This cross-country comparison of administrative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden is aimed at exploring how institutional contexts and administrative cultures have shaped strategies of problem-solving and governance modes during the pandemic, and to what extent the crisis has been used for opportunity management. The article shows that in France, the central government reacted determinedly and hierarchically, with tough containment measures. By contrast, the response in Germany was characterized by an initial bottom-up approach that gave way to remarkable federal unity in the further course of the crisis, followed again by a return to regional variance and local discretion. In Sweden, there was a continuation of ‘normal governance’ and a strategy of relying on voluntary compliance largely based on recommendations and less – as in Germany and France – on a strategy of imposing legally binding regulations. The comparative analysis also reveals that relevant stakeholders in all three countries have used the crisis as an opportunity for changes in the institutional settings and administrative procedures. Points for practitioners COVID-19 has shown that national political and administrative standard operating procedures in preparation for crises are, at best, partially helpful. Notwithstanding the fact that dealing with the unpredictable is a necessary part of crisis management, a need to further improve the institutional preparedness for pandemic crises in all three countries examined here has also become clear. This should be done particularly by way of shifting resources to the health and care sectors, strengthening the decentralized management of health emergencies, stocking and/or self-producing protection material, assessing the effects of crisis measures, and opening the scientific discourse to broader arenas of experts.

New value-adding solutions are needed for grocery supply chains to gain a sustainable competitive advantage in a market environment characterised by increased competition. This paper discusses two case studies that identify how improvements to the value offering brought about enhancements to the performance of the total supply chain. The concept of 'time benefit analysis' is applied to measure the impact of the change. These approaches offer novel and unique techniques for performance measurement and value offering analysis in supply chain management.

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Game mechanics can motivate users beyond what is normally expected. Research has shown that this technique can be used to enhance the learning experience for students on all educational levels. The paper details the experiences of transforming traditional lecture-based courses in undergraduate political science to gamification and game-based learning, and it presents the reader with a toolkit for how to make such a conversion based on the author's experiences. An overview of selected scholarly literature on teaching informs the reflection on this transformation. The paper concludes that gamification and game-based learning can provide benefits in political science education when leveraging formative assessment, flipped classrooms, and game-based learning. It also finds that there might be some institutional barriers to the adoption of these tools, primarily associated with the institutionalization of the bell curve as a guideline for the distribution of student grades. The paper ends with some reflections on possible future research areas.