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Supplier selection is a complex and strategic activity needed in every organization, involving many stakeholders and different attributes as price, delivery performance, and product quality. Globalization, in the last decades, increased the competitiveness between vendors, enhancing the use of decision models to support the best choice based on optimizations and bidding variations due to specific needs. This chapter presents three models of multi-dimensional auctions to improve an international humanitarian NGO process procurement efficiency by reducing procurement costs and the decision-making process time. These models have the advantage to be easily implementable in typically complex environments where there is a large number of categories, suppliers, and other features.

The first proposed model uses combinatorial auctions and is suited for procurement, where suppliers can benefit from cost complementarity. The second one uses volume discount auctions and is suited for volumetric purchases, where discounts for large quantities are common. The third one is a multi-attribute model, which computes the best possible solution considering several criteria and can be used in case of complex purchases that involve various categories and trade-offs and are subject to spot prices.

Several design considerations for this type of auctions are reviewed, as well as the mathematical formulation to determine the best alternative (i.e., winner) that can be solved using simple tools like Microsoft Excel. The models are optimized by a mixed-integer programming, and the multi-attribute one is developed using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). All three models developed in this research showed superior results compared to the baseline, being between 9% and 20% more efficient than a regular supplier selection (singly choosing the lowest price) and improving the bidding compliance.

The purpose of this paper is to review the current state of knowledge about the links – metaphorical and real – between cultural and biological diversity.

By way of approach, the paper focuses on language and music cultures, two areas of intangible cultural heritage whose diversity has come under threat in recent decades.

The paper suggests some ways in which recent advances in the fields of ecolinguistics, biolinguistic diversity, and music sustainability continue to further knowledge of the links between cultural diversity and biodiversity.

Metaphorical parallels between biodiversity and cultural diversity (such as the interconnectedness of the various forms of intangible cultural heritage, as in a biological ecosystem) may, to some extent, be able to inform the development of models for supporting intangible cultural heritage, such as language and music. Moreover, the very real interconnections between these two kinds of “diversities” holds implications for cultural heritage management, since efforts to safeguard cultural diversity will be impacted by the successes and failures of efforts to protect biodiversity, and vice versa.

For this reason, the issues explored in this review hold implications for policy‐makers, governments, non‐governmental organisations, culture‐bearers themselves, and other stakeholders in the viability and diversity of cultural heritage.

This chapter describes and discusses the main results of the successful off-hour delivery (OHD) pilot test in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, which took place between October 2014 and March 2015. The pilot engaged major stakeholders in urban distribution, including local authorities, shippers, carriers, and receivers, with the aim to determine what are the main requirements, constraints, opportunities, and threats for establishing a public policy related to shifting deliveries to late night in order to mitigate traffic congestion.

Differently from the former City of New York OHD pilot, here all participant companies were volunteers, with no need for cash incentives. The primary focus in São Paulo was on the issues of safety and noise, besides productivity aspects of travel time, truck speed, and delivery time.

The pilot was very successful, with no registered complaints of noise or security incidents. Travel speeds were obtained from global positioning system (GPS) tracking data and internal delivery systems. The chapter compares daytime and night operations and shows that productivity in some chains would improve significantly, but noise and safety must be carefully controlled to guarantee the expansion of the concept.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how collaborative entrepreneurial learning (EL) processes between entrepreneurs and university students can enhance the entrepreneurial practices in the context of knowledge-intensive enterprises. These learning processes represent a valuable source for entrepreneurship development in incumbent enterprises in the forms of innovative products, services, processes or organizational renewal.

An extreme case study is the project “Mimprendo” (www.mimprendo.it), an initiative promoted by the Italian Conference of the University Colleges and the Italian Association of Young Entrepreneurs in collaboration with Italian universities. This is analyzed in the period 2009-2015, during which seven editions were developed.

A framework is presented based on collaborative EL processes to perform relevant entrepreneurial projects in knowledge-intensive enterprises. The framework provides a coherent and systematic approach to generate, select and implement entrepreneurial practices in incumbent companies starting from a project competition involving creative students and innovative entrepreneurs. EL processes in the community composed of entrepreneurs, experts and university students are grouped into the entrepreneurial phases of inspiration, exploration, exploitation, acceleration and growth, and include the learning processes of “intuition and sensing,” “contamination,” “experiential and contextual learning,” “experimenting and acting” and finally “thinking and reflecting.”

