The development of the personal innovative competences in workers is of capital importance for the competitiveness of organizations, where the ability of the employees must respond in an innovative way to diverse situations that arise in specific contexts. Considering this, the question arises: How do innovative employees’ competences affect the sustainable development of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs)? Therefore, the objective of this work is to present a multi-criteria method based on the Analytic Network Process (ANP), to relate innovative personal competences and the sustainable development of MSMEs. An instrument was applied to groups of experts from 31 Ecuadorian fruit-exporting MSMEs, to develop a multi-criteria decisional network that allowed identifying the innovative personal abilities that have the greatest impact on the sustainable development of these organizations. The results demonstrate the relevance of the elements of innovative personal competencies, with a cumulative participation of 39.15%, Sustainable Export Development with 32.18% and Improvements with 28.66%. It also presents three types of analysis: i) Global to establish the weight of each variable; ii) Influences, to establish solid cause-effect relationships between the variables and iii) Integrated. The most relevant innovative personal competences for sustainable development and improvements for exporting SMEs are teamwork, critical thinking, and creativity within the international context.

The territorial planning approach to allocating productive forces is based on the fact that territories have competitive advantages in producing specific products. However, in agriculture, the advantages principle cannot be used to shape the allocation patterns, due to a variety of intervening factors, such as the climatic and environmental conditions for agricultural production and the quality of land and availability of water. In the case of Russia, one of the most diverse countries in terms of the territorial disparities in agricultural production, this study examines the location and development patterns of the agricultural sector. The study identifies the competitive advantages of territories by comparing localization of agricultural production, production costs, performance, and profitability of agricultural producers, as well as prices of agricultural products in 78 different administrative regions in Russia. The study reveals which regions have more advantageous conditions for over-concentrating energy capacities, labor resources, fixed capital, and investments. However, at a certain point, over-concentrated production forces can lead to a deterioration in the performance of farmers due to an increase in capital intensity. Therefore, countries with significant regional differences in agricultural production should adjust their spatial development patterns according to the parameters of territories’ comparative advantages.

Use of technologies and online presence is now almost inevitable in language learning. The practice of virtual exchanges (VEs) has been receiving a lot of attention among educators at all levels over the past years. This research paper sheds light on 13 VEs carried out in pre-service teacher education in the last six years and proposes its own VE design based on recommendations from the literature with the future perspective of designing a specific VE for the research. The aim of the systematic review was at first to determine the exchange and interaction set-ups and the potential gains in the terms of pre-service teachers’ skills development. Afterwards, we identified areas for improvement and proposed our design of a VE between pre-service teachers of English in Slovakia and Turkey. Some of the expected contributions of the proposed VE design are development of a linguistic and intercultural communicative competence, digital literacy, and other competences relevant for development of VEs.

This article discusses one of the problems of using digital technologies, namely the complexity of assessing the effectiveness of their implementation. Since the use of digital twins at the enterprises of the fuel and energy complex (FEC) has recently become relevant, the authors have chosen the digital twins technology for consideration in this article. For the successful implementation of digital technologies, the authors propose a system of evaluation indicators that will measure the effectiveness of Digital Twins implementation and determine the benefits obtained. The advantages of digital twins include improved management and monitoring, optimization of production processes, prediction of equipment failures, as well as reduced maintenance costs and increased overall efficiency of FEC systems. As a methodological basis for the study, authors use the system of balanced indicators proposed by R. Kaplan and D. Norton, which served as the basis for the development of a set of performance indicators of the fuel and energy complex enterprise with the introduction of digital twins. As a result of the study, a list of indicators for monitoring the effectiveness of digital twins implementation was determined. The study identifies performance indicators for digital twin implementation, with future research aimed at quantitative assessments. The enterprise can implement a digital twin system with a WACC of 10.99%, payback period of 8.06 years, IRR exceeding the discount rate by 9.07%, a 3.5% reduction in harmful emissions, and a 2.5% efficiency increase.

With the rising global consumer demand for green and healthy food, the tea industry is facing unprecedented competitive pressure. Therefore, how to build tea enterprises with sustainable competitiveness has become a key issue facing the industry. This paper firstly reviews the concept of traceability systems and their evolution and, based on the theory of enterprise competitive advantage, explores the influence mechanism of traceability as a strategic resource on the long-term competitiveness of tea enterprises; secondly, it analyzes the multi-dimensional role of traceability on enterprise competitiveness from five aspects, namely, quality and safety control and guarantee, brand image shaping and trust construction, market dynamics response and consumer feedback, risk response and product recall, as well as technological innovation and efficiency enhancement; finally, combined with the above analysis, this paper constructs a theoretical framework for the competitiveness of tea enterprises, integrates the impact of traceability in different dimensions, and proposes a multi-level competitiveness enhancement model. Through this framework, tea enterprises can more comprehensively understand and grasp the close relationship between traceability and the long-term competitive advantage of enterprises and then make strategic adjustments according to their own actual situation so as to realize sustainable competitiveness enhancement in the future market competition.

The study employed a qualitative approach to determine the influence and effectiveness of storytelling in shaping the Alpha generation’s buying decisions and consumption behaviours. The students of the University of Lagos Junior Secondary School were selected for the study. The interview questions were set to focus on factors like experiences, sources of storytelling communication, the outcomes and the affective effects. Twenty-five students were purposively selected out of one hundred and twelve (112) population for the interview based on the conditions for selection. Thematic analysis was used and a total of 244 themes were identified. Four (4) major themes were later identified in thematic synthesis through coding translation. The findings revealed that storytelling is effective and strategic in brands targeted at the Alpha generation, hence, the generation relied on storytelling to choose brands in convenience, impulsive and shopping products, and radio and television were the main sources of storytelling campaigns among the generation. Storytelling wrapped in songs, entertainment, dancing, drama, etc. captivated and influenced the generation, and children used the information from the storytelling campaigns to influence family purchase decisions and parents’ buying decisions and behaviours.