In the postmodern era of industrialization, sustainable business performance is vital for success in a competitive environment. In order to attain sustainable business performance, Malaysian Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are facing various social and technological challenges. The objective of this study was to examine the roles of social and technological challenges in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage and sustainable business performance. To accomplish this objective, first-hand data were collected from Malaysian SMEs. Opinions of managerial staff of these SMEs were preferred regarding the roles of social and technological challenges in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage and sustainable business performance. An email survey was carried out to collect data. A total of 500 questionnaires were distributed among managerial staff of SMEs. Questionnaires were distributed by using simple random sampling. By using structural equation modeling, findings of the study revealed that social and technological challenges played major roles in boosting sustainable competitive advantage and sustainable business performance. Moreover, strategic alignment was a key in reflecting the positive roles of social and technological factors on sustainable competitive advantage. Findings of the study are beneficial for practitioners and will allow their strategies to reflect sustainable competitive advantages and sustainable business performance.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors determining the behavioral intention of using food delivery apps (FDAs) during COVID-19 pandemics, under a case study of Bangkok, Thailand. The study was necessitated by the increased use of FDAs during the lockdown; online transactions were considered important in preventing the spread of the virus. The study used quantitative techniques involving structural equation model (SEM) to evaluate the effects of exogenous variables on endogenous variables. Primary data were collected from people who had installed and used FDAs. The findings indicated that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, timeliness, task technology fit, perceived trust, and perceived safety significantly influence the behavioral intention to use (BIU) to use food delivery apps during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, effort should be intensified to study and understand FDAs as it pertains to safety and usage.

With the rapid enhancement in the design and development of the Internet of Things creates a new research interest in the adaptation in industrial domains. It is due to the impact of distributed emerging technology and topology of industrial Internet of Things and the security-related resource constraints of industrial 5.0. This conducts new paradigm along with critical challenges to the existing information preservation, node transactions and communication, transmission, trust and privacy, and security protection related problems. These critical aspects pose serious limitations and issues for the industry to provide industrial data integrity, information exchange reliability, provenance, and trustworthiness for the overall activities and service delivery prospects. In addition, the intersection of blockchain and industrial IoT has gained more consideration and research interest. However, there is an emerging limitation between the inadequate performance of industrial IoT and connected nodes, and the high resource requirement of permissioned private blockchain ledger has not yet been tackled with the complete solution. Due to the introductions of NuCypher Re-Encryption infrastructure, hashing tree and allocation, and deployment of blockchain proof-of-work required more computational power as well. This paper is divided into three different folds; first, we studied various related literature of blockchain-enabling industrial Internet of Things and its critical implementation challenging aspects along with the solution. Secondly, we proposed a blockchain hyperledger sawtooth-enabled framework. This framework provides a secure and trusted execution environment, in which service delivery mechanisms and protocols are designed with an acknowledgment, including the immutable ledger storage security, along with the peer-to-peer network on-chain and off-chain communication of industrial activities. Thirdly, we design pseudo-chain codes and consensus protocols to provide smooth industrial node streamline transactions and broadcast content. The proposed multiple proof-of-work investigated and simulated using Hyperledger Sawtooth-enabled docker for testing to exchange information between connected devices of industrial Internet of Things within the limited usage of resource constraints.

Industry 4.0 is a current trend of automation and digitalization of industries. The impacts and importance of Industry 4.0 are reflected in all aspects of our lives. The purpose of this article is to analyze the literatures based on a scoping review method. A lack of digital culture, training, knowledge, and language are also challenges faced by Industry 4.0 while implementing its operations. Digital English and Education 4.0 are also employee competencies of Industry 4.0. The authors have reviewed the literature related to Digital English, Education 4.0, and Industry 4.0 from various resources. Astonishingly, the results show that the studies conducted in these areas are so specific focusing only one of the above-mentioned areas; no research article was identified that detailed the interconnections among these areas. From the scoping review, the study has identified the gaps in the literature. Thus, the study concludes that filling up the gaps and conducting research in these areas are useful to sort out a few of the challenges of Industry 4.0 and it recommends that in future, researchers conduct studies based on the interconnections of Digital English and Education 4.0 for Industry 4.0.