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Research Summary: We investigate how strategic leaders of an incumbent firm frame exploration of digital opportunities at the interfaces of organizational hierarchy. Digital technologies create an unbounded array of opportunities that may pose challenges to the strategic coherence of corporate entrepreneurship activity. Our analysis reveals that top management teams (TMTs) adopt a paradoxical framing of exploration, thereby creating a liminal space with unstable boundaries between exploration activities aligned with core resources (i.e., convergent) and those perceived as divergent. We show that middle managers (MMs) skillfully navigate this space by combining framing with substantive and symbolic actions to blur the boundaries of exploration. Drawing on our findings, we theorize the role of framing at the interfaces between the TMT and MMs in setting boundaries for exploration. Managerial Summary: The process of digital transformation can be overwhelming for established companies as managers encounter a myriad of new opportunities. Our study of a large telecommunications company found that both senior and MMs play important roles in guiding the development of new digital businesses. Senior managers encourage creative thinking and promote exploring multiple innovation opportunities. However, they also set boundaries to prevent innovation activities from becoming too risky by venturing into very distant domains. This contradictive requirement creates a “gray zone” for MMs to imaginatively use their skills to navigate restrictions without compromising exploration of new opportunities. This approach involves both top‐down and bottom‐up communication between senior and MMs that helps avoid short‐sightedness and overspending when it comes to innovating with digital technologies.

Desorptive capacity is the organisational ability to transfer internal knowledge to external actors to obtain competitive advantage. We distinguish two forms of desorptive capacity to investigate how organisations active in emerging technology domains explore and exploit opportunities to match internally developed technology to external needs. We also focus on management innovation–the ability to create or revise organisational structures or processes–as a potential antecedent of desorptive capacity. From a study of 84 synthetic biology organisations we found that explorative and exploitative desorptive capacity mediate the relationship between management innovation and external technology commercialisation. The study provides empirical evidence of the existence and interdependence of different managerial and organisational processes required for external technology commercialisation. We underscore how organisations can valorise technological assets strategically through management innovation and by achieving a fit between internal practices and the technological base of potential technology adopters.

Research summary: How firms respond to the emergence of dominant platforms that undermine their competitiveness remains a strategic puzzle. Our longitudinal study shows how one incumbent, Cisco, responded to such a challenge by creating a new platform, Fog, without undermining the dominant platform, Cloud, where it played a complementor role. By developing a process model we reveal how a firm in a peripheral role in a platform ecosystem can reposition itself through a dynamic mix of material, symbolic and institutional actions to develop and legitimize an alternative platform. This can be done first through symbiosis with the dominant platform, then partial competition with it. We theorize the value of a mutualistic “rising tide lifts all boats” strategy in contrast to hostile “winner takes all” approaches. Managerial summary: The increasing pervasiveness of digital platforms are driving established firms to reboot their strategy to embrace emergent forms of competition, collaboration, and mutual coexistence. Fearing disruption in their traditional business models, firms may decide to jump into the platform game. However, this is not straightforward since they do not want to go head-to-head with existing platforms and alienate their partners and customers by being perceived as encroaching on their turf. We describe one way that established technology firms are overcoming this dilemma through a “rising-tide-lifts-all-boats” strategy to cultivate new platforms. We show the value of seemingly inconsistent and dynamic approaches toward strategic communication and investments firm can use to lead new platforms without facing backlash from others.

