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Signaling how virtuous a brand is has become an ever more common strategy. Brands have recently outcompeted one another to align themselves with various causes. We explore the rise in virtue signaling and review prominent examples of brands that have linked themselves to social movements--some successfully, some unsuccessfully. We draw on evolutionary theory to develop a conceptual framework to think about brand virtue signaling. Armed with this framework, managers can assess whether their brands should adopt virtue signaling as a strategy and assess the short- and long-term implications of such a decision.

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are a record of ownership of primarily digital media, where the NFT is stored on a blockchain. According to the 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for Key Technologies, NFTs may significantly transform marketing functions. Marketing managers wishing to adopt NFTs therefore need to know something about the marketing implications. This article explains NFTs in broad terms and discusses the marketing implications using a modified AIDA hierarchy. These implications can give marketing managers and executives guidelines on how to persuade consumers to purchase NFTs owing to their unique characteristics, such as scarcity, nonfungibility, proven authenticity, proof of ownership, royalties, and direct distribution infrastructure.

Though more than a decade has passed, there are compelling reasons to revisit the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the most expensive nonnuclear industrial disaster in history. It serves as an exemplar of what organizations should not do. Recent tragedies in Nigeria and Florida also demonstrate how organizations might avoid the risk of being overtaken by readily predictable events. In this article, we look to advance research on risk mitigation and decision-making as we create a more succinct view of how managers create--and might prevent--inaptitude. To this end, we look at how the evolving concept of stupidity is defined in recent research and how it manifested in the critical case of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. We present five proposals for organizations looking to address and avoid potentially unwise decisions that may lead to the next disaster.

The first communication an entrepreneur often has with a potential investor is submitting a one-page executive summary for consideration. Subsequently, the potential investor or investment group chooses which venture ideas to further consider by inviting a pitch deck or an actual business pitch. This investment funnel is competitive and, accordingly, anything we as scholars can share with entrepreneurs seeking advice about how to optimize that initial executive summary to increase chances of getting to the pitch would be immensely valuable. Unfortunately, scant research has focused on this opportunity-introduction stage, and there is precious little we can prescribe for entrepreneurs seeking investment. To address this, we developed four executive summaries that varied only in the type of capital mentioned. We found that executive summaries that mentioned human capital more prominently were viewed as more cognitively legitimate and as deserving of a higher opportunity-recognition valuation. Put succinctly, consistent both with our theorized findings from our Open Science Framework preregistered experiment (N Z 367) and with our qualitative follow-up study, we found that human capital signals have a greater positive influence on potential investors' decisions relative to social capital, intellectual capital, and financial capital. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of this novel insight and include prescriptive recommendations for entrepreneurs.

Greening suppliers, or cultivating environmental responsibility throughout the supply chain, has become an important strategic issue for firms. While various approaches exist, green supplier development--that is, helping and collaborating with your suppliers to reduce their negative environmental impact--is a key method that can produce significant gains for both parties at multiple levels. Yet the benefits have not been sufficiently discussed and may therefore appear nebulous for managers. Focusing particularly on "What's in it for you, the buyer?", this article describes benefits at the intrafirm, interfirm, and market levels. Barriers to the realization of the benefits are also discussed, providing managerial guidance on supplier prioritization for green supplier development.

Family-owned Mittelstand firms have often been characterized as Janus-faced, meaning they can have two contrasting sides when it comes to innovation. On one side, they are technology leaders--especially in niche markets. On the other side, they can be slow adopters, deeply rooted in tradition. Digitalization is one of the biggest innovation challenges to firms of all sizes and ownership types. Research and observations in business practice show that while some family-owned Mittelstand firms master digitalization despite limited resources and traditional industries, others lag dangerously behind. So, how can family-owned Mittelstand firms prepare for a digital future, and which familial idiosyncrasies might help them? Based on current observations and interview data, we propose a framework for how these firms can use their unique resources to tackle challenges related to digitalization. To be successful in a digital world, they must leverage their family historical capital, family collaborative capital, and family venture capital. We highlight why and how these capital types should be linked to fully leverage their potential.

