Purpose: This study explores the knowledge development of network-based market orientation (MO) for the internationalization of disruptive innovation (DI) by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Methodology: To manage knowledge development for DI internationalization, a business model was applied to a case study of an individual example. The studied company participated in a series of workshops and allowed on-site visits and interviews for two years in a European Union-funded project. The workshops helped the company to gather MO and networking knowledge and then apply that knowledge internally in the organization and externally, in interactions with suppliers, buyers, and other members of the buyer chain.

Findings: Although technological and market efforts usually proceed separately, this study shows that technical and MO knowledge can go together through external and internal networking.

Research limitations/implications: To overcome the limitation of having just one example in a case study, several SMEs can be included in future research to produce a comparative analysis. A further study can investigate how technical and market networks can be integrated in the knowledge development process to speed up internationalization. Managers can learn to internationalize DI by collaborating, knowledge sharing, and networking with other SMEs, suppliers, and firms in the buyer chain.

Originality: The current study contributes to DI literature by highlighting knowledge generation in SMEs from a process perspective as well as by integrating technical and MO efforts for internationalization.

Purpose: This research focuses on firm resources and capabilities used for value co-creation in service innovation. Specifically, I investigated how service innovation is created in an in-ternational engineering company. The aim of this article is to reveal what resources and capa-bilities are employed by a service provider for value co-creation in the innovation project of engineering service and how they vary in particular stages of this project.

Methodology: The research is based on qualitative methodology by a multi-case study strate-gy. Focus group discussion with senior managers and semi-structured interviews with project managers of the studied international engineering company were used as concrete data gather-ing methods. Data analysis was conducted using the content analysis method.

Findings: The research revealed eight value co-creation activities accomplished by the engi-neering company and client during the engineering service innovation project. The activities are as follows: co-identification of the client’s problem, co-evaluation of ideas, co-defining of client’s requirements, co-analysis of environment, co-design, co-testing, and co-adoption, co-production, and co-activities after the launch. These activities are diffused in different project stages and demand a range of resources: expert knowledge, diagnostic, communication skills, trust, experience, technological equipment, human resources. Moreover, they require diverse capabilities: relational, innovative, analytical, negotiation, knowledge absorptive, planning, organizational flexibility, and cross-cultural. The intensity and variety of using the mentioned resources and capabilities differ relying on the value co-creation activity. Expert knowledge, communication skills as resources, and relational and innovative capabilities were empha-sized by the researchers most often. We hope these findings will represent a step toward a more coherent resource-based view (RBV) and service innovation theories.

Implications: The study involved only one Lithuanian engineering company, so the research context may influence the findings. Another limitation is related to the small number of cases and research participants.

Originality: Unlike previous studies that revealed the importance of single resources and ca-pabilities for service innovation, this study determined the range of resources and capabilities employed in different activities of engineering service innovation project stages, especially in the value co-creation activities performed by the engineering company and clients. Moreover, research also identified how resources and capabilities vary at different stages of these pro-jects.

Purpose: Many empirical and review studies have been performed in the management and organization literature from the structural social capital perspective. Since these studies focus on different topics periodically, we aimed to make a bibliometric analysis of the structural social capital literature that allows a regular, systematic, and quantitative evaluation of published articles in management and organization science to identify the underlying structure in this research area and to identify the main research themes of the scholarship.

Methodology: The bibliographic matching technique was used for checking international databases to explore the main concepts and themes of the management and organization literature and to identify main themes in the research area. Therefore, this article offers a bibliometric analysis of the literature that allows for a regular, systematic, and quantitative evaluation of published articles to identify their underlying structure and to identify the main research themes in the scholarship. Research data were analyzed using the text mining method, which is a sub-branch of the data mining method and one of the most critical ways to analyze and process unstructured data.

Findings: Structural social capital studies were examined in management and organization science databases in three periods forming four years. Although there are no completely different emerging themes, we noticed periodic differences and change in priority rankings. Moreover, we found that the subjects repeat every period with few new concepts.

Implications: This research shows the main themes in the management and organization literature, where structural social capital elements are examined together, and covers all areas of management, organization and business science. Considering the main topics of the three periods of this research, there are similarities, namely the words that rank among the top in each period are “innovation,” “entrepreneurship,” “knowledge management,” “performance,” “leadership,” “technology,” and “human resources” and these themes are the most prominent.

Originality/Value: This research presents an overview of all past studies that focus on the structural social capital present in social interactions. Since structural social capital influences management and organization literature, it is considered a valuable study and a guide for future research.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the role open data assumes in social innovation initiatives that combat the effects of Covid-19, in which quantitative information about these projects is complemented with the analysis of open data innovation capabilities.

