Using advanced technology in business has created hyper-competition among organizations to satisfy customers' needs. Using advanced technology aims to provide customers with quality products/services at suitable prices in the right place better than competitors. Therefore, the current study's purpose is to explore the influence of cloud computing services on Jordanian commercial organizations’ competitive advantages, organizations which use cloud computing services. The study uses quantitative, cause-effect, and cross-sectional methods and uses a convenience sampling approach to collect the data by questionnaire from 111 managers and/or owners of commercial organizations. The collected questionnaires are examined and inserted into SPSS. The instrument validity, normal distribution, and reliability are verified, then descriptive analysis is performed, the relationship between independent and dependent variables is tested, and finally multiple regressions are used to test the hypotheses. The findings indicate that commercial organizations are concerned about cloud computing services as well as competitive advantage sub-variables. The results also show that there was a significantly strong correlation between cloud computing services and competitive advantage. Moreover, cloud computing services influence the dimensions of competitive advantages (quality, cost, reliability, innovation, and responsiveness) of commercial organizations, where cloud computing services have the most significant influence on quality followed by cost and responsiveness, respectively. However, cloud computing services do not significantly influence innovation and reliability. Finally, the study recommends doing comparable research on other sectors, and industries as well as in other countries to test the results' generalizability.

This paper investigates the relationship between supply chain management practices and organizational performance with the mediating role of innovation. Data were collected from 207 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Punjab, Pakistan. PLS-SEM was used to analyze the proposed hypotheses. Findings reveal that strategic partnership with supplier and level of information sharing had no influence on organizational performance. In addition, quality of information sharing, internal supply chain process, and lean practices had significant influence on organizational performance. Moreover, all five practices of supply chain management had significant and positive influence on innovation. Meanwhile, innovation significantly and positively mediated the relationship between supply chain management five practices and organizational performance. The findings of this study will help managers of SMEs enhance their performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the drivers of firms’ sociability on social media (SM), an unregulated area, in an emerging country, namely, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The sample of this study is 345 non-financial listed firms on Tadawul stock exchange during 2016-2019. Data are collected from several sources such as annual reports, the official website of the sample companies. Other data are collected manually such as the presence of the CEO and the sampled companies on SM. Our findings show that firm size and leverage level are important firms’ characteristics that drive firms’ sociability on social media. The finding shows that CEO sociability on social media is a key CEOs’ characteristic that drives firms’ sociability on social media. Further analysis reports that there is a complementary effect between CEO’s sociability on social media and firm size in increasing firms’ sociability on SM. The findings also show that there is a complementary effect between CEO’s sociability on social media and firm leverage in increasing firms’ sociability on SM. This study contributes to the disclosure literature by providing empirical evidence of the drivers of firms’ sociability on SM, an unregulated area in KSA. It also complements the considerable literature on voluntary disclosure which ignores the use of SM platforms as a “new” voluntary type of reporting. The present study complements recent literature on the adoption of SM by providing evidence that the sociability of top leaders is a driver of firms’ sociability on SM.

In a market economy, entrepreneurship requires large-scale innovations to maintain competitiveness and high rates of economic growth, and large investments are needed to implement innovations. However, in the process of their activities, investors face increased investment risk and therefore need reliable methods of investment evaluation and investment modeling of innovations in industrial enterprises. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model for assessing the investment attractiveness of innovative projects. The article builds a graphical model of investment in an innovative product at different stages of its life cycle. A conceptual structural and mathematical model for assessing the investment attractiveness of innovative projects of industrial enterprises has been developed, which reflected the stages of risk management, phases of the life cycle of the innovation project and the stages of the innovation process. The main idea of the proposed model is to manage investment in innovation based on the impact on the level of specific innovation risks.

This paper was retracted based on the authors' request due to errors in the computations.

Industry 4.0 is a modern approach that aims at enhancing the connectivity between the different stages of the production process and the requirements of consumers. This paper addresses a relevant problem for both Industry 4.0 and flow shop literature: the missing operations flow shop scheduling problem. In general, in order to reduce the computational effort required to solve flow shop scheduling problems only permutation schedules (PFS) are considered, i.e., the same job sequence is used for all the machines involved. However, considering only PFS is not a constraint that is based on the real-world conditions of the industrial environments, and it is only a simplification strategy used frequently in the literature. Moreover, non-permutation (NPFS) orderings may be used for most of the real flow shop systems, i.e., different job schedules can be used for different machines in the production line, since NPFS solutions usually outperform the PFS ones. In this work, a novel mathematical formulation to minimize total tardiness and a resolution method, which considers both PFS and (the more computationally expensive) NPFS solutions, are presented to solve the flow shop scheduling problem with missing operations. The solution approach has two stages. First, a Genetic Algorithm, which only considers PFS solutions, is applied to solve the scheduling problem. The resulting solution is then improved in the second stage by means of a Simulated Annealing algorithm that expands the search space by considering NPFS solutions. The experimental tests were performed on a set of instances considering varying proportions of missing operations, as it is usual in the Industry 4.0 production environment. The results show that NPFS solutions clearly outperform PFS solutions for this problem.

