This paper contains an exploratory analysis of the business model innovations (BMIs) that firms in cultural and creative industries (CCIs) undertake along their life-cycle. Despite the role that creative and cultural and creative firms (CCFs) have in the economic development of industrialised countries, they tend to remain small and often fail due to industry-specific constraints and tensions, such as the lack of managerial capabilities and complexity in nurturing value chain relationships. However, there has been relatively limited scholarly interest into the specific conditions and processes that enabled CCFs to overcome these liabilities, and in particular into the identification of the business models they have adopted along their life-cycle. In this paper, this issue is analysed by using the concept of BMI, which sheds light on how the reconfiguration of the activity system through which a CCF creates, delivers and captures value enables the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities over time. This paper builds on an in-depth historical study of three leading firms operating in the mobile gaming industry, namely Rovio, Zynga and King Digital Entertainment. Three main results emerge from this study. First, in the ramp-up phase of their life-cycle, CCFs organize their resource architecture to build a strong and recognized reputation. Second, in the development phase, BMI is used to leverage new distribution paradigms. Finally, in the maturity phase, firms dedicate resources to innovate their product portfolios by providing platforms that support the development and testing of new creative ideas and solutions. Findings and implications are then discussed.

The importance of digital innovation is widely acknowledged among managers and scholars alike. However, its actual conceptual treatment in academic research is not necessarily clear or precise. Most research considers digital innovation as the final result of adopting digital technologies, such as new products, processes, services, or business models. In other words, this research advances the concept of digital innovation as an outcome. In parallel to this research on digital innovation as an outcome, the concept of digital innovation as a process has emerged, linking innovation capabilities, organizational structures, boundaries, and technology management in organisations. The scattered existing research on digital innovation as a process explores the anatomy of the digital transformation of the innovation process by focusing on its phases, underlying mechanisms, barriers, and enabling factors. We argue that management research should pay more attention to this perspective on digital innovation. Therefore, in this essay, we take stock of research on the topic and identify four orchestration mechanisms that are inherently processual, enabling the firm to effectively coordinate and leverage different types of resources to create and capture value through the adoption and exploitation of digital technologies in the innovation process. Based on these orchestration mechanisms, we develop an agenda for future research that will hopefully inform further scholarly inquiry in the field of digital innovation.

While entrepreneurial families often expand their activity over multiple businesses and patrimonial assets, this complexity is rarely addressed in mainstream family business research, where the predominant focus is on the family business or, at best, on the family controlling the operational business. We advance a more holistic understanding of entrepreneurial families that contemplates the variety of assets they create or acquire over time that jointly generate financial and socioemotional wealth for the family, and call for attention to the variety of organizations that entrepreneurial families establish to preserve, manage, and/or administer such assets. We theorize that each of these organizations can be devised as a family boundary organization (FBO), which operates at the interface of the entrepreneurial family and other systems, and such FBOs form a family-related organizational ecosystem. We propose a new framework that extends the scope of research beyond the family business and focuses more directly on entrepreneurial families and on the boundaries between the entrepreneurial family, its multiple assets, and the FBOs in the family-related organizational ecosystem. This framework paves the ground to extend the three-circle model, broadening the scope of family business research to consider a wider range of organizations besides the family firm, such as family foundations, family business foundations, family offices, family holdings, family academies, and family museums. Drawing on the organizational boundaries literature, we integrate organizational boundaries in the theory of the family firm and propose a research agenda to examine the entrepreneurial family and its assets in a broader way.

Scholars have recently paid growing attention to the transfer of family legacies across generations, but existing work has been mainly focused on an inward-oriented, intra-family, perspective. In this article, we seek to understand how family firms engage in rhetorical history to transfer their social family legacy to external stakeholders, what we call “outward-oriented social legacy.” By carrying out a 12-months field study in three Italian family business foundations, our findings unveil three distinctive narrative practices— founder foreshadowing, emplacing the legacy within the broader community, and weaving family history with macro—history—that contribute to transferring outward-oriented social legacies.

The design of reinforced concrete flat slabs in practice can be governed at failure by punching shear close to concentrated loads or columns. Punching shear resistance formulations provided by codes are calibrated on the basis of experimental tests on isolated slabs supported on columns in axisymmetric conditions. Nevertheless, the behavior of flat slabs can be different than isolated specimens due to the potentially beneficial contributions of moment redistributions and compressive membrane actions. Accounting for the significance of these effects, nonlinear finite element analyses are performed with the crack model PARC_CL implemented in Abaqus. This paper aims to investigate a series of punching shear tests on slabs with and without shear reinforcement, different reinforcement ratios and loading conditions accounting for the potential contribution to the enhancement of the punching strength due to compressive membrane action (CMA). The numerical results with a multi – layered shell modeling are then post – processed adopting the failure criterion of the Critical Shear Crack Theory (CSCT). The results pointed out the significant outcomes and differences between standard specimens and actual members showing how the current codes of practice may underestimate the punching capacity.