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Pervasive digitalization is changing how firms engage in strategic competition. Some firms are pursuing digital disruption strategies, using digital resources to rewire their value chain and change the landscape of their industry by redefining performance expectations. Other firms are adapting to digitalization by adding digital resources into their existing value chain. Through NK model simulations, we advance our understanding of digital disruption vis-à-vis adaptation in strategic competition in two main ways. First, we unearth important nuances in performance trade-offs: A digital disruption strategy may be effective for relative performance at the expense of absolute performance gains. Second, we explore relevant marketand competitor-related conditions under which firms should opt (or not) for a digital disruption strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies struggle with timely project execution despite employing sophisticated management methods. Although help across projects is critical for time performance, it has not been explicitly incorporated into project management (PM) systems. We model a PM system, based on an innovative real-life practice, that both incorporates and shapes project managers' helping behavior. A help process is at the core of this system, in which project managers may ask for and provide help while top management facilitates such exchanges. We find that companies should take a nuanced approach when designing help exchange and time-based incentives in tandem. A company that faces high project rewards after delays and highly effective help can benefit from inducing help because doing so enables the pursuit of projects it might abandon if delayed or even at the outset. The formal help process delivers value by creating and exploiting interdependencies between projects. These interdependencies allow project prioritization by inducing different effort levels in otherwise identical projects. A help process also allows the company to 'tune' the timing of efforts by front-loading or back-loading project work. The benefits of a help system accrue through cost efficiencies, increased probability of success under help, and intertemporal incentive effects that encourage early efforts. However, because the help process creates the opportunity for free riding, a help system is not always recommended and a no-help system may perform better, especially when there are low project rewards after delay and low opportunity costs for project work. History: Accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management. Keywords: project management * new product development * cooperative behavior, 1. Introduction Timely project completion is crucial for firms in competitive markets (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995, Cohen et al. 1996, Loch and Kavadias 2011). Across industries, however, firms are plagued [...]

Grasping the true value of ideas is essential for corporate innovation success. When it comes to forecasting the value of one's own innovation ideas, however, people may err systematically. In this paper, we shed light on this ideator's bias, and examine when and why certain ideas are more prone to biased evaluations. Specifically, we argue that biased idea evaluations depend on the self-efficacy that ideators may derive from their specific role and social identity in the firm when generating a specific idea. We test our theoretical predictions of such a situation-specific perspective on overconfidence by using a corporate dataset on process innovations and their valuations. Furthermore, we triangulate our predicted mechanism and rule out alternative explanations through a series of additional interviews and four scenario-based experiments. Consistent with our situation-specific, identity-based account, we find that ideas from employees at a higher (vs. lower) organizational level, and from employees generating ideas in groups (vs. individually) are more prone to an ideator's bias. In doing so, our study helps explain when the ideator's bias prevails in a real-life organizational context, raises caution about some current proxies to identify high-potential ideas, and provides fresh insights to established theories around overconfidence and self-efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how BMW used its workforce to re-engineer its production line to obtain a more ergonomically balanced job site that would also accommodate aging employees.

High-tech organizations maintain a portfolio of R&D projects that address problems with different levels of complexity. These projects use different strategies to search for technological solutions. Projects refining existing products, processes, and technologies, for instance, employ a local search strategy to improve performance, while projects developing new products, processes, and technologies employ a distant search strategy. However, projects can shift in their levels of complexity due to exogenous technological changes, and failure to change search strategy in turn can negatively impact project performance. This study first develops grounded theory via case studies to understand how high-tech organizations manage R&D projects when complexity shifts. The case data come from 142 informants in 12 R&D projects at three high-tech business units. A cross-case comparison shows that three interconnected mechanisms positioned at multiple levels within the organization enable high-tech organizations to identify such shifts and adjust the project's search. We refer to this strategy as responsive search. We then conduct agent-based simulation experiments to examine the conditions under which the responsive search outperforms other canonical search strategies. Overall, this study sheds light on the underexplored question of how to make mid-project corrections by effectively identifying and managing shifts in project complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]