The mission of Business Horizons is to publish research that practitioners can understand to help them change their thoughts and actions. However, this mission remains an elusive ideal for many business school academics as they struggle to overcome the research-practice gap. To help scholars bridge this gap, we present social media as a boundary-spanning technology to be open to connecting with, learning from and working with academics and other stakeholders outside their field. Social media can be used as a boundary-spanning technology to help bridge the research-practice gap. To support this idea, we present a process model of five research activities--networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing--and describe how social media can make each activity more open. We present a framework of four social media-enabled open academic approaches--connector, observer, promoter, and influencer--and outline some do's and don'ts for engaging in each approach. We also discuss the potential dark side of openness through social media and offer some coping strategies. As per the mission and scope of Business Horizons, this article aims to help business academics rethink and change their practices so that our profession is more widely regarded for how our research positively impacts business practice and society in general.

Virgilio "V" Bento, CEO of Sword Health-a startup that provided virtual physical therapy to patients in self-insured firms via AI and sensor technology with supervision by a physical therapist with a doctorate-considered how to increase its U.S. market share. To do so, it could use lower-cost supervisors, such as health coaches; sell a direct-to-consumer product; or work with retailers, among other options. Sword Health's main competitor, the unicorn-valued Hinge Healthcare, had the first-mover advantage, but Sword had FDA clearance, a fuller stack of applications and higher-credentialed supervision. Sword and Hinge charged the same price to the client. How should Sword Health best optimize its business opportunities? This case is suitable both as a general business case for undergraduate and MBA students of any level with focus on strategy, entrepreneurship, digital health, artificial intelligence, muscular skeletal issues, the healthcare industry, and physical therapy.

Over the past decade, Asian companies have been launching accelerated and wide-ranging digital transformation initiatives. This has enabled some of them to become leading national and even international players, as well as digital pioneers in their respective industries. This case examines the successful digital transformation undertaken by the Chinese company Midea, one of the world's leading home appliance manufacturers. By digitally transforming the company, Midea improved its financial performance and reshaped its business on a wider scale. While many cases that address digital transformation focus on the early phases of the process, Midea's case illustrates a successfully completed digital business transformation. This allows participants to have an overview of the entire digital transformation journey and see what the potential outcomes might be.

Artificial intelligence has been applied successfully in thousands of ways, but one of the less visible and less dramatic ones is improving data management. The authors describe five common areas of data management classifying, cataloging, quality, security, and data integration where they see AI playing important roles. They also discuss the vendor landscape and the ways that humans are essential to data management.

Patricia Skeen, a well-respected full professor at a prestigious business school at a major university, has accepted the role of chairing the school's important Academic Design and Delivery Committee (ADDC). During the week she was given to think about the role and to come to a decision, she gave some serious thought to how she wanted to lead her peers in such an endeavor. In this case, students are asked to engage in a similar reflective mode, identifying the commitments and to-do list with which they would undertake this, or any other similar, important task. The setting is simply one where the protagonist must lead from a collegial position absent any budget, any personnel decision-making authority, or an official title/position other than serving one term as committee chair and as an on-going colleague. This case is suitable for an undergraduate- or graduate-level introductory course on leadership and/or teams. The case provides an opportunity for students to consider the leadership qualities of those that they have observed when leading peers, their own prior experience leading groups of peers, and then synthesize and crystallize their own best thinking on how they would subsequently want to approach their next opportunity for leading peers. The case is fairly open-ended, thus galvanizing students' reflective thinking and refinement of their shared perspectives.

In the fall of 2019, “flight shaming,” a growing environmental movement, was gaining speed. The movement, which was sparked in Sweden and popularized by Greta Thunberg the previous year, sought to express the “unease about flying experienced by environmentally conscious travellers.” As a short-haul airline, EasyJet plc (EasyJet) needed to determine whether this was merely a passing fad that it could ignore or a threat that might damage its reputation and growth ambitions for the future. In the latter case, EasyJet would also need to determine what it should do to mitigate such risks.

