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Many organizations are drowning in a flood of corporate bullshit, and this is particularly true of organizations in trouble, whose managers tend to make up stuff on the fly and with little regard for future consequences. Bullshitting and lying are not synonymous. While the liar knows the truth and wittingly bends it to suit their purpose, the bullshitter simply does not care about the truth. Managers can actually do something about organizational bullshit, and this Executive Digest provides a sequential framework that enables them to do so. They can comprehend it, they can recognize it for what it is, they can act against it, and they can take steps to prevent it from happening in the future. While it is unlikely that any organization will ever be able to rid itself of bullshit entirely, this article argues that by taking these steps, astute managers can work toward stemming its flood.

A growing body of research examines whether and how university research parks (URPs) enhance the performance of their tenants and foster regional innovation. As the findings in the literature are inconclusive, we argue that the URP construct requires closer conceptual examination, especially in regards to URP strategies. This paper highlights the limitations of treating URPs homogenously and theorizes how URPs’ strategies vary and arise. We develop a conceptual model, a typology, based on URP’s industry specialization and development services, of four types of URP strategies. The model shows how URP strategies can vary in theoretically important ways to generate URP internal and external strategic fit.

In this paper, we introduce a novel way of understanding organizational resilience. We suggest that organizational resilience can be profitably viewed as an evolutionary process in which organizations adapt their configurations in response to changes in two external conditions — disturbance and munificence. Focusing on the contexts of manufacturing and operations management, we begin by explaining the concepts of organizational configuration and resilience. We then present a framework that views resilience-driven configuration change as an evolutionary process of variation, selection, and retention for a population of firms. The final component of this framework is the use of the cladistic method of classification to develop a hypothesis of the branching order of configuration change. We conclude the paper by presenting a typology that shows how different levels of munificence and disturbance combine to produce two types of adaptive resilience (cladogenetic and anagenetic) and one type of non-adaptive resilience (inertia). We also explain how phylograms can be used to indicate the amount of time separating different organizational configurations.

Many organizations are drowning in a flood of corporate bullshit, and this is particularly true of organizations in trouble, whose managers tend to make up stuff on the fly and with little regard for future consequences. Bullshitting and lying are not synonymous. While the liar knows the truth and wittingly bends it to suit their purpose, the bullshitter simply does not care about the truth. Managers can actually do something about organizational bullshit, and this Executive Digest provides a sequential framework that enables them to do so. They can comprehend it, they can recognize it for what it is, they can act against it, and they can take steps to prevent it from happening in the future. While it is unlikely that any organization will ever be able to rid itself of bullshit entirely, this article argues.

Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks: (1) whether the information in the leak is factual or concocted and (2) whether leaks are conducted overtly or covertly. Using these two dimensions, we identify four types of leaks: informing, dissembling, misdirecting, and provoking. We also provide a framework to help managers decide whether or not they should leak secrets.

Traditionally, the term crowd was used almost exclusively in the context of people who self-organized around a common purpose, emotion or experience. Today, however, firms often refer to crowds in discussions of how collections of individuals can be engaged for organizational purposes. Crowdsourcing, the use of information technologies to outsource business responsibilities to crowds, can now significantly influence a firms ability to leverage previously unattainable resources to build competitive advantage. Nonetheless, many managers are hesitant to consider crowdsourcing because they do not understand how its various types can add value to the firm. In response, we explain what crowdsourcing is, the advantages it offers and how firms can pursue crowdsourcing. We begin by formulating a crowdsourcing typology and show how its four categories (crowd-voting, micro-task, idea and solution crowdsourcing) can help firms develop crowd capital, an organizational-level resource harnessed from the crowd. We then present a three-step process model for generating crowd capital. Step one includes important considerations that shape how a crowd is to be constructed. Step two outlines the capabilities firms need to develop to acquire and assimilate resources (knowledge, labor, funds) from the crowd. Step three addresses key decision-areas that executives need to address to effectively engage crowds., Business Horizons, Volume 58, Issue 1, Pages 77-85

Environmental and economic evidence is increasingly supporting the need for better analytical tools for evaluating the recovery of consumer products. In response, we present a novel mathematical model for determining what we call the Optimal Recovery Plan (ORP) for any given product. The ORP is based on an evaluation and optimization of the economics of remanufacturing consumer products versus demanufacturing in the context of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation, a driving force behind the adoption remanufacturing initiatives by firms. We provide an illustrative application of the model and then discuss its implications for scholars and practitioners concerned with sustainable business development.

