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This paper cross-fertilizes regional innovation and place branding studies using the firm as the focal point of theoretical and empirical exploration. It explores how business innovation strategies connect place brands and regional innovation dynamics and highlights the role of place brands in symbolic knowledge exchange and co-production. The sustainability-oriented innovation strategy of a luxury fashion firm (Rifò) in the Prato textile district of Tuscany, Italy, is analysed. The firm's place brand appropriation assists symbolic knowledge absorption, interpretation and recombination with synthetic knowledge. The place brand supports the firm's operationalization of a context-specific, distinctive, actionable heritage-driven innovation approach to sustainability. Place brand formation results from the firm's recodification of local heritage into novel place meanings and images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on the case study of the establishment of the campus of Tongji University (TU) in Florence, Italy, in 2014. This is the first offshore campus of a Chinese university in a Western country, showing an innovative trend, in particular concerning the legitimacy within the host sociopolitical and economic context. This article frames the case in the scenario of academic internationalization and Chinese higher education. The article analyzes the internationalization strategy of TU and the peculiar evolution of Florence as an "education hub," and gives a detailed account of the process leading to the establishment of the campus. Conclusions emphasize the innovative features related to Tongji's choice to follow a delocalized platform approach and to network with local actors. This imposes a more complex view of the impact on the host region.

The implementation of the Smart Specialisation approach was expected to require an especially challenging commitment to policy learning in less advanced regions compared with advanced ones. This paper suggests a partially different analytical framework by discussing the relevance of path dependency in the design and implementation of Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3). The research question concerns the relationship between previous experiences in innovation policy also in less advanced regions and RIS3 policy processes. Based on the two case studies of Sicily and Apulia (Italy), the paper investigates in which way policy heritage contributed to the quality of processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Serena Rovai This study examines the critical role played by the environment-related variables on human resource management (HRM) in the PRC for western multinationals (MNCs) when transferring and implementing HRM practices in the host country. In contrast with current literature which suggests that western MNCs choose to adopt HRM policies that resemble more with the parent firm than with local Chinese companies (Bjorkman and Lu, 2000), evidence resulting through the development of our case-study and the exploration of company HRM practices shows how those HRM practices are often a 'hybrid' of parent firm practices and the local context as further hypothesised by the academia (Bjorkman and Lu, 2000; Chiang, 2000; Rowley and Benson, 2002; Tsui and Li, 2000).