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Designing and strategically developing viable business models is vital for value creation and capture and in turn for the survival and performance of entrepreneurial ventures. However, the widely held firm-centric and static business model perspective appears inadequate to reflect the realities of increasingly blurred industry boundaries, interconnected economies, and the resulting collapse of incumbent value chains. This PhD thesis adds understanding of the dynamic business model development process from an ecosystem perspective. The evolution of ten entrepreneurial ventures’ business models was documented and investigated through longitudinal in-depth case studies over twelve months. Analysing and comparing the cases revealed strategies that resulted in the development of effective interactive structures and robust value co-creation and capture mechanisms. The development of interactive structures, i.e. firm-ecosystem fits, was either supported by a focused or diversified ecosystem integration approach underpinned by heterogeneous interdependencies of value proposition and business model components across ecosystems. The obtained insights allowed the derivation of sets of capabilities that supported the business model development process and enhanced entrepreneurial ventures’ chances of survival. The findings have several implications for advancements of the business model theory. In particular they indicate what integration strategies can inform entrepreneurs’ and managers’ business model design and execution strategies for operating in increasingly complex ecosystems.

Qualitative data from interviews and diaries show that for managers in distributed teams, monitoring their team’s attitudes is vital. Monitoring attitudes is theorised to be a necessary part of enacting informal controls, essential for knowledge work where formal behaviour and output controls are likely to be insufficient. This suggests an extension to Ouchi’s (1977) influential Behaviour-Output framework to incorporate monitoring attitudes. Impression management and lack of physical proximity is shown to be a potential disruptor of attitude-related monitoring for managers. Pastoral control is then introduced to explain how managers utilise relational techniques to solicit information necessary for monitoring attitudes, and the role of context in enacting organisational control is explicated.

Many claims have been made about the learning benefits of communicating strategies in multi-media picture plus text formats, rather than mono-media text-only formats. However, there is little theorization and empirical evidence to support these claims. Drawing upon Cognitive Load Theory to develop learning-related hypotheses, this manuscript reports on a multi-country experiment that tests the effects of different modes of strategy communication on student learning. The results show the learning benefits to students of multi-media presentations of strategy and suggests how strategy professors should further encourage students to draw strategies in class.

Addressing the Grand Challenges of the world requires a mode of research that can mirror their scale and complexity. Traditional investigator- and industry-led research frameworks, although useful in their own right, fail to capture the collaborative, transdisciplinary approach that can both generate the necessary knowledge and apply research outcomes on the scale needed to resolve the ‘big picture’ problems. Mission-led research provides a framework that attempts to strike that balance of knowledge generation and application; and New Zealand’s National Science Challenges (NSCs) provide a representation of missionled research that may exemplify the relationships and processes needed to enact it. This thesis aims to understand how the relationships and processes designed to facilitate mission-led research in the NSCs impacts their ability to achieve their missions. Research was undertaken through semi-structured interviews with participants from two NSCs, representing four of the key stakeholder perspectives: Management, Researchers, Industry, and Māori. These interviews sought to understand how different stakeholder groups conceptualised mission-led research itself, the processes within it, and their relationships with other stakeholder groups. The results demonstrated that stakeholders perceived mission-led research in four interdependent ways, driven by a core concept of ‘Big Picture’ problems. These problems were seen to necessitate ‘Transdisciplinarity’ in their resolution, that research would be ‘Long-term/Strategic’, and that research outcomes would have a ‘Collective Benefit’. Alignment between conceptualisations of mission-led research and how closely processes and stakeholder groups adhered to those conceptualisations was central to positive engagement and collaboration. Alignment between stakeholders was seen to occur through three modes: Conceptual, Structural, and Relational. Conceptual alignment promoted a common understanding of the mission; Structural

Differences in dynamic capabilities (DCs) help explain firms’ abilities to change. DCs research has explored what DCs might be and generic categorisations of them after they have emerged, but little light has been thrown on the specific practices that enable or inhibit their emergence. This study explores how DCs emerge and why firms might develop DCs differently under the same market conditions. This thesis sought to understand these questions and respond to calls for longitudinal empirical studies to extend DC theory by studying the paths of four professional services firms in New Zealand over three decades. Using a multi-case study design and thematic analysis, this research applied Teece’s (2007) framework of sensing, seizing and transforming capabilities to identify the presence of DCs within each case, before attempting to identify the enablers and inhibitors influencing the development of such capabilities. While elements of each generic class of DC were evident in each case, the findings suggest that in order to utilise DCs to adapt effectively to environmental changes, a firm must deploy all three classes of capabilities at the same time. This research contributes to the DC literature by proposing a prioritised typology of antecedents that may help stimulate Teece’s sensing, seizing and transforming DCs, while identifying the rigidities that could inhibit their development. The empirical results reported on in this thesis suggest that similar firms’ development of DCs may be different because of idiosyncratic leadership and culture that can limit a firm’s ability to perceive the importance of DCs. Other characteristics that inhibit the development of DCs include centralised, non-participative cultures and high internal (or inward looking) orientation. These results extend current theory about triggers for developing DCs by identifying that the strongest triggers may be either serious macro-economic events or internally driven by firm-defined goals or strate

Organisational leaders need to reach out to a variety of stakeholders in order to convey their strategic intent. Bridging these interfaces is a challenge that focuses attention on how strategy may be communicated effectively. Many authors advocate developing and communicating strategy using multi-media forms that combine words and pictures. However, there is little evidence that multi-media communication of strategy is increasing in practice. This raises the question of whether multi-media communication is indeed better than single media for strategy communications. Drawing upon the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning we developed a series of hypotheses to find out, to what extent, and why, picture-plus-text presentation may provide greater benefits than text-only presentation in terms of 1) learning effectiveness, 2) perceptions of systematic integration, and 3) confidence building. To test whether multimedia strategy communications may provide more benefits than mono-media communications we ran an experiment across 8 countries involving 1,140 participants. Our results show there can be benefits to using multi-media means for strategy communications although there are performance variations that may determine when multi-media strategy communications are used in preference to mono-media means. These findings add to our understanding of the benefits and costs of multimedia strategy communications.