Introduction to Special Issue by Orlando Troisi and Mara Grimaldi: “…Contemporary organizations that aim at exploiting the opportunities offered from Big data should reframe their processes through new technologies and analytics not only to gain competitive advantage but also to implement flexible governance and foster diffused decision-making (Visvizi et al., 2018; Polese et al., 2021).
In the last developments introduced in management research, new collaborative and open models are understood strategically according to a network view that considers the relationships with a broad set of stakeholders (from for-profit companies to users, non-profit and public institutions) as critical factors enabling well-being and innovation (Visvizi and Lytras, 2019a).
For this reason, open innovation (OI) (Chesbrough, 2003) is conceptualized to describe the way in which emergent models of innovation can enable the development of innovative insights thanks to the knowledge exchanged through a complex set of relationships enhanced by smart technologies.
Smart organizations based on OI models can be reread as smart communities, as technology-mediated networks that through the collaboration between people (Abbate et al., 2019) and the sharing of a set of norms, rules and values (Barile et al., 2017; Vargo et al., 2020) can improve well-being in different areas, from economy to environment and social inclusion (Appio et al., 2019; Kashef et al., 2021). The ability of communities to challenge environmental complexity through their constant evolution can help rereading the concept of resilience as the complex result of system’s adaptation, maintenance, change and disruption (Vargo et al., 2015). The investigation of the main resilient features (restructuring, adaptation, transformation) of smart communities can contribute to detect the transition from the emergence of innovation to the development of social changes.
Therefore, the goal of the current Special Issue is to advance new theoretical and empirical contributions that analysze how contemporary resilient data-driven organizations and communities can integrate technologies with human component (Bang et al., 2021) to reframe innovation emergence and foster the attainment of societal transformation. In this way, by using a collaborative approach, research can explore how organizations can develop innovation solutions to address relevant social issues thanks to the constant reshaping of culture and knowledge and to co-learning processes that can address the evolving community needs.
The exploration of the different ways to reframe organizational processes and policies thanks to human’s interactions mediated through technology can help the identification of how social, economic and health challenges (in COVID era but also in case of future crises) can be met through continuous transformation…(More)”