In May 2022, Shopee Pte. Ltd. (Shopee), the e-commerce division of Singapore-based Sea Limited (Sea), was at a critical juncture. Over the past several years, fuelled by the growth of its e-commerce business, Shopee had achieved rapid revenue growth. Starting from Singapore and Southeast Asia, the company had expanded its international footprint to countries in Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin America. But early 2022 brought several new challenges for Shopee: Sea’s stock price plummeted as investors sold off high-growth and unprofitable Internet stocks; and Shopee exited France and India rapidly because it was facing pressure from multiple sources, including an industry association in India and the Indian government, which had banned sales of Shopee’s best-selling game in India. Shopee had to carefully choose an appropriate strategy for further international expansion. Should it pause its international expansion and consolidate in the short term or carry on with the rapid pace of expansion?

Following the Arab Spring of 2011, the centuries-old co-operative movement helped the emancipation and financial independence of women in Morocco. One such woman was Samira Smahri, the founder and president of a co-operative called Attadamoun, which nationally and internationally marketed a unique product native to Morocco now used around the world: argan oil and its derivative products. The co-op, founded in 2014 and located in Sidi Bibi, a small village in Morocco, had experienced steady growth and given women a sense of hope and new-found freedom. However, this was all put on hold with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, Smahri had to decide whether to persevere under extremely unfavourable conditions or to shut down the co-op that meant so much to her and the co-op’s emancipated women employees.

In the fall of 2019, "flight shaming," a growing environmental movement, was gaining speed. The movement, which was sparked in Sweden and popularized by Greta Thunberg the previous year, sought to express the "unease about flying experienced by environmentally conscious travellers." As a short-haul airline, EasyJet plc (EasyJet) needed to determine whether this was merely a passing fad that it could ignore or a threat that might damage its reputation and growth ambitions for the future. In the latter case, EasyJet would also need to determine what it should do to mitigate such risks.

In May 2022, Shopee Pte. Ltd. (Shopee), the e-commerce division of Singapore-based Sea Limited (Sea), was at a critical juncture. Over the past several years, fuelled by the growth of its e-commerce business, Shopee had achieved rapid revenue growth. Starting from Singapore and Southeast Asia, the company had expanded its international footprint to countries in Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin America. But early 2022 brought several new challenges for Shopee: Sea's stock price plummeted as investors sold off high-growth and unprofitable Internet stocks; and Shopee exited France and India rapidly because it was facing pressure from multiple sources, including an industry association in India and the Indian government, which had banned sales of Shopee's best-selling game in India. Shopee had to carefully choose an appropriate strategy for further international expansion. Should it pause its international expansion and consolidate in the short term or carry on with the rapid pace of expansion?

The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) was named a top ten plastic polluter by the Break Free from Plastics coalition in 2019. P&G faced backlash over the plastic waste associated with the distribution of consumer goods in single-use sachets. While sachets provided access to everyday household necessities to low-income individuals, they also created negative environmental externalities. The company had to decide how to tackle the problem of waste they were responsible for and, at the same time, deflect accusations of greenwashing. How could this environmental issue be solved without raising prices for low-income individuals? What did P&G’s key stakeholders expect? How could P&G achieve the “triple bottom line” by caring for profits, people, and the planet?

On June 5, 2021, an eleven-story building developed by the BROAD Group was completed in Changsha, China, in just 28 hours and 45 minutes. This building, known as the Holon Building, had the advantages of a long lifespan, short construction period, strong earthquake and typhoon resistance, low cost, high comfort and energy savings, and global transportability. Because of its standardized installation and 100 per cent factory prefabrication of all modules, Holon was well suited to various types of buildings. However, as a newly emerging technology, the Holon Building needed time and great effort to gain wide acceptance. BROAD's chairman and chief executive officer, Zhang Yue, was wondering about the feasibility of Holon buildings’ global market expansion.

Subir Shukla, the Principal Coordinator in Ignus Pahal, was involved in improving education for marginalized children. After working for many years at the policy level and assisting various governments across Asia in improving the public education system, he realized that the lack of access to reading material in India was hampering the children's ability to develop reading skills. In 2017 he decided to open Manan Publishing to cater to this need. He was strapped for funds for the initial years and was looking at some financial assistance for the first three years. His immediate need was to evolve a strategy for generating funds.