Methodology: A mixed methods approach is adopted. Initially, quantitative data regarding the number of innovative projects is extracted from the OPSI framework. Then, in a second phase, qualitative data from each project is explored to explore the open data innovation capabilities offered by each initiative.

Results: The results reveal that most social innovation initiatives focus on the area of data visualization dashboards and open datasets. However, some projects address other areas, e.g. hackathons, service availability, and tourism information.

Implications: Covid-19 profoundly affects the lives of people and businesses, and open data can assume a determinant role in mitigating these effects and improve information transparency and collaboration between public and private entities.

Originality/Value: This study is relevant for the establishment of supportive public policies that promote the emergence of open-data-driven initiatives to mitigate the effects of Covid-19 in several areas such as the economy, education, and leisure.

Purpose: Entrepreneurship is a vital tool for the economic development of any country. As a fiel of research, entrepreneurship has become a diversified area of study. A plethora of studies appeared that investigate the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention, most of them focus on personality traits and other psychological factors. However, the studies focus less on practical entrepreneurial education such as internship and business incubation. Thus, the current study seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating the impact of business incubators and internship programs on student’s entrepreneurial intention in the Pakistani context.

Methodology: The authors collected data through a structured questionnaire from students and ran partial least square structural equation modeling technique by SmartPLS software. Findings: The results show that business incubators and internship programs have a strong and positive statistically significant impact on entrepreneurial intentions.

Implication: The current study can help policy-makers get a better insight on entrepreneurship so as to improve its innovation, proactivity, and risk-taking ability and how these factors can amend the lack of entrepreneurial awareness among business students.

Purpose: Analysis of theoretical views and empirical research concerning the relation between IT reliability and the innovation level of organizations. Implications: Findings enable us to indicate the direction of further promising research that should concern the relationship between IT reliability and innovation in the context of stages of the innova tion process and different types of innovation, which should be analyzed separately.

Methodology: The pilot (sample: 100) and main (sample: 400) survey was conducted in 2017 among SMEs located in Poland. Findings: The empirical analysis shows that there is a relation between IT reliability and innova tion level. Moreover, information reliability appears as a factor that may influence the organization’s ability to create innovations. Furthermore, service reliability proves to correlate with innovation level as well, which provides additional conclusions that support the realization that service is an important feature, which may also influence employees’ ability to employ IT appropriately and efficiently, thereby supporting the generation of innovation.

Value: The article presents a new factor that may influence the possibility of creating various types of innovations. Usually, papers focus on IT systems, while the relationship between IT reliability and innovation allows us to look deeper into this relationship.

Purpose: The paper explores the paradigm shift occurring in the automotive retailing industry since the advent of technological innovations and different solutions in mobility. Existing studies and literature focus on the specific aspects of this changing trend, which is why this paper concentrates on the holistic changes that include various approaches to the issue of disruptive innovation in automotive retailing.

Methodology: To answer the research questions, the article utilizes qualitative research approach in combination with inductive-interpretive analysis. Interviews with eight top-level professionals from the automotive industry reveal three different perspectives on the subject. The study analyzes interview results with coding methodology and MaxQDA software.

Findings: The findings center on two components of research: major trends and impacts. The trends include the changing approach towards usership rather than ownership and to clustered habitation in mega cities. What is evident is the stark impact of such trends as the rising popularity of battery electric vehicles, autonomous cars, and mobility as a service on the dealership model of retailing. The impacts include the falling need and demand for personal cars, the rise of large fleet services like car subscription or lower maintenance needs that are expected to drastically reduce the importance of dealership.

Limitations: To further understand the trends in automotive retailing, future researchers should focus on local trends in specific regions. Another limitation is linked with exclusive concentration on experienced professionals as sources of data.

Purpose: The paper explores the online dialog of firms and consumers through corporate websites and social networks. The objective is to investigate the state of this dialog, its mechanisms, and outcomes in four export-oriented manufacturing companies that represent a wide spectrum of industries, including FMCG and durable goods, low-priced and expensive products, purchased with high and low involvement.

Methodology: A multiple-case study was used as the research method, with data sourced from in-depth interviews, observations, and published documents.

Findings: The findings show all managers agree that dialog with consumers is useful, they allocate resources to support it, but its intensity is underwhelming. Dialog effects were reported as positive but only as anecdotal evidence without validation in reliable data, which underscores measuring difficulties. It seems that dialog is the easiest to implement in and brings the most substantial benefits for high-involvement products but, even there, the feedback from consumers is not effectively used for developing product innovations. The major obstacle that restricts rich dialog is not technology but the intensity, speed, and quality of personal contact between employees and consumers.

Originality: The empirical material presented here offers original insights that foster a better understanding of online dialog between consumers and manufacturing companies.

Purpose: The paper scientifically analyzes sustainable development in the context of economic entities and their integration in supply chains that reflect the various business models between parties involved in value creation.

