Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between the openness of firms and their innovation and financial performances. Design/methodology/approach – In order to investigate such relationships, data on inbound and outbound open innovation (OI) processes and performances of 110 worldwide top research and development (R & D) spending bio-pharmaceutical companies are collected via the consolidated annual reports and the PATSTAT database. The time period of the analysis is 2008-2012. Findings – Regarding innovation performances, R & D productivity and revenues to patents ratio decrease with openness, whilst patents growth is not influenced by OI adoption. As to financial performances, sales growth exhibits a positive trend with openness, while operating profit and turnover decrease with OI adoption. Particularly, an inverted U-relationship with inbound and a U-shape one with outbound are observed as of operating profit. Research limitations/implications – The study adds to the knowledge about the effect of openness on firms’ performances, a topic of increasing interest to academics, managers and policy makers. Both inbound and outbound facets of the phenomenon are taken into account. Practical implications – Understanding how openness affects performances enables more informed decision making by managers, leading to a more effective use of OI activities. Originality/value – The work provides new insights as to what “being open” means for a company, gauging both inbound and outbound transactions after a pecuniary perspective. Employing objective and continuous measures, the relevance of OI for the whole business of firms can be identified.

The nature of buyer‐supplier relationships has been closely linked to nation specific explanations and concern has been expressed in literature regarding the transferability of co‐design best practices to different firms and countries. On the other hand, many attempts to isolate best practices and to apply them on a global scale have been proposed in the literature. Contributes to the issue by analysing a controversial case study based on the Italian automotive industry. Results show that few aspects of the Japanese contextual features and American ones existed when the major Italian car maker decided to outsource component design and dramatically change its supply chain management approach. Moreover, despite the massive involvement of suppliers at a very early stage of the car maker new product development process, not all the best practices deemed to be necessary when implementing a co‐operative buyer‐supplier relationship have been applied. Argues that these results lead us to question the very nature of effective buyer‐supplier relationships as described by the dominant literature and suggests implications for practitioners and for future research.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the relationships between the openness degree of companies and their 1) context features, 2) R&D organization and 3) financial performances. The openness degree is defined after a pecuniary approach, involving all the transactions in the innovation market. Hypotheses are formulated and, then, tested on a sample of 126 world top R&D spending bio-pharmaceutical companies for the period 2008-2012. Open innovation is more pervasive among small and young companies, for most of which it represents the very core business. Inbound and outbound practices have a similar diffusion in terms of number of companies adopting them, but the cumulative values of inbound flows are higher, whereas outbound flows are more relevant when compared to the total business of the firms. Inbound practices are substitutive to internal R&D activities, while outbound ones are complementary to internal development. The performances of companies have an inverted-U shape trend versus inbound practices and a fundamentally decreasing trend versus outbound ones.

The paper suggests a model for measuring the degree of openness of innovation in firms through the analysis of their annual reports. Two indicators are defined: open innovation generated value, which measures the intensity of outbound processes, and open innovation consumed value, measuring the intensity of inbound ones.\ud The model is applied to a sample of 145 R&D intense companies in the\ud biopharmaceutical industry, defining a positioning map of the firms in six classes

The growing attention to emerging technologies has raised several doubts regarding the sustainability aspects. Among the new technologies, blockchain has laid the foundations for a revolution in the financial field but also in the energy, tourism, medical, industrial and supply chains sectors. Through a systematic literature review, 37 documents were analyzed to describe the sustainable aspects generated using blockchain in supply chains. Therefore, the results achieved provide two levels of analysis. The former highlights the impact of the adoption of blockchain in supply chains based on the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. The latter shows the positive and negative impacts of each form of sustainability. The purpose of the work is to summarize the current state of the art in order to propose a future development agenda based on the need to simulate and define a measurability for each dimension of sustainability. Finally, the study provides a broad overview of practical and managerial implications for entrepreneurs and researchers. On the one hand, the work shows how the use of blockchain improves the profits and reputation of companies. On the other hand, it highlights several research gaps to be investigated and considered by researchers.