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The unpredictable nature of a current business environment has underlined the organisational performance optimisation as a major issue (Muthuveloo and Teoh, 2020). Successful performance optimisation strategies require the ability to adapt quickly to an uncertain and changing environment (Christopher and Peck, 2004, Tang and Tomlin, 2008). Hence organisations are continually seeking new opportunities for the cost reduction, enhancement of the product and service quality, and increase of employee and organisational satisfaction (Freitas and Costa, 2017). However, key to effective response is to ensure performance is not compromised and therefore the need to focus on optimisation strategies is vital (Singh and Singh, 2015). Hence exploring lean six sigma (LSS) as dynamic capability (DC) is essential (Anand et al., 2009; Gutierrez-Gutierrez et al., 2020; Alsyouf et al., (2020) reinforcing the strategic orientation of LSS beyond its operational application as a performance optimisation practice (Sunder and Ganesh, 2020).

The unpredictable nature of a current business environment has underlined the organisational performance optimisation as a major issue (Muthuveloo and Teoh, 2020). Successful performance optimisation strategies require the ability to adapt quickly to an uncertain and changing environment (Christopher and Peck, 2004, Tang and Tomlin, 2008). Hence organisations are continually seeking new opportunities for the cost reduction, enhancement of the product and service quality, and increase of employee and organisational satisfaction (Freitas and Costa, 2017). However, key to effective response is to ensure performance is not compromised and therefore the need to focus on optimisation strategies is vital (Singh and Singh, 2015). Hence exploring lean six sigma (LSS) as dynamic capability (DC) is essential (Anand et al., 2009; Gutierrez-Gutierrez et al., 2020; Alsyouf et al., (2020) reinforcing the strategic orientation of LSS beyond its operational application as a performance optimisation practice (Sunder and Ganesh, 2020).

The objective of this paper is to present the results of a desk and field explorative analysis aimed to provide insights and models for realizing entrepreneurial skills curriculum in all cycles of a pre-university education system, and also in higher education schools in a developing country context, such as Albania. In doing this, the authors focus on comparing a US model of content entrepreneurship with entrepreneurial competence in the official curriculum of Albanian Education. In this sense, this paper is a support to the development of entrepreneurship competence and tourism development, as an integrated way in the implemented curriculum, especially for the pupils of pre-university education in Albania.

Recently, social big data are attracting increasingly the attention of tourism scientific community and decision makers, as a source of data that carries incredible insights and knowledge for innovation and value creation of the sector. Although it is widely debated about the opportunities of social big data, their practical utilisation for value creation is still in a very early phase. A suitable understanding of data and its usefulness is the essential keystone toward taking advantage. This paper aims to provide a conceptual framework as basis for guiding tourism operators and destination mangers to properly deal with social big data and create value for a sustainable smart tourism destination by extracting insights and knowledge that would help them to obtain greater intimacy from customers and to adapt to market changes.

This paper aims to provide a Structured Literature Review (SLR) about the strategic role of Intellectual Capital (IC) for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It offers an outline of past and present literature and frames a future research agenda. It analyses papers published in journals from 2003 – 2018 with the aim of deriving significant insights about IC's determinants for achieving SDGs. Although empirical and theoretical studies have shown a positive relationship between IC and sustainability, the research remains an emerging area of growing importance. Although no explicit specialisation in the topic currently exists, findings highlight the “sustainability imperative” and convergence toward the following research areas: IC components for Sustainable Development in Private Sector, IC for Sustainable Regional Development in the Knowledge Economy, and IC for Sustainable Development in the Public Sector. Discussions indicate that some SDGs are starting to be explored more than others (e.g., quality education, infrastructure, health, cities and communities) and that only recently some studies are specialising specifically in the importance of technology to address the SDGs. Implications for technology policy have been highlighted to frame a future research agenda for academics and practitioners.

