Publicações

This paper examines the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and their high value in supporting strategic competitiveness. To examine the links among strategy formulation, ICT, AI, and uncontrollable factors affecting business operations, this study proposes an interpretive model of these relationships, with strategic competitiveness as the dependent variable. Drawing on interviews and real-world data from several SMEs, the research findings indicate that although adopting AI and forecasting practices may pose challenges, mid-level and top managers increasingly recognize the importance of ICT and AI in formulating and implementing competitive strategies that enhance organizational competitiveness. The key results are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.

Flow experience and gaming addiction are central to understanding player engagement and spending. This study proposes and tests an integrated model linking flow, online gaming addiction, and purchase intention for in-game virtual goods. Data from 483 gamers were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling. Results confirm that flow positively influences purchase intention both directly and indirectly through addiction, which functions as a partial mediator. Multi-group analysis reveals the core model is robust across gender and engagement level, although the indirect pathway via addiction is stronger among experienced players, while light users show greater sensitivity to engagement-driven consumption. These findings clarify how immersive experiences translate into economic behavior, identify vulnerable user segments, and inform game designers, marketers, and policymakers concerned with responsible monetization.

Impulse buying is something most of us have experienced—walking into a store with no plans to shop and walking out with a bag full of clothes. This study looks closely at what drives that kind of spontaneous behavior, focusing specifically on fashion physical retail in Portugal. The researchers surveyed 411 consumers and used a structural model to analyze how different traits and marketing stimuli influence impulse buying. They looked at factors like sensation seeking, self-identity, shopping motivations (both for pleasure and practicality), how involved people are with fashion, how sensitive they are to price, and how much they’re influenced by store promotions and ambiance. A key part of the study is the role of self-control. The findings show that self-control acts as a kind of filter—helping people resist external triggers like sales promotions or appealing store environments. While fashion involvement, hedonic motives, and price sensitivity directly encourage impulse buying, self-control weakens the impact of other factors. In fact, it completely mediates the effects of store ambiance and promotions. This means that those elements only influence buying behavior when someone’s self-control is low. The study offers valuable insights for fashion retailers. Retailers who want to increase sales should focus on creating enjoyable shopping environments and running sales promotions because these strategies work best with customers who have low self-control. The study deepens our comprehension of impulse buying by showing how motivations interact with environments and internal self-regulation.

Grid-impact studies treat battery electric vehicles as loads, and ask when network capacity will be exhausted. This paper reverses the question: how much of the fleet must operate bidirectionally, and with what probability will an achievable participation rate suffice, for the network to remain within its limits? A conceptual framework adds a vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-building flexibility term to the balance between available and required power, nests the authors’ earlier deterministic model for twenty municipalities in Northern Portugal as its zero-flexibility special case, derives a closed-form break-even participation rate per municipality and year, and keeps the simultaneity assumption of that model explicit as a coincidence factor. Participation, location, plug-in and export parameters follow beta-PERT distributions calibrated on published trials and surveys, propagated by Monte Carlo simulation without new field data. The framework is an apparent-power balance per municipality, so its outputs are an upper bound on usable flexibility, not a feeder-level feasibility check. An enrolled vehicle provides about 11 kVA of peak relief, over nine tenths from not charging rather than exporting. Under worst-case simultaneity, observed participation rates, if in place from the outset, halve the 2028 shortfall probability but cannot prevent shortfall by 2030; under realistic coincidence the regional network is not constrained and only eight of twenty municipalities remain critical. The network balance is replicable wherever municipal substation data exist; behavioural parameters require local calibration.

Organizations increasingly measure and report sustainability, yet the impacts they report are produced in projects. This paper proposes a relational reconceptualization of sustainability maturity in project management, as the coupling of measurement means to the project decisions where sustainability ends are produced, and examines it against practitioners’ accounts. Sixty interviews (from an initial corpus of 62) with project management practitioners across six sectors and three organizational scales were analyzed through hybrid qualitative content analysis (27 codes; blind double coding, κ = 0.70). Practitioners rated their organizations readily but on improvised scales that were differentiated internally and narrated as trajectory, including regression; no participant invoked any named maturity model. In this sample, measurement accumulates at the organizational level while the project level frequently goes unmeasured: 26% of the 54 organizations, and 47% of the multinationals among them, maintain corporate measurement with no project-level measurement. This asymmetry is an observable signature consistent with vertical, means–ends decoupling; whether the corporate measurement that exists fails to inform project decisions is an inference the present design cannot test. External requirements dominate the reported drivers and are frequently welcomed as resources for growth; in exploratory sector comparisons, construction shows the highest project-level measurement and IT the lowest. The findings are consistent with the coupling conception, which they were used to develop rather than to test, and point to measurement attachment, rather than instrument availability, as the likely binding constraint in sustainability management systems.