Methodology: The authors seek the relationship between three aspects of sustainability and limitation of the functional weaknesses of the market through the integration of supply chains that reflect various business models. The paper bases on a survey conducted to identify interests of the companies in integrating innovations for greater sustainability.

Findings: The integration of supply chain is one of the reasons for using or limiting the functional weaknesses of the market related to the three sustainability aspects pictured by the concept of sustainability as environmental, social, and economic resources. Different forms of integration may contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of these resources.

Limitations: To clarify the influence of the supply chain integration on sustainable development, scholars need to conduct further research. The main point of the future research should be the development of a measure for the extent of influence of the supply chain integration on sustainable development.

Originality: The connecting of the integration of supply chain and sustainability is a new direction of scientific research that has previous studies. Thus, the research outcomes will impact the scientific field and community in both the area of supply chain management and sustainability studies. Keywords: innovation, business model, sustainable supply chain, integration

Purpose: This paper provides an empirical evaluation of R&D returns for a series of global companies who lead in innovation within the health care industry.

Methodology: The estimation procedure bases on two specifications: the parametric production function setting, and finite distributed lag model (FDL).

Findings: Using the most recent data on R&D investment by health care equipment and services along pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies, we confirm the positive albeit mitigated impact of R&D efforts on performance indicators (levels of sales). Moreover, we comment on the current phenomena observed in health care industry and offer a policy view for ongoing and future challenges in the sector.

Added value: Since there is a dearth of recent empirical evidence on R&D returns in the broad health industry, this paper offers the evaluation of economic incentives for companies to invest in R&D. These incentives embrace the induced increase in sales and profits levels. The authors participate in a public debate concerning the optimal levels of R&D rewards required to sustain the innovation within the sector.

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to better understand why some SMEs who pursue a niche strategy on the international scale are more effective with a differentiation via innovation while others with marketing differentiation.

Methodology: Therefore, the paper studies the effectiveness of different points of differentiation (innovation, marketing) of hidden champion type of companies: (1) from the perspective of the unknowns of the key success factors in the specifc market segment, and (2) from the perspective of the professional mindset/education of the strategist.

Findings: The results show that differentiation via innovation positively impacts frm performance when there are many market unknowns over key success factors, whereas marketing differentiation positively impacts frm performance when there are few market unknowns over key success factors. On the other hand, when top management earns a business education, the impact of marketing differentiation on frm performance is signifcant, positive, and strong. The effectiveness of differentiation via innovation does not depend on education.

Research limitations/implications: These results mostly consider the hidden champion type of companies, which prefer not to reveal themselves or their data to the public. The transferability of this research is thus limited.

Originality/value: This paper studies the hidden champion type of companies, which usually receive little attention from researchers, through the lens of differentiation via innovation and marketing differentiation as two distinct ways of competing as their effectiveness is contingent on the market unknowns.

Purpose: Despite the importance of innovation, the full innovation potential of companies operating in the industrial sector of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) seems not to have been unlocked yet. Thus, the primary purpose of the study was to explore the key elements of company innovation policies applied on the way to successful innovation.

Methodology: The article presents results of an empirical quantitative analysis. The data has been collected through an anonymous online and postal survey. The analysis focuses on 345 companies active on foreign markets and involves a Mann-Whitney U test and a regression analysis.

Findings: The conducted analysis points to the importance of the degree of interorganizational network embeddedness for the performance of companies active on foreign markets. It shows that the higher the degree of the overall network embeddedness (measured with adaptations, trust and mutuality), the higher the company’s perceived performance relative to its competitors.

Research limitations: The research was burdened with such limitations as respondents experiencing time pressure and the use of only one source of information (the interviewees).

Originality: Despite much general evidence, the study attempts to complement the rare qualitative studies on innovation in CEE. It was carried out as a response to the lack of an in-depth study covering such recurrent challenges in the feld of company innovation policies as disruption, portfolio balancing, integration, intangibilities’ management, and play.

Purpose: Despite the importance of innovation, the full innovation potential of companies operating in the industrial sector of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) seems not to have been unlocked yet. Thus, the primary purpose of the study was to explore the key elements of company innovation policies applied on the way to successful innovation.

Methodology: The study is based on qualitative methods. The aim of the study has been achieved through 24 semi-structured interviews conducted with senior management, project leaders, and R&D specialists employed at companies operating in the industrial sector in CEE. The time frame covers the period of the fourth quarter of 2016 and the frst quarter of 2017.

Findings: Managing disruption consists of focusing on innovation development stage and following market imperatives by making the innovation try to address the market needs. Balancing portfolio requires considering product and process innovation jointly. Furthermore, 62% of the interviewees say that breakthrough innovation results ultimately from numerous incremental advancements. As far as policy integration is concerned, achieving competitive advantage through internal research is common amongst technological leaders, while market contenders turn to external cooperation. Moreover, incorporating CSV principles into the concept of innovation policy appears to be a necessity. Managing intangibilities comes down to patents.