Purpose The aim of this paper is underline how the new emerging digital technologies could be of great value in expanding the opportunities for women entrepreneurship by supporting them in overcoming the constrains they face as well as in creating more favorable network environment. This is creating the conditions for a new phenomenon called Digital Women Entrepreneurship. Methodology A qualitative literature review in relation to women entrepreneurship activities and the emergence of digital technologies is performed. Findings Specifically the contribution and the impact provided by the Digital Technologies will be analyzed for women entrepreneurship. A holistic interpretative framework for analyzing Digital Women Entrepreneurship is proposed. A conceptual discussion on how the Digital Technologies opportunities could be valuable in overcoming some of the constrains women tackle in their entrepreneurship process and which are the main research streams that emerge for future investigation on the theme. Originality/value Even if the literature on Women Entrepreneurship is well covered, to our best knowledge the intersection between the two fields remains unexplored. The paper provides a contribution in this direction, identifying new trends and future directions for research. Practical implications The major implication is to advance knowledge and practice in the area of gender in management and use of Digital Technologies by focusing upon empirical research, theoretical developments, practice and current issues. Benefits are related to a better understanding of the debate on “Gender and Management” themes by reconsidering networking activities with social media.

It is widely recognized that entrepreneurs are key drivers of economic development, and as such, nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset in young people has become a key priority for innovation. Entrepreneurship education (EE) has emerged as a key instrument to enhance entrepreneurial orientation. A growing number of curricula and programs devoted to entrepreneurship are registered in all levels and fields of education. Likewise, the tourism education sector recently has started to offer entrepreneurship education through dedicated modules or courses. However, despite the growing attention and relevance of EE in tourism, to our best knowledge, this field of research remains under-investigated. This paper aims to contribute to closing this gap by analyzing, though a web-based content analysis, the situation of European university initiatives that have begun including modules and contents related to entrepreneurship in their tourism educational programs. In particular, the paper seeks to analyse how the main components related to EE are being structured in these tourism education programs and offer advice on what might constitute an effective tourism entrepreneurship education path.

The pivotal role of Entrepreneurship centers in the development of Entrepreneurship Education (EE) is receiving more attention. This study aims to open the &ldquo, black box&rdquo, of &ldquo, how, when, why and what&rdquo, entrepreneurial mindset and competencies in the field of technology entrepreneurship are learned over time in the Entrepreneurship Centers. The study adopts an empirical web-based content analysis of ten entrepreneurship centers in European Universities from seven countries, analyzing 105 curricular and extra-curricular entrepreneurship education programs. This method allows researchers to address generalization bias and to effectuate a cross-case comparison, thus revealing more common patterns regarding the phenomenon. Findings reveal some common pillars of EE as developed within the Entrepreneurship centers in terms of five key dimensions: target audience, learning objectives, entrepreneurship contents, learning pedagogies and stakeholders&rsquo, engagement. This analysis provides the basis to introduce a process-based framework for entrepreneurial mindset creation in EE that is organized around four main phases: inspiration, engagement, exploitation and sustainment. The process-based model of EE supports entrepreneurship centers in designing learning initiatives that are aimed to inspire students at all levels of education, young entrepreneurs and start-uppers and scientists in their need to be equipped with an entrepreneurial mindset for technology entrepreneurship. The originality of the paper stands on the &ldquo, process-based&rdquo, framework that is proposed that serves as an interactive pathway that dynamically combines the phases toward entrepreneurial venture creation, the entrepreneurial competence level, the entrepreneurial learning strategies and collaboration with the University&rsquo, s stakeholders&rsquo, network toward the achievement of the competence goal.

The emergence of the blogosphere has created new challenges for large companies in the management of their corporate reputations, since grass roots blogs can generate negative perceptions about a firm and then spread them rapidly and widely. The blogosphere has also created new opportunities for firms to enhance their reputations, because the informal and personal communication that occurs on blogs may generate significant positive ‘ Internet word of mouth ’ . This paper examines the interaction between the blogosphere and a leading technology company, Dell Computer, over a critical two-year period. Our approach combines two novel techniques: automated mining of blog entries, enabled by parsing software, which generates semantic analysis and network maps of the relevant blog entries; and netnography, a method derived from ethnography for analyzing Internet-based discussions. This study shows that many established reputation management approaches, which were developed during the era of mass media, need to be reshaped to meet new realities in the age of Web 2.0.

the aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the primary issues, opportunities and challenges that eGovernment initiatives present for developing countries. The insights and results here presented are based on an empirical, webbased research of 15 case studies undertaken in developing countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Jamaica, the Philippines) which have already explored and implemented eGovernment initiatives. In these cases, we can observe different applications and opportunities for eGovernment, such as: tax administration (Jamaica, Guatemala); better services to customers, businesses and stakeholders in general (Brazil, India); and eGovernment for transparency and business efficiency (the Philippines, Ind ia, Chile).

