Starting from the mid-1990s, business models have received increased attention from both academics and practitioners. At a general level, a business model refers to the core logic that a firm or other type of organization employs to achieve its goals. Thus, in general terms, the business model construct attempts to capture the way organizations “do business” or operate to create, deliver, and capture value. Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a unique dimension of innovation, different from and complementary to other dimensions of innovation, such as product/service, process, or organizational innovation. This distinction is important in that different dimensions of innovation have different antecedents, different processes, and, eventually, different outcomes.
Business models have been the subject of extensive research, giving birth to several lines of inquiry. Among them, one line focuses on business models in relation to innovation. This is a vast, somewhat fragmented, and evolving line of inquiry. Despite this limitation, it is possible to recognize that, at the core, business models are relevant to innovation in at least two main ways. First, business models can act as vehicles for the diffusion of innovation by bridging inventions, innovative technologies, and ideas to (often distant) markets and application domains. Therefore, business models speak to the phenomenon of technology transfer from the point of view of academic entrepreneurship and of corporate innovation. Thus, an important role of the business model in relation to innovation is to support the diffusion and adoption of new technologies and scientific discoveries by bridging them with the realization of economic output in markets. This is a considerable endeavor that relies on a complex process entailing the search for, and recombination of, complementary knowledge and capabilities. Second, business models are a subject of innovation that can become a source of innovation in and of themselves. For example, offerings that reinvent value to the customer—as opposed to offerings that incrementally add value to existing offerings—often involve designing novel business models. Relatedly, BMI refers to both a process (i.e., the dynamics involved in innovating business models) as well as the output of that process.
In relation to BMI as a process, the literature has suggested distinguishing between business model reconfiguration (BMR; i.e., the reconfiguration of an existing business model), and business model design (BMD; i.e., the design of a new business model from scratch). This distinction allows us to identify three possible instances, namely general BMR in incumbent firms, BMD in incumbent firms, and BMD in newly formed organizations and startups. These are arguably different phenomena involving different processes as well as different moderators. BMR could be understood as an evolutionary process occurring because of changes in activities and adjustments within an existing configuration. BMD involves facing considerable uncertainty, thus putting a premium on discovery-driven approaches that emphasize experimentation and learning and a considerable degree of knowledge search and recombination.
Article
Innovation and Business Models
Lorenzo Massa and Christopher L. Tucci
Article
Innovation Ecosystems in Management: An Organizing Typology
Llewellyn D. W. Thomas and Erkko Autio
The concept of an “ecosystem” is increasingly used in management and business to describe collectives of heterogeneous, yet complementary organizations who jointly create some kind of system-level output, analogous to an “ecosystem service” delivered by natural ecosystems, which extends beyond the outputs and activities of any individual participant of the ecosystem. Due to its attractiveness and elasticity, the ecosystem concept has been applied to a wide range of phenomena by a variety of scholarly perspectives and under varying monikers such as “innovation ecosystems,” “business ecosystems,” “technology ecosystems,” “platform ecosystems,” “entrepreneurial ecosystems,” and “knowledge ecosystems.” This conceptual and application heterogeneity has contributed to conceptual and terminological confusion, which threatens to undermine the utility of the concept in supporting cumulative insight.
In this article, we seek to reintroduce some order into this conceptual heterogeneity by reviewing how the ecosystem concept has been applied to variably overlapping phenomena and by highlighting key terminological and conceptual inconsistencies and their sources. We find that conceptual inconsistency in the ecosystem terminology relates to two key dimensions: the “unit” of analysis and the type of “ecosystem service”—that is the ecosystem output collectively generated. We then argue that although there is considerable heterogeneity in application, the concept nevertheless offers promise in its potential to support insights that are distinctive relative to other concepts describing collectives of organizations, such as those of “industry,” “supply chain,” “cluster,” and “network.” We also find that despite such proliferation, the concept nevertheless describes collectives that are distinctive in that they uniquely combine participant heterogeneity, coherence of ecosystem outputs, participant interdependence, and nonhierarchical governance.