Contains fulltext : 170193.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) We develop a psychological perspective on managers’ exploration orientation. Our study suggests that the regulatory focus of managers may in different ways, impact their orientation toward search, risk-taking, and experimentation. Moreover, we argue that these relationships are contingent not only on the extent to which the organizational context fits with the motivational disposition of managers, but also on the complexity of decision-making. Using an experimental setting, we find that managers’ regulatory focus affects their willingness to experiment with a wide range of alternatives and to deviate from existing best practices. Moreover, the promotion focus of managers heightens their exploration orientation in an organizational context with promotion-focused cues in highly complex decision-making. This study has important implications for our understanding of managers’ exploration orientation under conditions of complexity. 23 december 2016

Although exploratory units constitute a structural mechanism that buffer rigidity and inertia from firms’ core businesses, tensions and challenges may arise when there is a changing strategy at the corporate level that misaligned with the initial purpose of the unit. In this paper, we explain how managers in spatially separated exploration units of an organization deal with the conflicting requirements of exploring emerging industries and senior executives’ initiatives to align the organization around the temporal focus on restoration of core businesses. We uncover internal mechanisms that reveals how an exploratory unit become ambidextrous that enable them to maintain a strategic alignment with the main organization while ensuring required adaptability for exploration in emerging industry. Our findings draw on the longitudinal analysis of exploration activities of a business unit at a global telecommunication firm that responsible for pursuing opportunities in the emerging Internet of Things industry (IoT) between 2015 and 2019. This study contributes to extant literature by developing a link between contextual and structural ambidexterity at the business unit level, and particularly, by showing managerial approaches through which an organizational unit become ambidextrous.

In adopting highly integrated Product-Service Systems (PSS), incentive structures change and the value attainable for providers throughout the lifecycle becomes an issue of growing complexity. Nonetheless, value for PSS providers has up to now not been considered in a multidimensional fashion. In an effort to move towards a characterization of providers value, an offering in the information communication technology sector was examined through an investigation with ten staff-members of Ericsson, Sweden. This led to a value-categorization, which can be utilized in the PSS design process to enhance the value captured throughout the lifecycle beyond immediate monetary benefit. In an effort to provide general learnings, the results are discussed with a focus on PSS business models, PSS design and management communication. Overall, the results presented provide a more comprehensive picture of what a provider has to gain from a PSS offering throughout its entire lifecycle. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V.

Prior research provides in-depth insights about strategies for new ventures to compete in existing platform ecosystems. However, we know relatively little about the process of creating new platform...

Innovation has since long been known as key to organizational success and survival, which has driven in particular large technology firms to systematize their research and development activities an...

This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal study of a large corporation's transition to a new business model in the face of a major transformation in the ICT industry brought about by Cloud computing. We build theory on the process of business model innovation through a qualitative study that investigates how an established firm organizes for an emerging business model. Contrary to previous findings that presented spatial separation as the optimal structural approach for dealing with two competing business models, our findings indicate a need for recursive iterations between different modes of separated and integrated structures in line with the emergent nature of strategic intent toward the new business models. Our analyses reveal strategy formation to be a collective experimental learning process revolving around a number of alternative strategic intentions ranging from incremental evolution and transformation to complete replacement of the existing business model. Given the fundamental differences in the nature and requirements of those alternative intents, iterations between different structural modes and differing combinations proved to be crucial in enabling the organization to make transition to the new business model.

Although exploratory units constitute a structural mechanism that buffer rigidity and inertia from firms’ core businesses, tensions and challenges may arise when there is a changing strategy at the corporate level that misaligned with the initial purpose of the unit. In this paper, we explain how managers in spatially separated exploration units of an organization deal with the conflicting requirements of exploring emerging industries and senior executives’ initiatives to align the organization around the temporal focus on restoration of core businesses. We uncover internal mechanisms that reveals how an exploratory unit become ambidextrous that enable them to maintain a strategic alignment with the main organization while ensuring required adaptability for exploration in emerging industries. Our findings draw on the longitudinal analysis of exploration activities of a business unit at a global telecommunication firm that responsible for pursuing opportunities in the emerging Internet of Things industry (IoT) between 2015 and 2019. This study contributes to extant literature by developing a link between contextual and structural ambidexterity at the business unit level, and particularly, by showing managerial approaches through which an organizational unit become ambidextrous.

The creation of an online strategy community is increasingly attractive for companies as a mean to make the strategy process more inclusive. However, the fundamental difference between the flexible...