Implications for research can be identified according to many perspectives to deepen the centrality of the learning process in the research on knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship.

The framework results to be a promising approach to diffuse an entrepreneurial culture both in incumbent enterprises and in university students through a synergic collaboration among industry, university and institution. Practical implications could be derived for enterprise, students and educators involved in the design of innovative learning initiatives to sustain the development of an entrepreneurial mind-set.

The framework contributes to extending an emerging research area exploring entrepreneurship as a never-ending dynamic learning process. The involvement of brilliant university students in activating EL process with entrepreneurs in incumbent enterprises represents a novel aspect in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the articles presented in the special issue “Entrepreneurial learning dynamics in knowledge-intensive enterprises.” The special issue is inspired by recent research on entrepreneurial learning dynamics in knowledge-intensive enterprises literature. The aim is to extend and consolidate this emerging research area exploring entrepreneurship as a never-ending dynamic learning process, as well as, to cross-fertilize entrepreneurship and organizational learning studies.

The paper is based on a literature and published document review, experiential reflections and argument.

The paper reveals an integrative framework to highlight the breath of entrepreneurial learning research according to different level of analysis: the context where learning happen, the different typologies of entrepreneurial learning processes, the ontological levels at which learning can occur and the different typologies of entrepreneurial learners. Continuous learning processes allow entrepreneurs to develop and grow, as well as, enable knowledge-intensive enterprises to engage in strategic renewal processes.

Although, entrepreneurial learning research so far has focused on applying existing theories in the entrepreneurial context, more research is needed to broaden the perspective and understanding how entrepreneurial learning can help to face key entrepreneurship’s challenges in different context.

The paper presents an holistic approach of current entrepreneurial learning research and encourages researchers to explore how different learning types come into play in different entrepreneurial contexts (start-up initiatives, strategic renewal in incumbent enterprises, ventures development and growth).

How university context (UC) enhances students’ entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition is an emerging topic. It is known that students learn, not only from educational programmes, but also from the context in which they are embedded. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of such context on student’s entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition.

The authors use a three-dimensional institutional framework to describe UC including regulative, normative and cognitive structures. Regulative structures refer to rules and regulations, support initiatives in relation to entrepreneurship; normative structures include shared values and norms; while cognitive structures apply to knowledge among students and faculty. A heterogeneous sample of 196 respondents from five countries was used to create reliable measures of UC and to test the hypotheses with the help of regression analysis.

The findings indicate that two dimensions of UC in particular (regulative and normative) were shown to be of great importance in increasing entrepreneurial intentions and opportunity recognition among students.

The study contributes to this further by suggesting a reliable and theory-grounded scale of UC. Furthermore, this study adds to the discussion on entrepreneurship education by proving evidence of the importance of UC on entrepreneurial intentions. The important contribution is acknowledgement of the fact that social systems both constrain and enable entrepreneurs in their discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities. The authors have established that “would-be student entrepreneurs” do not exist separately from their structural context. Attempts to understand them outside of this context cannot, therefore, fully capture their nature.

Embroidery as a textile embellishment technique plays an important role in people's daily life. Esthetic embroidery artworks possess cultural values. With the development of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), these technologies have been studied and applied in the embroidery process. This study aims to survey how these technologies facilitate embroidery from different aspects.

This paper surveys how the technologies of robotics and AI are applied in the embroidery field. The applications are mainly reviewed from three aspects: computerized robotic embroidery systems has been widely used for the mass production of embroidered textiles, the advanced technological systems and techniques have greatly facilitated the development of smart textiles and the artificial intelligence plays an important role in the inheritance, innovation and protection of traditional handicraft artwork of embroidery.

The programmable robotic embroidery machines have greatly improved the production efficiency of embroidered textiles and promoted the development of electronic textiles. The AI, mainly the deep learning technology, brings significant benefits to esthetic embroidery creation. Technology-based embroidery has become a hot research topic in the field of textiles.

This paper summarizes the application of robotics and AI technologies in the field of embroidery, which provides readers a comprehensive and systematic understanding about the research progress of modern technology-oriented embroidery. This helps readers gain inspiration from the technology perspectives.