There is need to better understand the trends and future challenges influencing the marine and coastal environments and identify the opportunities to develop innovative sustainability-oriented solutions to address these. Alongside mainstream decision support tools used in environmental management and conservation sciences, foresight techniques provide comprehensive and well-rounded information and knowledge about likely developments in the long-term future. This study uses a horizon scanning exercise to explore emerging signals and trends of future developments and innovation for the sustainable development of the blue economy looking towards 2030. It derives a series of global developments, challenges and opportunities relating to the blue economy from a review of high-level international reports and studies. Through a workshop conducted with 29 scientists and researchers based in maritime universities in six countries in Europe, the study identifies and prioritizes emerging signals and trends considered of high impact for a sustainability transition. The outputs include a synthesis of 11 global developments in the blue economy and 7 cross-cutting trends and trend projections. These may be valuable to marine scientists as a source of inspiration for a future research agenda or can be used as evidence for decision- and policymakers to deal with future uncertainties about the growth of the blue economy.

Purpose: Firms need to develop absorptive capacities to effectively source and exploit knowledge relevant to environmental behaviour for their own innovation activity. Business-to-business interactions can represent a significant route through which knowledge and resources about environmental innovations are transferred along the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to explore how firms exploit business partnerships in order to build capacity for environmental innovation. In order to do so, it investigates two elements of B2B interactions – partner alignment and compatibility – and their influence on absorptive capacity-building. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on a qualitative interview study of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) operating in the environmental goods and services sector and their clients involved in adopting environmental innovations. Matched pairs of engineering consulting firms and their clients – tourism accommodation establishments – were selected as a sampling frame in order to study the influence of partner alignment and compatibility on the exchange of environmentally relevant knowledge and competencies. Findings: The findings show that the synergistic attributes of business partners influence absorptive capacity-building and give rise to different patterns of interaction of KIBS with their client. The B2B interactions investigated are characterised by alignment along multiple objectives about the relevance of environmental behaviour. Furthermore, the compatibility of the partners’ competences is a key determinant of environmental innovation outcome. Practical implications: The study highlights the role of managers in identifying and selecting those business partnerships that accrue greater potential benefit for accessing resources and competencies for eco-innovation. Originality/value: The study contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity and innovation by demonstrating how B2B interactions – in this study, the interaction of KIBS with their clients – influence the capacity of firms to adopt environmental innovations which is an area of study that deserves further attention.

Purpose: Boutique hotels reflect a nascent phenomenon in the literature and in the accommodation sector. As a result, they are void of governmental classification and regulation. Concurrently, they lack any form of operational definition. The purpose of this paper is to address these limitations by identifying the core attributes found to define boutique hotels.Design/methodology/approach: To fulfil the purpose of this paper, the authors conducted a systematic literature review on Web of Science. This resulted in an analysis of 33 peer-review articles published from 1994 to 2022.Findings: The findings of this review revealed that boutique hotels are defined by eight core attributes; these are (1) multiple ownership structures, (2) situatedness in a historic premises, (3) strategic locations, (4) thematized internal décor, (5) experience design, (6) high levels of personalization, (7) novelty in service provisions and (8) niche marketing strategies.Practical implications: For policymakers, this paper may be used as a reference point to establish designated classification systems for boutique hotels. For practitioners, this paper may be used as a source of inspiration and benchmark to establish boutique hotels which align to the criteria highlighted in this paper. For scholars, this paper proposes an operational description of boutique hotels and novel areas for future research.Originality/value: This paper represents one of the initial efforts undertaken by researchers to unify the literature on boutique hotels.