Search

Open Innovation (OI) has become a key part of corporate strategy, and many firms have adopted dedicated organizational functions to leverage OI. However, current literature lacks insights into how firms deploy such functions and what they do. To address this issue, this article provides insights from interviews with senior managers in dedicated OI functions in 20 different firms. The findings reveal three ways that firms can employ these functions and the key practices for which they are responsible. Finally, dedicated OI functions can change over time as the firms' OI capabilities mature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Inspired by the goal of making marketplaces more inclusive, this research provides a deeper understanding of consumer vulnerability dynamics to develop strategies that help reduce these vulnerabilities. The proposed framework, first, conceptualizes vulnerability states as a function of the breadth and depth of consumers’ vulnerability; then, it sketches a set of vulnerability indicators that illustrate vulnerability breadth and depth. Second, because the breadth and depth of vulnerability vary over time, the framework goes beyond vulnerability states to identify distinct vulnerability-increasing and vulnerability-decreasing pathways, which describe how consumers move between vulnerability states. In a final step, the framework proposes that organizations can (and should) support consumers to mitigate vulnerability by helping consumers build resilience (e.g., via distinct types of resilience-fueling consumer agency). This framework offers novel conceptual insights into consumer vulnerability dynamics as well as resilience and provides avenues for future research on how organizations can better partner with consumers who experience vulnerabilities.

We develop and test a more comprehensive theory of the sources and effects of workplace favoritism by drawing on a large, agency-wide sample of U.S. Federal Aviation Administration employees. We report how members of various underrepresented groups differ in their perceptions of a variety of sources of favoritism. We find that their perceptions of friendship favoritism are an important source of perception of workplace favoritism for all employees. We show that perceptions of favoritism are negatively associated with employee trust in their organizations and coworkers, commitment to their organizations, willingness to speak up, and pay satisfaction, with friendship favoritism significantly dominating over most other sources. Further, we find that team leaders, supervisors, managers, and executives, with their greater knowledge of organizational processes, report less favoritism. This and previous research provide practical guidance on how greater transparency may reduce employee perceptions of favoritism in the federal workforce while avoiding discredited formalistic constraints.

The sports world has historically rejected the practice of tanking. I argue that this attitude is unwarranted. To do so, I introduce a concept called strategic suboptimal play (SSP), which is the practice of incurring the risk of a short-term competitive disadvantage to increase the chances of gaining a longer-term competitive advantage. Tanking is just an instance of SSP employed in higher-order games, i.e. games that are at least partially played by other games, like tournaments or seasons. Since SSP is integral to every sport, there are currently no easy grounds for rejecting it outright. As such, the same is true of tanking. I will explore some possible reasons why tanking is wrongly thought objectionable, as well as some objections to and implications of my argument for competitive sports more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As generative AI systems move beyond Turing’s benchmark for whether a machine exhibits human-like intelligence, what implications does this technological milestone have for organization theory? We engage with this question by considering how the increasing creativity and social competence exhibited by generative AI impacts processes of social construction and cultural evolution that have, up to this point, been the exclusive domain of humans. More specifically, we consider what it means to have intelligent machines capable of category work, which we define here as both the culturally savvy use of categories and purposeful participation in the processes of construction that underpin systems of categories more generally. We go on to explore some of the implications for individuals, organizations and societies of the appearance of this new class of artificial participants in the processes that constitute category systems.

This article provides three major contributions to the literature: we provide granular information on the development of student argumentative writing across secondary school; we replicate the MacArthur et al. model of Natural Language Processing (NLP) writing features that predict quality with a younger group of students; and we are able to examine the differences for students across language status. In our study, we sought to find the average levels of text length, cohesion, connectives, syntactic complexity, and word-level complexity in this sample across Grades 7-12 by sex, by English learner status, and for essays scoring above and below the median holistic score. Mean levels of variables by grade suggest a developmental progression with respect to text length, with the text length increasing with grade level, but the other variables in the model were fairly stable. Sex did not seem to affect the model in meaningful ways beyond the increased fluency of women writers. We saw text length and word level differences between initially designated and redesignated bilingual students compared to their English-only peers. Finally, we see that the model works better with our higher scoring essays and is less effective explaining the lower scoring essays.

Ski mountaineering sprint competitions are short individual races involving 3 uphill sections (U), 3 transitions (T), and a final descent. To date, relatively little is known about this novel Olympic discipline, and here we examined (1) the contribution of the time spent on U, T, and final descent to overall finishing time and (2) the potential relationships with final ranking. During the different rounds of 2 International Ski Mountaineering Federation World Cup sprint competitions, male and female ski mountaineers were video recorded. Correlation and multiple linear regression analyses were used to investigate the impact of U, T, and final descent on the best overall finishing time. Linear-mixed model analysis was applied to explore potential interactions between section times, rounds, and final ranking. Overall, U (r =.90–.97) and T (r =.57–.89) were closely correlated with the best overall finishing time (all P <.05). U explained approximately 80% to 90% of the variation in the best finishing time for both sexes, with U + T explaining approximately 95% to 98% of this variation. In each successive round, the ski mountaineers eliminated were all slower on U than the Top 3 (all P <.05). The fastest skiers increased their performance on U in the later rounds of the competitions, while those eliminated showed a tendency toward a decrease. Our findings reveal that world-class sprint ski mountaineers conduct transitions optimally and perform effectively uphill. Training for such competitions should aim to improve short supramaximal uphill performance (∼1.5–2.5 min), ensuring that this does not decline with multiple efforts. These insights into ski mountaineering sprint performance are of considerable value in connection with training for the 2026 Winter Olympics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]