Purpose: This paper aims to explore the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in smart cities (SC) as a key aspect of enhancing urban governance and achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This integration presents significant opportunities and certain risks that require careful and proportionate management. Design/methodology/approach: Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, and using a hierarchical impact assessment method, this study suggests how to measure the impact of AI-enhanced SC projects on ethical principles throughout respective projects’ life cycle. Having outlined a typology of SC applications, and having matched them with specific AI models, this paper develops and applies an analytical framework that serves as a valuable tool for monitoring ethical aspects of AI-based projects implemented in SC. Findings: The study presents a descriptive model and a single visual scheme that synthesize the analytical framework. These tools provide support to public and private stakeholders, including citizens, NGOs and academic and research institutes by offering a unified method to assess and understand the ethical implications of complex SC systems. Through a hierarchical approach, the study aggregates the impacts of child nodes at each layer. Originality/value: The study's contribution consists in the introduction of a comprehensive analytical framework that enables a structured assessment of ethical implications in AI-enhanced SC projects. By providing a clear approach for monitoring ethical impacts, the research fills a gap in literature as well as in practice as regards responsible and ethical use of AI in urban governance.

Purpose: The present paper aims at understanding how horizontal network collaborations between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can be designed and implemented to take advantage of a supply chain finance (SCF) perspective.Design/methodology/approach: This study presents an SCF literature background identifying four literature gaps, and in response to them it adopts an action research approach. The empirical analysis is developed on a network-case study: a horizontal collaboration project between small businesses of the Italian wine industry and their supply chains.Findings: SMEs can play an active role in developing – in terms of design and implementation – their collaborative networks by taking advantage of an SCF perspective for themselves, and their customers, based on the reorganization of relationships interface processes. Taking this perspective can be a concrete and crucial way to sustain the development of SMEs and their supply chains in an actual competitive context.Research limitations/implications: The paper identifies the theoretical gaps in the literature, suggests new research areas that deserve to be more deeply investigated and connects case-related results to the key concepts. The empirical part presents a real case application that proposes a complete roadmap for managers and practitioners who wish to experience similar projects.Practical implications: This network-case study storyline, presenting an overview of ten years of meetings, with related purposes, is suggesting a roadmap for design and implementation of horizontal network as managerial implications. These kinds of active research projects, with a collaborative mixed team of academics and practitioners, and involving a multilayer group of participants, are positive examples for closing the bridge between companies and academia, which enhance this network of small businesses active in trying to improve their competitiveness working together.Originality/value: The value of the paper is to embrace a supply chain-oriented perspective for an SME, independent of the financial system and based on inventory flow management. Very little literature focuses on inventory-based research within the SCF framework, designed for real implementation in horizontal network collaboration by entrepreneurial ventures.

Purpose: This research introduces a service-oriented and decentralised application (Dapp), TrustyChain, which implements the innovations connected to blockchain technology (BT) and cryptocurrencies to facilitate the application of smart contracts throughout an entire supply chain. The application is designed to impact supply chain performances, optimising transaction costs and lead time while leveraging network economies to generate a competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approach: In conducting our research, we developed a case study by adopting Yin’s methodological framework and offering an as-is/to-be scenario. Linear regression analyses were conducted to assess the impact on the target variables.Findings: This study demonstrates how blockchain-based DApp innovations enhance information flow and optimise transaction costs by resolving the challenges associated with purchase and sale decisions. Specifically, the adoption of TrustyChain has underscored the strengthened structural alignment of exchange processes among supply chain participants, significantly improving transparency, traceability and operational efficiency.Research limitations/implications: This study provides valuable insights for managers and practitioners, facilitating the understanding of the DApp implementation process and increasing the likelihood of effective application, which is essential for establishing a sustainable supply chain network. Additionally, our research emphasises the critical role of innovations in advancing supply chain transparency and efficiency while also shedding light on their substantial influence on trust dynamics within supply chains. Finally, this work opens new avenues for exploration, underscoring the need to investigate the evolving paradigm of trust in the context of BT.Originality/value: This study contributes to the existing literature on the DApp ecosystem by conducting an empirical investigation on a DApp’s impact on the transparency, traceability and efficiency of an entire supply chain. Currently, there is limited research available that measures the level of efficiency and effectiveness that can be attained through stakeholder participation in a DApp network.

Purpose: The main objective of this research is to highlight the managerial and organizational implications for businesses resulting from the implementation of blockchain logic and technologies. The functionalities of blockchain technologies are compared with the traditional approach to supply chain management to emphasize the impact they can have on managing intra-supply chain relationships and the organizational structure of companies involved in supply channels. Design/methodology/approach: To conduct this study, a conceptual study was carried out, starting from an analysis of the main characteristics of blockchain technologies, to build an AS-IS scenario compared with the TO-BE scenario resulting from the implementation of these technologies within supply chains. To conduct this study, conceptual categories of the viable system approach and process management perspective were utilized. The conceptual analysis was performed using a matrix representation, which correlates material, informational, and financial flows with the dimensions of traceability, transparency, and efficiency, before and after the implementation of blockchains in managing supply chain transactions. Findings: The study highlighted how the principles underlying blockchain can lead to overcoming the traditional indispensable search for trust among supply chain operators. Therefore, through these results, it is possible to hypothesize an improvement in the resilience conditions of companies operating in block–supply chains. Originality/value: This study contributes to investigating the relationship between blockchain and operational consonance among operators in managing interorganizational processes to improve conditions of efficiency, traceability, and transparency, which are functional in the resilience of companies involved in the supply chain compared to the changing dynamics of the context. Research implications: Trustless logic in the implementation of blockchain technologies leads to the configuration of a new concept of trust, connected to the entire supply chain system, as a result of the improvement in the security, visibility, and efficiency conditions of transactions. The increased visibility and transparency developed in block–supply chains prompt all actors involved in the supply chains to rethink information management, given the reduction in informational asymmetries and, thus, the optimization of transaction costs.

Purpose: This study utilizes intellectual capital theory (ICT) to examine the impact of intellectual agility, digital creativity, platform readiness, algorithmic autonomy support, networking competence and emotional congruence on the social media reuse likelihood of employees. This study also explores the moderating role of platform literacy between intellectual capital dimensions and social media reuse likelihood. Design/methodology/approach: This study employed a cross-sectional, quantitative research design by collecting data from 300 employees working across diverse industries. Covariance-based structured equation modelling is used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses. Findings: The findings demonstrate that intellectual agility, digital creativity, platform readiness and algorithmic autonomy significantly shape the social media reuse likelihood of employees. The results also established the moderating role of platform literacy between digital creativity, networking competence and social media reuse likelihood. Originality/value: This study offers a novel framework grounded in intellectual capital theory by integrating dimensions of human capital, structural capital, relational capital and platform literacy to predict the social media reuse likelihood of employees in technology-centred workplaces.