The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been the subject of various studies in recent decades. The purpose of this research was to study the Corporate Social Responsibility of companies, in combination with customers’ perspectives, in terms of their trends regarding their trust and loyalty. In this study, the business sector of the Greek mobile telecommunications’ companies was selected, where research on issues related to CSR is not considered extensive, to analyze customers’ attitudes towards a company that emphasizes its social responsibility. To complete the theoretical framework, questionnaires were collected to empirically investigate correlations and highlight, ultimately, the importance of having socially responsible companies in the mobile telecommunications sector in Greece. The present research proved that both at the bibliographic and practical level, successful companies are the ones that are concerned not only with increasing their sales and profitability, but also with enhancing and emphasizing their social impact and returning value to society.

Since 2020, numerous guides and tools have been available for designing, planning, and running hackathons in fields such as software engineering, ICT, and healthcare. However, a substantial gap is observed in the post-event phase of hackathons' life cycle, directly affecting the sustainability of results. This bears significant implications for hackathon events per se, as well as for ecosystem stakeholders, in medium-term and long-term perspectives. This paper addresses the issue of low valorisation of hackathon-derived solutions and assists their direct exploitation. We aim to provide a framework for hackathon organisers, managers, policymakers, and intermediary bodies maximising impact of such events. To achieve this, we investigate the relationship between event-level success and ecosystem-level impact. We draw upon the practices and data from the ENTREPRENEDU project hackathons, a Horizon Europe-funded program coordinated by the E. Amaldi Foundation. This series of hackathons, held in three different countries, helped identify key aspects for further investigation and served as the groundwork to define/frame our research question. We conducted literature review, examining papers and reports to explore how hackathon-derived knowledge is valorised within entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems. Our research aimed to identify how the already known success factors of a well-designed event contribute to the sustainability of outcomes and assess their relationship. We link hackathon success indicators juxtaposed to relevant factors. While acknowledging the complexity and multifactorial nature of innovation process and knowledge diffusion, we believe that our study advances the potential for hackathons’ greater impact by providing a cohesive framework.

Business accelerators are key actors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, positively influencing the startups they support. Still, academic research on the factors that contribute to an accelerator’s success is limited. Recognising their fundamental role in fostering innovation across diverse entrepreneurial ecosystems, this article focuses on understanding the factors affecting their success ratio across the European Union (EU), adopting a comparative approach between emerging and advanced economies. In doing so, it investigates factors like their strategies and structure, their innovation ranking and their sectoral focus. Results from 41 accelerators across 19 European countries suggest that the accelerators adopt different strategies for startup engagement with investors and that the innovation ranking of their country affects the standing of the accelerator in the ecosystem. They vary in their funding strategies, but the majority address broad sectoral spectrums. There is divergence in their investment strategies between developing and advanced European economies, as accelerators from the former still focus on rather technologically mature sectors, while accelerators from the latter have shifted their focus to emerging sectors.