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A synopsis of key topics, issues and findings as presented at the 4th World Congress on Intellectual Capital hosted by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. There were 536 delegates from 32 countries discussing the growing importance of intellectual capital. This paper highlights the key messages from the keynote speakers of the conference. Includes a summary of the presentations of such luminaries as Shahla Aly, VP Communication Sector at IBM Canada; Stephen Denning, KM director of the World Bank; Don Tapscott, chairman of Digital 4Sight; Ante Pulic and Ursula Schneider, directors of the Austrian Intellectual Capital Research Centre; Tom Jenkins, CEO of OpenText; Leif Edvinsson, VP of Knexa.com Enterprises; Verna Allee, president of Integral Performance Group; and Don Morrison, COO of Research in Motion.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transferability of the intellectual capital approach methodology from the corporate to the national level. Just as financial measures fall short of covering major value drivers at the corporate level, gross national product does not sufficiently reflect future potentials to grow and to contribute to a globalising economy with trans‐national value chains, value cycles and value networks. There have been many efforts to develop core indicators of economic performance, such as ratings of competitiveness, global embeddedness, high‐tech exposure, spending in R&D, competencies to read and calculate of students and many more. The project team concluded that those measures showed two major weaknesses: they lack an overall framework and thus an analysis of their interplay and they overemphasise the reporting in relation to the development or management aspect of the factors considered by the respective approaches.

The team aspired to create a prototype knowledge report for Austria as part of a prototype procedure, the “Agenda Knowledge”, which should fuel efforts of the country to change its role in the emerging knowledge society from imitator to inventor. The endeavour was based on the Lisbon Agenda of the European Union, which integrates economic competitiveness and social cohesion. A trans‐disciplinary design was applied which is best described as action research and makes use of many different methods at different stages of the process; all methods were evaluated in terms of their effectiveness, efficiency and social acceptance.

Results of the pilot project comprise a prototype national knowledge report as part of an overarching prototype procedure which is able to deal with incommensurabilities at the level of visions and ends as well as with different paradigms at the level of end‐mean relations in a political rather than in an academic manner.

First process‐oriented approach to the development and monitoring of intellectual capital at the national level.

The development in the German-speaking countries of International Management (IM) as an academic discipline is analyzed both from a research-oriented and an institutional standpoint. This development is characterized by a relatively long run-up after early beginnings in the 1920s and a steep jump during the past 15–20 years. Business Administration and Strategic Management rather than Economics have influenced the IM field which is now an established subject in its own right. The resulting discipline is well on its way to overcoming an alleged “black hole-image” of international isolation on the part of German-speaking countries’ scholars.

Wilhelm Launhardt (1832‐1918) is a founder of mathematical economics. His main work, Mathematical Foundations of Economics, published in 1885, was translated into English in 1993. As an engineer, he contributed to the field of not only engineering, but also of economics and, in particular, to those parts in economics which can be treated fruitfully with mathematics. Launhardt developed his work independently from the French engineers, but based it squarely on the work of the agricultural engineer von Thünen. He made references to the economists Sax, Walras and Jevons. His main economic contribution lies in founding location theory but, beyond that, he contributed to the mathematical treatment of economics, labor economics, monetary economics and technology economics with a special emphasis on railway issues from a locational point of view. Hence, it is the purpose of this paper to show how Launhardt used mathematics in his engineering‐based approach to the economics of location and technology.

While LIS scholarship emphasizes the need to be multi-literate by equipping people with critical information literacy, digital literacy, and media literacy skills to combat the phenomenon of fake news in the contemporary information society, the concept of political information literacy is still in its infancy. This chapter addresses this gap by developing an understanding of political information literacy and challenges the premise that information professionals and information organizations should remain neutral in the face of phenomena like censorship through noise and disinformation. In this endeavor, it reviews contemporary information environments vis-à-vis the growth of fake news and misinformation, and current information literacy approaches utilized by information organizations. Thereafter, it explores several cognitive barriers, such as the role of confirmation bias, information avoidance, information groupishness, and information overload, which affects people’s ability to process information. Finally, it encourages information professionals to hold regular information sessions on politically charged topics, tackle the cognitive factors increasing misinformation, and cultivate multidisciplinary approaches to confront fake news.

The purpose of this paper is to determine consumer perceptions of service quality in wet markets and supermarkets in Hong Kong.

A questionnaire was developed and distributed via a convenience sample to consumers in shopping malls in Causeway Bay, Mong Kok and Tsuen Wan.

The study finds that supermarkets outperformed wet markets across all aspects of service quality as measured by SERVQUAL‐P.

Implications suggest that wet market vendors are not providing the level of service quality demanded by their customers. In particular, findings suggest that wet market vendors need to improve the visual attractiveness of their stalls, work on making them look more professional and start using more modern equipment.

Wet market vendors in conjunction with government representatives need to develop standards of service quality for wet markets across Hong Kong. This is imperative if the wet market model is to survive in what is a highly competitive food retailing industry. Without action, it appears that the supermarketization of the Hong Kong food retailing industry will continue unabated.

This paper adds to a small but growing research stream examining service quality in the food retailing industry in Hong Kong. It provides empirical results that guide suggested actions for change.

Though the circular economy (CE) is a current buzzword, this still lacks a precise definition. In the absence of a clear notion of what that term includes, actions taken by the government and companies may not be well informed. In particular, those actions need to consider what people mean when people talk about the CE, either to refocus people's decisions or to undertake a more effective communications strategy.

Since people voice people's opinions mainly through social media nowadays, special attention has to be paid to discussions on those media. In this paper, the authors focus on Twitter as a popular social platform to deliver one's thoughts quickly and fast. The authors' research aim is to get the perceptions of people about the CE. After collecting more than 100,000 tweets over 16 weeks, the authors analyse those tweets to understand the public discussion about the CE. The authors conduct a frequency analysis of the most recurring words, including the words' association with other words in the same context and categorise them into a set of topics.

The authors show that the discussion focuses on the usage of resources and materials that heavily endanger sustainability, i.e. carbon and plastic and the harmful habit of wasting. On the other hand, the two most common good practices associated with the CE and sustainability emerge as recycling and reuse (the latter being mentioned far less). Also, the business side of the CE appears to be relevant.

The outcome of this analysis can drive suitable communication strategies by which companies and governments interested in the development of the CE can understand what is actually discussed on social media and call for the attention.

This paper addresses the lack of a standard definition the authors highlighted in the Introduction. The results confirm that people understand CE by looking both at CE's constituent activities and CE's expected consequences, namely the reduction of waste, the transition to a green economy free of plastic and other pollutants and the improvement of the world climate.