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The relationship between Stakeholder Satisfaction and Organizational Sustainable Growth and Success is investigated focusing on the importance of a firm's relationships with critical stakeholders that may lead to better performance, as organizations while integrating business and societal considerations create value for their stakeholders.

Recent literature has addressed initial coin offering (ICO) projects, which are an innovative form of venture financing through cryptocurrencies using blockchain technology. Many features of ICOs remain unexplored, leaving much room for additional research, including the success factors of ICO projects. We investigate the success of ICO projects, with our main purpose being to identify factors that influence a project’s outcome. Following a literature review, from which several potential variables were collected, we used a database comprising 428 ICO projects in the banking/financial sector to regress several econometric models. We confirmed the impacts of several variables and obtained particularly valuable results concerning project and campaign variables. We confirmed the importance of a well-structured and informative whitepaper. The proximity to certain markets with high availability of financial and human capital is also an important determinant of the success of an ICO. We also confirm the strong dependency on cryptocurrency and the impact of cryptocurrency valuations on the success of a project. Furthermore, we confirm the importance of social media in ICO projects, as well as the importance of human capital characteristics. Our research contributes to the ICO literature by capturing most of the success factors previously identified and testing their impacts based on a large database. The current research contributes to the building of systems theory and signaling theory by adapting their frameworks to the ICO environment. Our results are also important for regulators, as ICOs are mainly unregulated and have vast future potential, and for investors, who can benefit from our analysis and use it in their due diligence.

The increasing use of information technology in enterprises’ daily operations has led to multiple innovative ways to run a business, including electronic commerce (hereafter, e-commerce). However, firms with fewer resources, such as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are more reluctant to use electronic channels during transactions. This aversion to contemporary business models is a result of these companies’ lack of knowledge and capabilities regarding e-commerce. To improve their businesses, SMEs’ managers and decision makers could benefit from a methodological framework that fosters a deeper understanding of the determinants of e-commerce. This study sought to explore the use of fuzzy cognitive mapping to address this need. The results are grounded in the knowledge and experience of a panel of experts in e-commerce. The fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) developed shows that entrepreneur profile, market, operational management, marketing and promotions, website and digital platform, and products present the highest centrality indices as determinants of SME e-commerce. The findings offer a better understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between these determinants. The advantages, limitations, and shortcomings of our constructivist proposal are also discussed.

The traditional viewof quality related costs (QRC) tries tojustify investment in preventionasa way to reduce the costs offailure. Butthisstatic viewmust countera moredynamic vision that fosterscontinuous improvementand assessesthe costs andbenefits of implementingtechniques and methods ofquality management, such ascertification ofISO 9001systems. However, it is unknown whether such companies are also engaged in the management of QRC, arising from activities undertaken, either at the level of monitoring, or coming from failures, and if such organizations verify (or not) the recovery of investments in quality. In this sense, the present article aims to provide insight into the procedures adopted by Portuguese companies in managing QRC, and to assess the extent to which management reports allow the analysis of quality costs and contribute to the related planning and control activities. The results of this study showed that there is hardly any assent to the implementation of formal mechanisms for planning and control of QRC, and to the explicit identification and segregation of those costs in management reports.

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The Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) subject has been gaining relevance due to its novelty, due to the capital amounts involved in the projects, as well as the disruptive technology and methods involved. ICOs are a disruptive way to nance new projects which involve high risks and which are mainly technological. This way to nance a project has been compared to others, namely, crowdfunding, venture capital or Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Nevertheless, ICOs have very speci c characteristics which make them unique. We have studied the ICO projects and developed a literature review on the topic. Building on the Human Capital Theory (HCT), we have also studied the importance given to the project's team and its perceived impact on projects' success. Our contribution to ll in this literature gap was to develop an econometric model which measures the impact of team's characteristics on the success of a project. The database was collected with the combination of two data sources and is composed of 3158 pro les and 340 ICO projects. We have concluded that team variables are signi cant contributors to project's success. Our data suggests that people's location contributes to projects' success as well as promoters' networks. The ratings attributed by external parties to the project are also indicators of success. Several control variables such as the implementation of thresholds to investment, the number of currencies accepted, the platform in which the ICO is developed, the existence of bonus schemes and the year of the project were found to be statistically signi cant having an impact on projects' outcome.

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