This paper examines the effect of management innovation on a firm's ability to effectively adopt an emerging core technology. Organizing for technological change is often associated with structural dilemmas for incumbents: while structural contingent solutions such as spatially separated units and parallel organizations have been frequently discussed as enablers of handling contradictory requirements of existing and emerging technologies, there is empirical evidence that such solutions are likely to be either unfeasible or unsustainable in the cases of core technologies. Our analysis on the adoption process of a new core technology by a large telecommunication firm reveals the role of management innovation in fulfilling seemingly paradoxical structural requirements of knowledge accumulation in a dynamic knowledge environment. We discuss how a novel structural approach enabled the organization to overcome rigidities in the existing routines and foster a favorable environment for adoption of cloud technology and to overcome organizational challenges, with which the firm's conventional practices failed to commensurate.

Established firms aspiring an alternative to a technological platform that undermines their competitive position confront the dilemma of seeking their own economic interests and gaining legitimacy ...

As a response to competitive and economic pressures, large organizations are increasingly seeking new business ideas from employees across different units of organizations. However the org...

In the past decades, collaboration has become increasingly important for organisations involved in highly complex and evolving areas of knowledge. Synthetic biology is an emerging techno-scientific...

This study contributes to better understanding of what effects business model innovation in a multinational enterprise and sheds light on ways for MNEs to respond to diverging requirements of globa...

In this study we investigate organizational control systems as the underpinnings of large organizations’ ability to perform after transition to a flattened and decentralized structure. We consider ...

The involvement of customers, also known as co-creation, is believed to affect the innovation performance of a firm. Indeed, past studies have provided ample support for the positive effects of customer involvement on product quality, innovation speed, and productivity; but the discussions on the effectiveness of co-creation for achieving radical innovations and the drivers of this relationship are less clear. By examining the effects of collaboration with customers on senior managers’ attentiveness and behavior in favor of exploration, we advance the understanding of the link between customer co-creation and radical innovations. Analysis on six case studies and a survey of 131 companies adopting a similar emerging technology indicate a higher probability for exploratory innovation among the companies that co-create with their customers. Our findings further suggest that managerial attention and management innovation are two factors that mediate this relationship.

The ability of an organization to prosper in highly volatile and often disruptive environment is mainly dependent on its ability to profitably manage its internal and external sources of knowledge. Two key structural factors such as centralization and formalization have been suggested in the literature to play an important role in this process. Organizations however, are socially constructed entities and knowledge related capabilities, remain socially founded primarily in the emotions and cognition of individual members. By adopting a behavioral strategy lens, we explore the underlying mechanism connecting structure to AC by investigating the mediating role of organizational energy (i.e. the mobilization of the emotional, cognitive and behavioral resources of an organization). A survey was conducted among firms that are challenged by the disruptive effect of cloud computing. The results suggest that energy mediates the impact of decentralization on absorptive capacity, while the equivalent effect of forma...

Prior research contends that managerial cognition plays an important role in explaining the firm’s effective response to environmental dynamism. However, evidence suggests that firms may cope with ...

The purpose of this research was to develop a framework of how incumbent firms organize for adoption and implementation of an emerging disruptive business model. The framework, based on an in-depth...

Management innovation is speculated to be an enabler of technological change by way of adoption or development of new technologies. However, the precise dynamics of the mechanism that drive this relationship are not fully understood. Drawing on the concept of absorptive capacity in the organizational learning literature, this article examines how routines that give gestalt to the prevalent organizational structures, systems and practices influence the adoption or non-adoption of emerging technologies. We complement our theoretical analysis with an in-depth case study of Ercisson’s experiences with Cloud Computing Technology (CCT). The case provides a unique opportunity to explore how organizational innovation determines managerial motivation and organizational pace to embrace a disruptive new technology whose full potential is not as yet understood. Our article provides evidence for a recursive relationship between managerial attention to a new technology, management innovation, and technology adoption, w...