Wearing face masks is recommended as part of personal protective equipment and as a public health measure to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Their use, however, is deeply connected to social and cultural practices and has acquired a variety of personal and social meanings. This article aims to identify the diversity of sociocultural, ethical, and political meanings attributed to face masks, how they might impact public health policies, and how they should be considered in health communication. In May 2020, we involved 29 experts of an interdisciplinary research network on health and society to provide their testimonies on the use of face masks in 20 European and 2 Asian countries (China and South Korea). They reflected on regulations in the corresponding jurisdictions as well as the personal and social aspects of face mask wearing. We analyzed those testimonies thematically, employing the method of qualitative descriptive analysis. The analysis framed the four dimensions of the societal and personal practices of wearing (or not wearing) face masks: individual perceptions of infection risk, personal interpretations of responsibility and solidarity, cultural traditions and religious imprinting, and the need of expressing self-identity. Our study points to the importance for an in-depth understanding of the cultural and sociopolitical considerations around the personal and social meaning of mask wearing in different contexts as a necessary prerequisite for the assessment of the effectiveness of face masks as a public health measure. Improving the personal and collective understanding of citizens' behaviors and attitudes appears essential for designing more effective health communications about COVID-19 pandemic or other global crises in the future.   To wear a face mask or not to wear a face mask?   Nowadays, this question has been analogous   to the famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet:   “To be or not to be, that is the question.”   This is a bit allegorical,   but certainly not far from the current circumstances   where a deadly virus is spreading amongst us... Vanja Kopilaš, Croatia.

The global space industry has recently seen a structural transformation through the emergence of "New Space", i.e. a significant expansion of the development of smaller, cheaper and more modular space-related products in services. One example of this expansion is the emergence of a world-leading cluster of New Space industry in Scotland (UK). Critically, this development is being pitched as a new approach to innovation ecosystem, which the players refer to as "Agile Space", based on a consolidation of cross-sector competences within a loose value chain integration. However, I argue in particular, that the emergence of the Scottish New Space Sector is crucially linked to the Living Laboratories (Living Lab) conceptualisation of the innovation practices and processes within the Agile Space approach. Hence, this paper maps the key features of the emergence and development of the New Space Industry in Scotland and analyses the key feature of the Agile Space Living Lab paradigm, before proposing a critical further research agenda suggesting several much-needed strands of enquiry.

This paper is building a detailed understanding of the organisational structures and practices in SMEs' knowledge absorption from a network of innovation partners. In particular, it explores the relationship between the openness of innovation process through innovation networks and the development of organisational structures within firms, as well as its linkage to a regional sectoral environment. It proposes a new conceptual tool of "innovation moments", to synthesise the key theoretical premises of knowledge management, organisational learning and absorptive capacity literatures. In order to study this vital nexus of phenomena, we propose to deploy a novel mixed methods approach of combining quantitative ego-centric Social Network Analysis (Ego-SNA) and qualitative derived narratives of product development experiences via a sensitising concept, to study the emergence and development of the New Space Sector in Scotland. The findings show that the type of the SME-"traditional" versus New Space and upstream versus downstream-is clearly related to the structure of the firms' ego-centric innovation networks and their position in the composite whole network. Furthermore, by using qualitative case study data we show that the firms' typology is also closely related to internal organisational features, in particular flattening hierarchical structures and the formalisation and standardisation within NPD processes. This paper argues that the interlinking of these two elements is poised to describe a cultural shift in the approach to innovation networking and new product development (NPD) process management, understanding of which is a critical element of examining Open Innovation in SMEs.

The global Space Industry's transition to New Space-that is, smaller and cheaper hardware and more easily accessible space data-is expanding space-related economic activity into new, peripheral geographical areas. This paradigm shift has been particularly successful in establishing a budding ecosystem of small-to-medium-sized enterprises in Scotland, which is sometimes referred to as the ''Space Glen.'' These developments are linked to the U.K. and Scottish policymakers addressing the growth of the Space Sector within the innovation policy, rather than a separate Space policy/program. In this review article, I argue that the resulting small-scale and dispersed investment in R&D and business development put forward by the various governmental actors led to the creation of dispersed and divergent clusters of firms, strongly linked to research expertise at local universities, as well as other sectors with more mature markets, such as oil and gas and forestry. Recently, these have been joined together in a common regional sectoral identity, through industry-led grouping initiatives, mainly through promotion at events. Deploying mixed-method data collection and document analysis, this scoping study examines the interplay between innovation policy and emerging sectoral structures in the space sector and poses further questions for a more detailed understanding of the ''Space Glen'' phenomenon.

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Innovation intermediaries are seen as crucial and critical players in the development of emergent hightech sectors, though their understanding is not holistic and it depends on geographical and sectoral specificities. This paper empirically deploys a recently developed classification within a case study of the New Space Sector in Scotland, a previously peripheral region within Space Industry, now emerging as a global leader. Based on secondary document analysis and mixed-method empirical research using primary data from surveys, interviews and social network analysis, this study examines: a) the makeup of the innovation intermediation organisations in Scottish Space Sector, b) their sectoral positioning through innovation networks and c) the interventions they deploy and effects they expect to have on the sectoral actors. Based on this analysis, a new typology of Innovation intermediaries' interventions is proposed, to link them with their identified systemic roles of enablers, equippers, shapers and movers.

The fourth industrial revolution has produced several new fields of research, yet the areas of management and business are lagging behind. The aim of the present paper is to show connections and common thoughts within various literature areas, identify the main theoretical influxes into the field, and make informed suggestions for its future development. The analysis is conducted through the use of bibliometric methods, specifically co-citation analysis (Small, 1973) and bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963). Co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two units are cited together while bibliographic coupling uses the number of references shared by two documents as a measure of the similarity between them (Zupic & Čater, 2015). This enables us to identify relevant clusters that will show which scientific areas are most commonly connected with our chosen keywords. Furthermore, we will elaborate the advantages, disadvantages, effects and possible implications of the new robotization era processes on companies' business model transformation and changes in organizational structures, with an emphasis on the strategy of firms and the management behind it.

Smart Specialization Strategy (S3) has become a dominant regional economic development field with significant policy traction, in particular within the European Union. However, questions are being raised about its operationalization and a gap has been identified with respect to the role of innovation intermediaries' interventions in support of the developing regional-sectoral innovation systems. In particular, reasons for diverging policy approaches of "niche specialization" versus "regional advantage" in comparable situations should be examined to illuminate the contextual factors impacting the interpretation of the intermediaries' mandates. In this paper, the cases of two leading investments in innovation intermediation in the emerging New Space sector are analyzed (Space-SI and Higgs Centre for Innovation) in two EU NUTS level 1 regions (Slovenia and Scotland), which were previously peripheral players in this technological domain. In particular, using a novel innovation intermediation interventions' classification, this paper identifies the difference between research and development (R&D) and business development (BD) support foci in the two locales, noting some of the contextual factors associated with them and arguing for the long-term balancing of the two approaches.