Research limitations: The research was burdened with such limitations as respondents experiencing time pressure and the use of only one source of information (the interviewees).

Originality: Despite much general evidence, the study attempts to complement the rare qualitative studies on innovation in CEE. It was carried out as a response to the lack of an in-depth study covering such recurrent challenges in the feld of company innovation policies as disruption, portfolio balancing, integration, intangibilities’ management, and play.

Purpose: The increasing pace of technological progress, hyper-competitiveness, volatility of markets, dominant in the contemporary society all cause signifcant changes in the approach to innovation and lead to the emergence of a new generation of models of innovation processes. An open innovation model is based on a systematic search for as well as research and use of various sources of opportunities for innovations that offer commercial potential. The main objective of this article is to analyse the possibilities of application of models of open innovation in management of micro, small, and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Poland. This article intends to explore the essence of open innovation by values, its inception, and conditions for its implementation in the management process specifc to the SME sector.

Methodology: The study has been based on in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted among business managers/owners responsible for innovation development of SMEs in Poland (16 interviews in total).

Findings: SMEs usually do not have their own research and development (R&D) departments, but need external support and R&D solutions tailored to their needs. SMEs need innovations and skills, which requires close cooperation with different partners. In order for SMEs to beneft from innovation processes, a structured cooperation not only with scientists and researchers, but also with other market partners needs to be established and intensifed. It changes both the creation of intellectual capital and the ways to manage it.

Originality: The new approach in the context of management of innovation is now one of the key challenges faced by smaller businesses. It is necessary to make changes in the approach to integration of external sources of innovation with the potential and resources at the disposal of a given company.

Purpose: The article contents are a synthetic presentation of the evolution of marketing and the hitherto development of social innovation as well as a comparison of the leading traits of both processes at the present stage of development. Based on this, there is an attempt to assess their impact on the social and economic development.

Methodology: This article is of a theoretical nature.

Findings: The idea and concept of marketing and social innovation have a great potential to serve socioeconomic development. To a certain degree, they have approximate or even common ideas and goals as well as similar concepts and effects. Social innovation is a support for marketing in the delivery of values and satisfaction to consumers and to a signifi cant part of the society. It also independently affects raising the quality of life of the society, owing to socialisation, diffusion and aid in the more effective use of technological, organisational, managerial and marketing innovations.

Value: The article is a part of the stream of current discussion on the place and role of marketing and social innovation in the contemporary economy and society.

Objective: This paper describes the level of knowledge of the areas in project management. The aim of this article is to diagnose the fi rst level of project management maturity in four surveyed companies. A common language is the fi rst of the fi ve levels of project management maturity.

Methodology: Qualitative research on target sample has been carried out using a questionnaire.

Test results: The study presents a fragment of the results of research on the project management maturity in organizations in the process of product innovation. Project knowledge is a resource for knowledge about methods and techniques related to the coordination of project activities and project experience gained from the implementation
of previous and earlier projects.

Conclusion: Proper knowledge management during the project can undoubtedly bring many benefi ts as: developing and improving their own solutions, eliminating duplication of work, saving time, learning from mistakes and the mistakes of others, the use of best practices.

Originality: Knowledge of project areas by the team indicates the level of project management maturity in the creation of product innovation.

Purpose: This paper aims to match subjective and objective measures of organizational innovativeness and test correlative relationship between the two.

Methodology: The research adopts a quantitative approach, and applies correlation analysis to identify interdependencies. The study has been done in the aviation industry, as organizational innovativeness has so far been described especially in high-tech industries – however it has not been investigated within aviation industry yet.

Findings: The results show that the discussions over reliability of research based on subjective measurements techniques are not unfounded. The evidence suggests that subjective measures are not correlated with objective measures, and the outcomes of third-party investigations differ considerably. Therefore decisions about measurements techniques should be deliberate, thought out, theoretically grounded and justifi ed. In general, methodological recommendations provided by this paper could be boiled down to the ascertainment that accurate and reliable assessment of organizational innovativeness should use a set of objective measures addressing all stages of the innovation process.

Originality: It should be noted that this study was restricted to only one industry and prone to some common bias. The aviation industry sample was relatively small and purposefully selected, disallowing conclusive statements made outside of this empirical setting. However despite the limitations this paper provides some signifi cant contribution to evaluation and research on innovativeness. It compares two approaches to measurement and empirically proves which approach is more suitable in case of such a highly innovation-intensive sector like aviation. Moreover, it introduces a new in Polish research tool for subjective assessment of organizational innovativeness namely the questionnaire developed by Wang and Ahmed (2004).