The new competitive scenario based on knowledge resources has led firms to become more open to innovative sources and mainly to focus on collaboration with customers to co-create value (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Sawhney, Verona & Prandelli, 2005). The Internet, and more in particular, web 2.0 technologies, enable patterns of collaborative innovation, involving customers into the NPD process. By contrast, empirical studies show that there are many large and small companies which do not grasp the opportunities provided by the customers' contribution. This is due to a number of inhibiting factors that represent barriers for the collaborative innovation. This chapter aims firstly to delineate and validate some of these constraints by using the insights coming out from a case study and secondly to suggest a possible solution in order to overpass some of the barriers identified and to exploit the customers' knowledge acquired on the web.

The aim of this paper is to propose a dynamic integrated approach, based on modularity concept and on the business ecosystem approach, that exploit different eBusiness services for SMEs under an open business network platform. The adoption of this approach enables firms to collaborate locally for delivering the best product/service to the customers as well as globally by accessing international markets, interrelate directly with the customers, create relationships and collaborate with worldwide actors. The paper will be structured as following: We will start by offering an overview of the state of the art of eBusiness platforms among SME of food and tourism firms and then we discuss the main drawbacks that characterize them. The digital business ecosystem approach and the modularity concept will be described as the theoretical ground in which our proposed integrated model is rooted. 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Destinations differ in the modalities of coordination and collaboration, the intensity of interactions, local tourism supply organization and skill set, technological structure, and more in general, on the e-Readiness the entire system. Those features may affect the viability and success of Destination Management Systems. So, this paper argues that for a successful embarkation in e-Business, the choice and design of DMS Business models should be aligned to destination peculiar characteristics. In this aim a theoretical framework for the identification of DMS business models suitable to the different destinations configurations is presented. The conclusions will show as this framework is not static, but it follows and represents an evolutionary e-business implementation pattern for destinations.

Today we know that we live in a complex world of emergent behaviour and attributes, in which our powers of prediction are limited (Allen, Strathern, 2005). This counter with the ‘classical’ views of competitive advantage that implicitly supposed a mechanical environment, in which breaking a process into parts would allow us to predict it and the overall system. Also, the conventional, traditional approaches that have prevailed in the tourism management are being increasingly considered unable to give directions for organizations to cope with uncertainty and unpredictability of the future. This failure is related with the fact that analyzing and studying the constituent parts separately, do not give much insights on how all parts can function together, on what directions the whole industry/or sector need to move on, what actions, decisions and policies need to be activated in order to leverage the entire system. Senge (1990) notes “.....we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our action; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole”. Indeed, modelling the complexity of the new environment requires new managerial techniques and strategies that swiftly respond to changing technology and markets. This paper describes a new conceptual shift away from mechanistic to dynamic-complex approaches for management of tourism organisations. According to this framework, tourism parts are not considered in isolation, but instead as networks of relationships with flexible structures to allow self-organising convergence and co-evolution (Kelly, 2005). We argue that tourism fims’advantage would be more related to efforts of coordination and interaction among its constituting parts that provide increased capabilities for delivering the best value for money for its tourists. The implications of this new conceptualization for tourism structures, approaches, competitive resources and strategic actions concern: (a) Knowledge become the strategic resource for tourism enterprise as well as the ability to acquire, integrate, store, share and apply them become the most important resource for building and sustaining competitive advantage (Grant, 2001, Penrose, 1995). As consequence the knowledge worker turns out to be the most important asset for organizations. (b) Co-evolution and innovation patterns require modular production structures and network organizational structures based on knowledge sharing, knowledge searching and creation, for continuous upgrading of resource basis and attainability of a sustainable competitive advantage. (c) The strategy centres around knowledge management and continuous learning. The competitive advantage depend on the capabilities to capture and absorb the resources and knowledge residing inside the network, on the relationships between firms, customers and suppliers.

Networks are assumed to enhance tourism small firms' performance and competitiveness. Research indicates that there are different sources of values that could derive from these networks such as cost and time efficiency, quality improvement, flexibility and innovation. However, in most cases, these values are associated to a general framework of what Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and a network model are supposed to offer for small and medium enterprises (SME) and to its participating actors. Little, isolated empirical research has been conducted regarding the real value participating firms could appropriate and create. This paper reports on findings of an empirical research aimed to measure and investigate the value that single tourism enterprises could create and/or appropriate by participating in network tourism systems. The perceptions of small medium tourism enterprises (SMTE) regarding the value sources that could derive from their participation in network systems are also reported.