they should develop, accordingly, a related behavioral repertoire. This contribution, by proposing a more complete and complex approach for SW adoption based on ambidextrous leadership, offers an original point of view that highlights the importance of balancing both directive and empowering leadership styles within a SW context.

This article explores the relationship between leadership and safety culture within a high-reliability organisation (HRO). By drawing from a sample of 68 managers from a large safety-oriented company, we aim to analyse the contribution of vertical versus shared decision-making styles related to safety culture. Results suggest that both styles can influence a safety culture, even if differently. Regarding a safety prevention situation, a vertical leadership approach is found to be more impactful than a shared one on preoccupation with failure, sensitivity to operations and reluctance to simplify. For the safety containment, our evidence reveals that both approaches are required for resilience and deference to expertise. The different influences of decision-making processes on safety culture make clear the need for leaders to pay attention to vertical and shared leadership styles and behaviours. Our research makes a useful contribution into the leadership/safety culture relationship by providing an original perspective about what leadership and behaviours could better predict the dimensions of a safety culture within HROs.