The question of how social enterprises foster social innovation in rural regions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I develop the assumption that the embeddedness of social enterprises in rural communities and their ability to connect rural communities with supra-regional networks and...

Local innovation research often focuses on big cities and creative places. However, novel developments also emerge in provincial cities and in interactions between (social) entrepreneurs and policymakers. This article shows, by way of two case studies in Greece and Poland and an interpretive...

Social innovation (SI) research tends to understand rural SI processes as collective initiatives of equally engaged, supportive, and like-minded people. However, recent research has indicated that SI projects often benefit from dedicated key players who find support in their communities but also...

According to Schumpeter, the creativity and motivational ability of distinguished entrepreneurs drive innovation in enterprises. It is the individual entrepreneur who comes up with new ideas and paves the way for their realization. Conversely, social enterprises are regarded as making decisions...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to show that Hoshin Kanri has the potential to integrate the operations strategy literature into a coherent structure. Hoshin Kanri’s planning process is typically described as a top-down cascading of goals, starting with the senior management’s goals...

Bottleneck detection in manufacturing is the key to improving production efficiency and stability in order to improve capacity. Yet, common bottleneck detection methods in industry and academia lack either accuracy or practicability, or both, for dynamic systems. The new methodology is conducted...