The increasingly tight competition has caused problems for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in increasing their marketing performance. During the last few years, the marketing performance of SMEs operating in the Project woodcraft industry sector in the Badung Bali has moved downwards. The goal of this research is to develop knowledge in the fields of Strategic Management, specifically regarding product innovation to achieve a competitive advantage in an attempt to improve internationalization and marketing performance. The population in this research is all of the SMEs operating in the woodcraft industry sector and is based in Badung Bali. The sample size in this research is determined based on Slovin's formula and the total includes 100 units of SME operating in the woodcraft industry. The method used is the quantitative approach, which examines the role of competitive advantage in mediating the influence of product innovation on internationalization and marketing performance. Based on the research results, product innovation has a positive and significant influence on both, competitive advantage and internationalization. Product innovation and competitive advantage have positive and significant influences on marketing performance. Competitive advantage has a positive and significant influence on internationalization. Meanwhile, it has been revealed that competitive advantage can mediate the influence of product innovation on marketing performance and competitive advantage can mediate the influence of product innovation on the internationalization of SME operating in the Project woodcraft industry sector in Badung Bali. Based on these findings, the project woodcraft industry SME in Badung Bali is advised to be more innovative in producing their products, so that there would be an increase in marketing performance in the international market. It is also recommended for subsequent researchers to add in other variables, such as product quality and market orientation, to enrich the information attained.

Corporate foresight is a capability that includes any structural or cultural element that enables the company to detect discontinuous change early. The purpose of the present study is to examine the direct impact of corporate foresight, and organizational learning on the performance dynamic of SMEs working in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In addition, the study tries to analyze the moderating as well as mediating effect of digital transformation and innovativeness on the relationship between exogenous and endogenous constructs. A sample of 576 questionnaires were distributed among the owners/managers of different SMEs working in the region of UAE. However, a final sample of 354 respondents was empirically tested. The data was analyzed through a two-step approach where structural equation modelling (SEM) under SmartPLS was found to be very helpful to examine the direct and indirect relationship between the study variables. The study findings show that there is an insignificant but positive impact of corporate foresight on organizational performance whereas significant impact of organizational learning on organizational performance. Furthermore, the study found evidence for the moderating effect of digital transformation between organizational learning and innovation. Additionally, it is observed that innovativeness mediates the relationship between corporate foresight and performance dynamics. The study findings suggest that for exploring the relationship between corporate foresight, digital transformation, and organization the role of innovation and digital transformation is quite significant. The study findings suggest that both owners and managers at SMEs of UAE should attach more importance to innovative capabilities and digital transformation for achieving higher levels of organizational performance. Policy makers should reasonably consider the direct and indirect effect of study variables while considering high performance at the workplace.

Women entrepreneurs and the informal sector are looking for footholds in the COVID-19 pandemic, which will lead women to develop creative businesses. This study examines the role of sharing knowledge and innovation in addressing gaps in social capital and marketing performance. Purposive sampling is used in the technique sample with 229 samples and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM-PLS) analysis techniques with SmartPLS is used for processing applications. The results show that social capital has a positive effect on the business performance of women entrepreneurs in Bali, Indonesia. The knowledge-sharing variable can be a mediator in the relationship between social capital and performance, and social capital has a significant positive effect on innovation, but innovation does not have a positive effect on marketing performance and knowledge sharing. In the end, women entrepreneurs will use knowledge sharing to create various innovations to meet market demand. However, opportunities for women entrepreneurs are very limited on capital due to the lack of guaranteed capital, and a lack of entrepreneurial skills in the era of technology, market access, bureaucracy, and legal matters. In addition, managerial skills, access to information technology, and the perspective that men should excel in Balinese culture and customs, limit business for women entrepreneurs.

This paper presents an exploratory factor analysis on knowledge management and organizational innovation items influencing on organizational strategy. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 210 employees in an insurance firm named Dana located in Iran. Cronbach alpha has been well above 0.90, which confirms the validity of the overall survey. Using principle component analysis, the study extracts six critical success factors influencing on knowledge management including knowledge management processes, organizational culture, organizational structure, human resources, information technology, top management support and three factors of innovation including product innovation, process innovation, and organizational performance.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of organizational culture on individual’s innovation. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 30 questions in Likert scale, which has 4 main categories and 16 sub-categories. The main hypothesis of the survey investigates whether or there is a positive relationship between organizational culture and individual’s innovation. Using Spearman correlation ratio as well as stepwise regression technique, the study has confirmed a positive and meaningful relationship between organizational culture and individual’s innovation. In addition, there are positive and meaningful relationship between individual’s innovation and knowledge sharing, top management support, supporting mechanism and management’s accepting criticism.