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Following the shift towards online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting educators have faced the difficult challenge of adapting their course delivery to an online environment. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a testimonial from two postgraduate accounting courses that heavily rely on cooperative learning and covers their transition towards a distance education approach. The authors explore the challenges students have faced when taking part in group assignments in the online environment, focusing on both quantitative and qualitative analysis of their overall experience. The findings discussed in this chapter are meant to serve as a base for future studies on the topic of post-pandemic online education and cooperative learning in the accounting field.

Climate change, pollutants, sustainable development, and public health have become increasingly more relevant issues that continuously get addressed and discussed by governments and entities all over the globe. Through the adoption of policies and recyclable methods, they hope to encourage and aid the responsible consumption of natural resources so as to reduce the creation of waste. Furthermore, the generation of sustainable communities is encouraged so as to safeguard and protect the population's health against the risks associated with different types of pollutants. To support SMEs in the adoption of sustainable practices, this chapter aims to introduce, guide, and provide some useful tools that can then be utilized by readers and professionals operating within SMEs to maximize the effectiveness of their sustainability approaches and tools while also providing knowledge on how the implementation of sustainable practices could be integrated within their businesses.

PurposeCrowdfunding platforms are important innovations that allow nascent entrepreneurs to gain access to financial resources and crowd inputs to better refine and develop their business idea. The purpose of this paper is to investigate user-generated content (UGC) from both reward-based and equity-based crowdfunding platforms, in order to determine its implications for open and user innovation.Design/methodology/approachA total sample of 200 most funded technology products was extracted from four distinct crowdfunding platforms. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis was performed in an attempt to identify critical latent factors. The analysis was carried out through the theoretical lens of innovation literature, in an attempt to uncover the implications for open and user innovation.FindingsThe authors were able to highlight the implications of crowd inputs for open and user innovation, as backers provided nascent entrepreneurs with several types of feedback, ranging from product co-development to strategy and marketing. Furthermore, the study provided an overview of the key differences emerging between reward-based and equity-based crowdfunding platforms in terms of crowd inputs.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study features intrinsic limitations of the LDA approach being adopted. More specifically, it only provides a “snapshot” in time of the current sample, rather than investigating its development over time.Practical implicationsThe present study solidifies the value of UGC as a resource to mine for trends and feedback.Originality/valueThe study contributes to both the innovation literature and the crowdfunding literature. It bridges several gaps found in both literature streams, by providing empirical evidence to test and verify pre-existing exploratory research.

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