Sustainable development concept and creation of innovative business models by retail chains Available to Purchase

Katarzyna Bilińska-Reformat is Professor and Head of Marketing Management and Tourism Department at the Faculty of Management, University of Economics in Katowice in Poland. She is interested in issues regarding retail management and marketing strategies. She is an author or co-author of 180 publications, including articles and conference papers published in Polish and foreign periodicals. She has also run many business research works for companies and has been a consultant in marketing. Co-author of the methodology of pro-innovation advisory services for SMEs, under the name “Marketing Audit of Young Firms”, implemented by the Upper Silesian Agency for Promotion of Entrepreneurship SA in Katowice. She has been a manager of scientific project financed by the National Science Centre (NCN) in Cracow.

Barbara Kucharska is employed as Assistant Professor at the University of Economics in Katowice in Poland. She received the PhD degree in Economy. Her most important accomplishments are focussed on the major subject areas: functioning of retail trade, innovations in retail trade in the context of creation of value for customer and behaviours of market entities. She has have been conducting scientific and research activity while participating as a supervisor, main researcher or executor in four scientific grants, and participating in over 20 department research projects. She also individually implemented five projects of own research. She was the supervisor and its only executor of the project “Innovations in retail trade in creation of values for customer” financed by National Science Centre.

Malgorzata Twardzik is currently Lecturer in Retail Geography, Economic Geography and Location Theory within the Department of Spatial Economics at the University of Economics in Katowice in Poland. She main research interests lie in the area of economic geography, the problem of retail location in the city and in the development of shopping centres. She also received the PhD degree in Economy from the University of Economics in Katowice. For many years, she has conducted research on the location of commercial activity in the city space, spatial concentration of retail and modern trade formats. Currently, she is working on the project of functioning of downtown shopping streets in the vicinity of shopping centres (in Silesia Region) and the functional distribution of shopping centres in the city. She is the author of more than 60 scientific papers and papers for economic practice.

Les Dolega is currently Lecturer in Retail Geography and GIS within the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool. His main research interests lie in the area of economic geography with the focus on town centre performance, their spatial complexity and implementation of consumer-related (big) data. He also received the PhD degree in Retail Geography from the University of Southampton, where he investigated the response of UK high streets to the economic crisis. More recently, he has lead the ESRC “e-Resilience” project (resilience of UK high streets to online sales). Currently, he is working on a number of projects including “Multidimensional classification of retail spaces” and “Evolving retail landscape in Liverpool City Region”.