Accelerators are a type of incubation program that are concerned with attracting, supporting and developing new ventures. Although there is significant enthusiasm for accelerators and their potential benefits, there is limited research on how their core capabilities can vary. In response, we develop a typology of accelerator capabilities taking into account their strategy, governance, business model, operations and finance. To develop the typology we carried out a benchmark analysis of six clean energy commercialization accelerators (CECAs). From this we verified and illustrated the dimensions of our typology and identified four types of accelerator capabilities: R&D focused, technology enabled, market enabled, and network enabled. We then use a seventh accelerator case to illustrate how our typology can be used to describe, understand and prescribe appropriate capabilities for a CECA. We conclude our paper by explaining the research and practice implications of our research. Crown Copyright © 2013.

Tapping into the creativity of a crowd can provide a highly efficient and effective means of acquiring ideas, work, and content to solve problems. But crowdsourcing solutions can also come with risks, including the legal risks associated with intellectual property. Therefore, we raise and address a two-part question: Why—and how—should organizations deal with intellectual property issues when engaging in the crowdsourcing of solutions? The answers lie in understanding the approaches for acquiring sufficient intellectual property from a crowd and limiting the risks of using that intellectual property. Herein, we discuss the hazards of not considering these legal issues and explain how managers can use appropriate terms and conditions to balance and mitigate the risks associated with soliciting solutions from a crowd. Based on differences in how organizations acquire intellectual property and limit associated risks, we identify and illustrate with examples four approaches for managing intellectual property (passive, possessive, persuasive, and prudent) when crowdsourcing solutions. We conclude with recommendations for how organizations should use and tailor the approaches in our framework to source intellectual property from a crowd.

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms—such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis—to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm's reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don’t understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities.

This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation. The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several open innovation scholars — having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on “Researching Open Innovation” at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on open innovation, organized at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study open innovation — originally an organizational-level phenomenon — across multiple levels of analysis. While our integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting, and integrating different perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorizing will be needed to advance open innovation research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research — particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.

The focus of this paper is on innovation in terms of the new product development processes and to discuss its main features. This is followed by a presentation of the new ideas emerging from complex systems science. It is then demonstrated how complex systems provides an overall conceptual framework for thinking about innovation and for considering how this helps to provide understanding and advice for the organisation of new product development in different circumstances. Three case studies are quoted which illustrate the application of these new ideas.

The Graphs with Results and Actions Inter-related (GRAI) methodology and its development the GRAI Integrated Methodology (GIM) are established enterprise modelling (EM) techniques for representing the decision architecture of manufacturing systems. However, they lack the support of certain modelling constructs, which in turn can lead to inconsistent and inadequate results. To help address this issue, this paper proposes a classification schema of manufacturing decisions that will facilitate the identification and analysis of decisions for constructing GRAI models. The classification schema is based on: (i) a continuum of organisational decision characteristics; (ii) a categorisation of manufacturing decision domains (DDs) and (iii) a list of manufacturing system configurations, By using this schema during the initial analysis phase and the model construction phase, it is possible to improve the process of idenfifying key manufacturing decisions and the associated processes, activities and entities.

In this study we seek to better understand how the configuration of relationships immediately around a firm may impact its performance in context of its activities and industry. We use Q-analysis to reveal specific configurations of how actors are organized and involved in activities in relation to firm performance. This is an exploratory study, that employs Q-Analysis techniques, which “avoid the use of data transformations and summary measures,” and are considered “best suited for exploratory research and hypothesis generation” (Jacobson & Yan, 1998). This study uses interview transcripts in which questions regarding the involvement of actors towards the development or access of specific resources are analyzed as proposed in Hakansson’s network model (Hakansson, 1987, 1989) as source data.The interviews analyzed were conducted as part of the 2001-2003 ISRN Innovation Survey in the new media and biotech industries in Vancouver. Subsets of firms are formed for comparison, by splitting the sample based on compound annual growth rate and industry. Conclusions are drawn in an attempt to link the performance of the new venture with the activities pursued through and the configuration of networks.