This paper provides a theoretical contribution by investigating how digital technologies are currently reshaping the museum value chain in the Infosphere, an information environment where boundaries between the offline and online worlds are rapidly becoming blurred. This study applies Porter’s value chain to museum management to understand (1) how ICTs impact the primary production processes of museums, and (2) how museums are currently relocating in the new emerging environment. The study is conducted through an extensive literature review on museums and digital technologies. The research results identify four approaches to digital transformation: (1) a back-office approach to improve the preservation of cultural heritage; (2) an onsite approach to enhance the quality of the museum experience; (3) an online approach to extend the museum experience beyond museum doors; and (4) an onlife approach based on multisensorial and interactive technologies, LOD and IoT, to create a wider, more accessible and hybrid museum experience.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and framing sustainability issues from a resilience perspective, our paper first aimed to highlight nature-based solutions (NBSs) as levers to foster sustainable cities consistent with Agenda 2030-SDG 11 (2015) and the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III, 2016). Second, we empirically analyzed two Italian municipalities that are experimenting with initiatives of sustainable urban management and planning based on NBSs: the Municipality of Lucca in Tuscany and the Municipality of Latina in the Latium Region. These municipalities present institutional and socioeconomic similarities, making them an interesting study setting that allows us to draw significant lessons. We conducted four research steps: (1) theoretical background analysis, including resilience thinking in sustainable urban management. We investigated the role of NBSs in enabling urban resilience according to the last level of resilience, i.e., the transformative level. (2) We studied the contributions of NBSs to sustainable cities and resilience thinking. (3) We analyzed the NBSs’ projects of Lucca and Latina, and (4) we proposed an urban managerial tool: the NBSs’ curve, which facilitates the estimation of the NBS ecosystem endowment. The results of the NBS initiatives presented in this study have a two-fold value. First, they aim to combine citizens’ well-being with ecological and environmental aspects by better managing urban spaces that facilitate interpersonal relationships and resource sharing. Second, they are developed to meet the needs of local groups by serving as a stimulus (Fridays For Future movement) and as enablers (local associations) of managed actions. The lessons learned about the enhancement of sustainable cities through NBSs were thoroughly debated.

The European Union’s (EU’s) Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a milestone in the entangled path of regulating the increasing economic power of gatekeepers (e.g. Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft); however, it poses blind spots about its effectiveness with reference to two aspects. The first blind spot consists of not considering that the economic power of gatekeepers comes from multiple sources involving different levels of competition (i.e. within and between platforms). The second blind spot descends from the first one; each source of gatekeepers’ economic power is linked to rents of a different nature: monopolistic, Ricardian or Schumpeterian. However, the DMA does not distinguish the different natures of rents, instead treating all rents extracted by gatekeepers as homogeneous. These intertwined blind spots may provoke paradoxical effects on the main goal pursued by the DMA itself—namely, promoting contestable, fair and innovative digital markets. In contrast with works emphasising the strengths of the DMA in protecting competition in digital markets, the present research unveils these two blind spots affecting the DMA. First, this research analyses the different sources of economic power wielded by gatekeepers and the respective levels of competition to which the DMA refers. Second, it adopts the theoretical lens of the nature of rents to assess the effects of the DMA’s obligations on the effectiveness of its principles: contestability, fairness and innovativeness. Third, it provides implications for policymakers and theoretical insights for investigating the gap between the DMA’s intentions and results.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine peer production (P2P) conceived as an ecosystem for value co-creation. First, this paper provides information on the specific P2P method for value co-creation, which is based on distributed technologies, cognitive slack and search for quality, to provide outputs that are open to continuous improvement. Second, aiming to fill the extant literature gap, this paper discusses the efficient dimension of P2P, providing a framework for the net benefit analysis of the economies and diseconomies that affect the value co-creation processes.Design/methodology/approach: The paper identifies three main literature clusters that are focused on P2P, namely, economical, sociological and organizational clusters, and integrates them with the economics of organizational perspective to elicit information on the efficient dimension of P2P. This efficient dimension is expressed by a net benefit analysis of the economies and diseconomies that affect the P2P value co-creation processes.Findings: The P2P ecosystem is characterized by the intensive interaction among cognitive slack and distributed technologies. This complex interaction presents interesting implications in terms of efficiency that, until now, have not been analyzed in the literature. Aiming to fill the extant literature gap, this paper provides a consistent analytical framework that simultaneously takes into account the economies of knowledge integration and potential diseconomies, that is, the costs of coordination and loss of control that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies.Originality/value: This paper provides an original explanation of P2P as an emergent ecosystem that serves as a service logics amplifier of value co-creation. In this regard, analysis of the key features of P2P not only sheds new light on P2P, but also allows for the reflection on the ecosystem’s framework, which promotes a virtuous interaction between the conceptual speculation and understanding of reality. Moreover, the proposed framework for the net benefit analysis of the P2P value co-creation model draws the attention of managers and decision makers as they consider the following issue: value co-creation jointly considers not only its benefits, but also its associated costs.

Purpose: This paper aims to focus on distributed technologies with the aim of highlighting their economic-organizational dimensions. In particular, the contribution first presents a deeper understanding of the nature and the dynamics of the economies and diseconomies that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies. Second, it aims to shed light on the increasing tension between the hierarchy-based model of production and peer-to-peer (p2p) production, which involves the pervasive diffusion of distributed technologies.Design/methodology/approach: Adopting an economic-organizational perspective, which is deeply rooted in the related extant literature, an analytically consistent model is developed to simultaneously take into account the following variables: adoption density independent variable) and economies of knowledge integration and organizational diseconomies (the costs of a loss of control and the costs of organizational decoupling and recoupling) as dependent variables.Findings: Distributed technologies allow access to a large quantity and a wide variety of cognitive slacks that have not been possible until now. In doing so, they are leading the transition towards p2p. This is an emerging production paradigm that is characterized – with respect to mass production – by a shift in the relative importance of cognitive slack in comparison with tangible slack. Nevertheless, the unrestrainable diffusion of distributed technologies is not neutral for organizations. On the one hand, these technologies allow for the integration of economies of knowledge, and on the other hand, they involve organizational diseconomies that should not be ignored by managers and researchers.Originality/value: This paper fills a gap in the literature by developing a consistent analytical framework that simultaneously takes into account the economies of knowledge integration and potential organizational diseconomies (the costs of coordination and the loss of control) that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies.