The answer, according to the research, lies in a concept the author calls adoption credibility, captured in a new theoretical framework named TIDE—an acronym for Technological Fit, Institutional Enablement, Deployment Fit, and Economic-Organizational Fit. Drawing on survey evidence from Greek fisheries and seafood enterprises collected under the DORIS project, the study argues that modular valorization systems become adoptable only when all four dimensions align simultaneously. A technology that fits the material stream but overwhelms the operator, or a business model that works on paper but collapses under seasonal volume swings, will simply never leave the drawing board. Adoption, in this view, is a configurational outcome rather than the product of any single decisive factor.

The empirical foundation of the framework is a structured questionnaire administered to companies spanning fish and seafood processing, fisheries, aquaculture, and retail operations with on-site fish handling. Of 55 companies contacted, 16 completed the survey—a response rate of roughly 29 percent. Most respondents were processing-oriented firms: ten engaged in processing and packaging, four combined aquaculture with processing, and the remainder included a vertically integrated fishery-processing enterprise and a supermarket chain performing off-site filleting. The firms are concentrated in coastal and urban hubs such as Attica and Macedonia, but some operate on islands or in remote areas like Rhodes and Crete, capturing exactly the geographic diversity that makes deployment decisions so difficult.

The survey revealed recurring patterns that shape the four TIDE dimensions. By-product generation is continuous but marked by seasonal peaks, especially in summer, and streams are commonly mixed, only partly separated, and often frozen before handover to third parties. Disposal fees frequently exceed any revenue opportunities: among respondents who provided cost data, delivery fees ranged from approximately €0.08 to €0.50 per kilogram, while reported revenues from by-products were low and sometimes wiped out by transport costs. Space is tight, regulatory and permitting burdens loom large, and users strongly prefer systems that can be operated without additional specialized personnel. These observations became the raw material from which the framework’s dimensions were distilled through an abductive, theory-building synthesis.

Technological Fit, the first dimension, refers to how well a valorization system matches the temporal, compositional, and handling realities of the by-product stream. A modular unit that assumes clean separation, stable throughput, or abundant operator time will exhibit weak fit in real processing environments. Economic-Organizational Fit, the second dimension, concerns whether cost structures, financing mechanisms, labor demands, and managerial burdens match the resource profile of a small firm. Because by-product management is typically experienced as a cost center rather than a profit center, adoption rarely hinges on a high-margin value proposition. Instead, it depends on avoided disposal costs, modest value uplift, financing that lowers upfront exposure, and service-based or leasing arrangements that make adoption less ownership-intensive and more responsive to variable volumes.

Deployment Fit, the third dimension, addresses the geography of the industry. Some firms cluster in dense coastal and urban hubs where shared infrastructure is realistic; others sit on islands where treatment capacity is limited and transport, space, and infrastructure constraints are acute. The choice between on-site micro-units, shared hubs, and mobile services is therefore not a secondary design detail but an integral part of adoption itself. The framework illustrates this with three stylized archetypes: a high-fit SME with a balanced profile across all four dimensions, for whom an on-site unit becomes plausible; a cluster-based SME whose strong Deployment Fit reflects the advantages of shared infrastructure; and an island SME where institutional support and spatial necessity are strong but financial and operational capacity is constrained, pointing toward mobile-service solutions.

The fourth dimension, Institutional Enablement, receives the most distinctive theoretical treatment. Rather than treating regulation as an external barrier, the framework positions it as an active mechanism that converts technical and economic potential into implementable adoption. The study identifies four roles. Standardized permitting packs and classification guidance reduce compliance uncertainty around animal by-product rules, hygiene obligations, and environmental permits. Operating procedures, short training modules, and remote troubleshooting build operational capability. Traceability standards, documentation protocols, and facilitated offtake relationships create the market legitimacy that higher-value outputs require. And institutional structures stabilize the coordination and risk-sharing arrangements that shared hubs, leasing contracts, and mobile services demand. In short, institutions are not background conditions but adoption infrastructure.

From these dimensions the study derives six formal propositions, including the claim that Institutional Enablement not only directly raises adoption credibility but also conditions the effect of the other three dimensions—strengthening the relationship between technological, economic-organizational, and deployment fit and actual uptake when institutional support is high. The framework is then translated into an econometric operationalization: adoption credibility can be modeled as a perceptual, behavioral, or categorical outcome, with the four TIDE dimensions as explanatory variables and interaction terms testing whether institutional support amplifies the others. A second specification links the framework to cost-benefit analysis and technical optimization, incorporating indicators such as capital expenditure per kilogram of annual capacity, operating expenditure, expected revenues, avoided disposal costs, net present value, payback period, and breakeven throughput. The author is careful to note that these equations are conceptual specifications for future testing, not empirical results, since the survey sample is too small for full econometric estimation.

The study is explicit about its limitations. The framework derives from just 16 respondents in a single country, dominated by processing-oriented firms, and relies on cross-sectional perceptions rather than observed adoption behavior over time. It should therefore be read as a theory-building contribution rather than a statistically validated model. Still, the author argues that the dimensions of technological, deployment, and economic-organizational fit reflect challenges widely documented in the broader SME adoption literature and should travel well across sectors, while Institutional Enablement is likely to be more jurisdiction-specific, given how much permitting procedures and governance arrangements vary. Future research should test the propositions with larger, more representative samples, longitudinal designs, and cross-country comparisons.

The practical implications are striking. For technology developers, the message is that engineering a better machine is not enough: service design, deployment architecture, permitting support, traceability systems, and operator training must be treated as integral components of the innovation package. For policymakers, the findings suggest that institutional enablement should be viewed as adoption infrastructure in its own right, particularly in sectors characterized by resource constraints and regulatory complexity. And for the seafood industry itself, the framework offers a way to explain why two seemingly similar firms respond so differently to the same technological opportunity—one embracing an on-site micro-unit, another joining a shared hub, a third waiting for a mobile service to arrive. If the blue economy is to close its material loops, the study suggests, the decisive frontier is not chemistry but configuration: getting technology, economics, geography, and institutions to reinforce one another at the scale of a single, hard-pressed small business.

Subject of Research: Techno-economic optimization and adoption of modular seafood by-product valorization systems in small and medium-sized enterprises

Article Title: Techno-economic optimization of low-CAPEX/OPEX seafood valorization in SMEs using the TIDE framework

Article References: Lamprinakis, L. (2026). Techno-economic optimization of low-CAPEX/OPEX seafood valorization in SMEs using the TIDE framework. Results in Engineering, 32, Article 113281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113281

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113281

Keywords: seafood by-products, circular economy, TIDE framework, SMEs, blue economy, technology adoption, techno-economic analysis, waste valorization, institutional enablement, deployment models, Greek fisheries, modular biorefinery

The research, led by Ángela Martín-Méndez of the Universidad Europea de Madrid together with Francisco Campuzano-Bolarín of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena and David López-López of ESADE Business School, is built on a structured critical review spanning six connected literatures: nature-positive itself, net-based approaches such as no net loss and biodiversity net gain, the mitigation hierarchy and offsetting, biodiversity measurement and reporting, environmental management systems, and the realities of implementation in industrial firms and small and medium-sized enterprises. Rather than running a conventional meta-analysis, which the authors say is impossible in a field lacking a common outcome variable or unit of analysis, they coded each source against a common set of analytical questions covering definitions, netting logic, controllability, measurement, governance and reporting.

The review’s central finding is that nature-positive is used in radically unstable ways. In its strongest and most cited sense, it describes a societal ambition to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and move towards ecological recovery, a directional goal championed by figures such as Harvey Locke and E.J. Milner-Gulland. But the same term is routinely deployed as a corporate commitment, a project-level outcome or a vague rhetorical signal of green intent. Critics including Milner-Gulland and, more recently, Thomas White and colleagues have warned that the concept loses analytical meaning when applied without clear specification of scale, baseline, evidence standard and governance. For a bounded operational site embedded in a wider landscape, the authors argue, this ambiguity is especially corrosive: it invites either unverifiable net-outcome claims or empty slogans.

The second tension the review uncovers lies in the netting logic inherited from no net loss, net positive impact and biodiversity net gain approaches. These frameworks promise a familiar performance arithmetic: establish a baseline, quantify losses and gains, report a net result. Yet decades of scholarship, from John Bull’s foundational work on offsets to Maron and colleagues’ 2024 warning that nature-positive must incorporate rather than undermine the mitigation hierarchy, keep circling the same unresolved problems of equivalence, additionality, timing, permanence and governance. Gains created through compensation may not genuinely match losses elsewhere; some gains would have happened anyway; restoration lags far behind impact; and long-term maintenance is hostage to changing ownership and budgets. For industrial facilities, the authors conclude, compensation provides a fragile basis for claims of positive biodiversity performance, and the evidence more strongly supports on-site avoidance, pressure reduction and continuity of management.

The third tension is perhaps the most practically important: controllability. Facility managers can directly alter mowing regimes, planting structure, drainage patterns, lighting, herbicide use and contractor specifications, and these interventions can meaningfully improve habitat quality within the site perimeter. What they cannot do is fully control species occurrence, abundance or persistence, which depend on landscape connectivity, source populations, climatic variation and ecological time lags that stop at no fence line. Improved habitat may be necessary for biodiversity recovery without being sufficient to guarantee it. This asymmetry, the authors argue, should reshape accountability: managers can be held responsible for actions that are implemented, maintained and governed, but not for every ecological response over long horizons. Ecological observations, on this view, are directional learning signals rather than deterministic performance scores.

Measurement compounds the difficulty. Biodiversity is multidimensional, encompassing habitats, species, ecological functions and relationships, and any single metric captures only selected slices of ecological change. Studies by Nicholson, Martínez-Jauregui, Simpson and Wauchope all show that different indicator choices lead to different ecological and managerial conclusions. Meanwhile the reporting literature, including Boiral’s influential work on biodiversity reporting and impression management, documents how disclosure under instruments such as TNFD and ESRS E4 remains fragmented, selective and vulnerable to overstatement. The review therefore endorses a two-layer evidence logic: a first layer of intervention evidence, recording what was implemented, where, when, by whom and with what maintenance provisions, and a second layer of ecological signal evidence, consisting of repeated habitat observations useful for learning but not to be presented as proof of net biodiversity outcomes.

From these findings the authors derive their framework, Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities, or NP4IF. It is deliberately not a new biodiversity doctrine and does not replace TNFD, ESRS, science-based targets or biodiversity net gain requirements; its contribution is operational. NP4IF treats the facility perimeter as the unit of action, evidence, responsibility and claim, and links seven components: a site baseline, a prioritisation filter that selects interventions by ecological relevance, feasibility, safety, cost and persistence, an intervention portfolio covering measures such as vegetation management, drainage improvement, lighting attenuation and reduced chemical pressure, governance mechanisms that embed actions in routine operations, the two-layer evidence system, and a claims-discipline mechanism that aligns external communication with the strength of available evidence.

The framework runs on a PDCA-compatible cycle familiar from ISO 14001-style environmental management systems. In the Plan stage, a facility defines its perimeter, identifies ecological zones and constraints and selects a small set of feasible priorities. In the Do stage, interventions are implemented through standard operating procedures, maintenance routines, contractor requirements and training. The Check stage verifies intervention continuity and records ecological observations using proportionate indicators, while the Act stage corrects weaknesses, scales effective measures and discontinues ineffective ones. A six-point decision pathway then governs what can be claimed: strong claims are limited to actions that have been implemented, maintained, governed and verified, qualified claims may describe ecological signals or trends, and claims of demonstrated net biodiversity gain are to be avoided unless robust evidence exists for baseline, equivalence, additionality, permanence, attribution and governance.

Why does this matter beyond the technical literature? Because biodiversity actions at industrial sites are notoriously fragile, vulnerable to reversal through procurement changes, contractor drift, budget cuts and staff turnover. The EMS literature shows that environmental systems function either as symbolic commitments or as practical infrastructures depending on how deeply they penetrate everyday routines, audits and management review. The authors argue that credible stewardship is associated less with ambitious rhetoric than with mundane but durable mechanisms: site zoning, maintenance standards, contractor clauses, inspection schedules and periodic review. For small and medium-sized enterprises and legacy sites in particular, a limited but persistent stewardship system may be far more defensible than expansive claims unsupported by operational continuity.

The study is candid about its limits: it is structured and critical rather than fully systematic, and the literature it synthesises is weighted towards Anglophone and European debates. Future research priorities include longitudinal studies of which interventions endure changes in budgets and management attention, testing of small feasible indicator sets, empirical work on adoption pathways in SMEs, and scrutiny of whether external disclosure under TNFD and ESRS strengthens substantive stewardship or merely produces more sophisticated claims. But the central message is already clear and likely to reverberate through corporate sustainability departments: industrial facilities should stop claiming, in abstract net-outcome terms, that they are definitively nature-positive. A far more credible claim, the authors conclude, is that a facility has implemented, maintained, monitored and reviewed a structured biodiversity stewardship process within its perimeter, reporting ecological observations as signals rather than proof. Nature-positive, in other words, is best understood not as a label a site earns, but as a disciplined management practice it performs, locally, persistently and with appropriate humility about what the fence line can and cannot deliver.

Subject of Research: An environmental management framework for biodiversity stewardship at industrial facilities

Article Title: Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities: An Environmental Management Framework for Biodiversity Stewardship

Article References: Martín-Méndez, Á., Campuzano-Bolarín, F., & López-López, D. (2026). Nature-Positive for Industrial Facilities: An Environmental Management Framework for Biodiversity Stewardship. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 298. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02601-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02601-2

Keywords: nature-positive, biodiversity stewardship, industrial facilities, environmental management systems, mitigation hierarchy, biodiversity offsets, no net loss, biodiversity reporting, TNFD, ESRS, SMEs, PDCA

The OCOP program, inspired by Japan’s One Village One Product and Thailand’s One Tambon One Product movements, has become a cornerstone of Vietnam’s rural development policy, designed to restructure the agricultural sector and strengthen the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in the countryside. Yet the program has a documented weakness: product lines are frequently undifferentiated, innovation rates remain low, and firms struggle to sustain a competitive presence beyond their local markets. That gap between institutional ambition and firm-level performance is precisely what motivated Huynh Nguyen Tuong An, Nguyen Quoc Cuong, and Nguyen Ngoc Thuc of the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City to investigate what actually drives product innovation among these enterprises.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on three established frameworks. Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory, developed by Lumpkin and Dess and rooted in earlier work by Danny Miller, describes a firm’s strategic posture through three dimensions: innovativeness, the tendency to generate and pursue new ideas; proactiveness, the drive to anticipate and seize market opportunities before competitors; and risk-taking, the willingness to commit resources to ventures with uncertain outcomes. Dynamic Capabilities Theory, proposed by Teece and colleagues, explains how firms sense opportunities and reconfigure internal resources to adapt to rapid environmental change. Institutional Theory, meanwhile, emphasizes that formal structures such as government programs, regulations, and policy incentives shape organizational behavior, particularly in transition economies where firms operate under constraints that differ fundamentally from those in developed markets.

What makes the study methodologically distinctive is its unified model. Rather than treating business model innovation and technology capability as separate curiosities, the researchers positioned them as co-mediators, two parallel conduits through which entrepreneurial orientation flows into product outcomes. Business model innovation, defined by Foss and Saebi as a designed, novel change to the key elements of how a firm creates, delivers, and captures value, operates at the level of business logic. Technology capability, the ability to acquire, assimilate, and deploy technology, operates at the level of technical execution. On top of this dual mediation, the researchers layered a moderator: perceived institutional support, the degree to which firms believe government assistance, policy incentives, and program support are genuinely available to them.

To test this architecture, the team applied partial least squares structural equation modeling using SmartPLS software on survey data collected between May and October 2025. Respondents were owners, managers, and senior staff of OCOP enterprises across major provinces of Vietnam’s Southeast region, selected through purposive sampling because no comprehensive public registry of these firms exists. Of 500 initial responses, 480 survived data screening after incomplete or uniform questionnaires were removed, a sample size that comfortably exceeds both the ten-times rule minimum of 258 and the 138 participants required by an a priori power analysis conducted in G*Power. All constructs were measured on five-point Likert scales adapted from validated instruments, including Covin and Slevin’s entrepreneurial orientation scale, Clauss’s business model innovation measure, and Frishammar and Hörte’s new product development performance items.

The statistical rigor extended well beyond the basics. The measurement model showed all outer loadings above 0.70, composite reliability values surpassing 0.70, and average variance extracted above 0.50, while heterotrait-monotrait ratios confirmed that the constructs were empirically distinct. Common method bias, a chronic concern in self-reported cross-sectional surveys, was addressed both procedurally, through respondent anonymity, separated questionnaire sections, and pilot testing with 40 respondents, and statistically, through Harman’s single-factor test, which found the first factor accounted for only 33.028 percent of variance, and full collinearity assessment, in which all variance inflation factors fell below the 3.3 threshold. The model explained 52.2 percent of the variance in new product development performance, with Stone-Geisser Q-squared values confirming medium-to-strong predictive relevance.

The headline result is a striking asymmetry among the three entrepreneurial traits. Proactiveness and risk-taking each exerted a direct, statistically significant positive effect on new product development performance, while innovativeness failed to reach significance in the direct path. Yet innovativeness was far from irrelevant: all six indirect pathways through business model innovation and technology capability were significant at the 0.1 percent level, indicating that creativity works only when it is embedded in reconfigured value architectures and strengthened technical foundations. For proactiveness and risk-taking, both direct and indirect effects were significant, marking business model innovation and technology capability as partial mediators. Business model innovation emerged as the single most influential driver of product performance, with a medium effect size, while the effect sizes of innovativeness and institutional support on the outcome were negligible in the direct paths.

The moderating analysis added a further nuance. Perceived institutional support significantly amplified the effects of both innovativeness and proactiveness on product performance, with 95 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals excluding zero, and simple slope analysis showed the innovativeness-performance slope turning from negligible to strongly positive as institutional support rose. But the same amplification did not hold for risk-taking: although the interaction coefficient was positive, its confidence interval included zero, meaning the moderation was not supported at the conventional level. The authors interpret this as evidence that star-rating promotion standards and market access support do not sufficiently reduce the uncertainty firms face when committing resources to genuinely uncertain product development bets. In other words, government support helps firms be creative and seize opportunities, but it does not yet insure them against the downside of bold bets.

The practical implications ripple outward from the rice paddies and workshops of Dong Nai, Tay Ninh, and Binh Phuoc to the broader debate on innovation in emerging economies. Successful OCOP firms, the study shows, tend to restructure their business models through multi-platform sales channels, e-commerce applications, livestream commerce, and agricultural experience tourism, while investing in preservation technology, deep processing, and automation to improve quality, extend product life cycles, and shorten commercialization timelines. For managers, the message is that entrepreneurial orientation alone is a necessary but insufficient condition; it must be paired with deliberate business model reconfiguration and technology investment. For policymakers, the findings argue for transparent, accessible support systems, financial incentives, innovation management training, and digital transformation assistance that convert perceived support into real innovation capacity. The authors caution that the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, the single-region sample limits generalizability, and self-reported measures introduce potential bias, calling for longitudinal and multi-source replication. Still, in a program meant to lift rural livelihoods toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the lesson is clear: in Vietnam’s countryside, boldness and foresight pay, but only when creativity is given the organizational machinery to become a product.

Subject of Research: How entrepreneurial orientation dimensions affect new product development performance among OCOP enterprises in Vietnam, with business model innovation and technology capability as mediators and perceived institutional support as a moderator.

Article Title: Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new product development performance

Article References: An, H. N. T., Cuong, N. Q., & Thuc, N. N. (2026). Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new product development performance. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00605-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00605-1

Keywords: entrepreneurial orientation, new product development performance, business model innovation, technology capability, perceived institutional support, OCOP enterprises, Vietnam, SMEs, PLS-SEM, dynamic capabilities, institutional theory, rural development