Based on our identified dimensions of conceptual heterogeneity, we offer a typology of the different ecosystem concepts, thereby helping reorganize this proliferating domain. The typology is based upon three distinct ecosystem outputs—ecosystem-level value offering for a defined audience, the collective generation of business model innovation, and the collective generation of research-based knowledge—and three research emphases that resonate with alternative “units” of analysis—community dynamics, output cogeneration, and interdependence management. Together, these allow us to clearly differentiate between the concepts of innovation ecosystems, business ecosystems, platform ecosystems, technology ecosystems, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and knowledge ecosystems. Based on the three distinct types of ecosystem outputs, our typology identifies three major types of ecosystems: innovation ecosystems, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and knowledge ecosystems. Under the rubric of “innovation ecosystems,” we further distinguish between business ecosystems, modular ecosystems, and platform ecosystems. We conclude by considering innovation ecosystem dynamics, highlighting the important role of digitalization, and reviewing the implications of our model for ecosystem emergence, competition, coevolution, and resilience.
Article
Innovation for Society
Sanjay Sharma
At a macro level, innovation for society refers to innovation of societal institutions. At a micro level, it refers to innovations undertaken by social entrepreneurs as start-ups with a social and/or environmental mission and innovations undertaken by firms in products/services, processes, operations, technologies, and business models to address social and environmental challenges while achieving core economic objectives. The focus here is on firm-level innovations and the drivers for such innovations.
Exogenous drivers include institutional-level influences such as regulations, societal norms, and industry best practices (mimetic forces) and stakeholder-level influences including shareholders, investors, customers, regulators, nongovernmental organizations, media, and others that have power, legitimacy, and urgency of their claims directly or indirectly via other stakeholders. The endogenous drivers include institutional ownership, activist shareholders, boards of directors, ownership, and competitive strategy focused on developing profitable businesses that address societal challenges.
Even when the firm is motivated due to exogenous and endogenous drivers to undertake investments in innovating for society, it needs the capacity to generate and implement such innovations. Innovations for society require motivated managers, managerial capacity, and organizational capabilities that go beyond routine innovations that firms undertake to improve products and processes and enter new markets. This capacity enables firms to reconcile their performance on economic, social, and environmental metrics to address societal challenges while achieving core economic objectives.
Managerial capacity requires firms to overcome cognitive biases and create opportunity frames that convert negative loss bias, where managers perceive lack of control over outcomes, to a positive opportunity bias, where managers perceive the ability to control their decisions and actions. Opportunity framing involves legitimization of innovation for society in the corporate identity, integration of sustainability metrics into performance evaluation, creation of discretionary slack, and empowerment of managers with a relevant and ongoing information flow.
Innovating for society also requires major changes in a firm’s decision-making processes and investments in new organizational capabilities of engaging stakeholders and integration of external learning, processes of continuous improvement of operations, higher order or double-loop organizational learning by integrating external learning with internal knowledge, cross-functional integration, technology portfolios, and strategic proactivity, all leading to processes of continuous innovation.
Knowledge about the role of firms in addressing societal challenges has grown over the past three decades as scholars in multiple disciplines have explained the motivations of firms to undertake innovations for society, processes to build organizational capabilities to adopt and implement sustainability strategies, and linkages of such strategies to financial performance. Nevertheless, such innovations and strategies are far from a universal norm.
Article
Innovation Indicators
Fred Gault and Luc Soete
Innovation indicators support research on innovation and the development of innovation policy. Once a policy has been implemented, innovation indicators can be used to monitor and evaluate the result, leading to policy learning. Producing innovation indicators requires an understanding of what innovation is. There are many definitions in the literature, but innovation indicators are based on statistical measurement guided by international standard definitions of innovation and of innovation activities.
Policymakers are not just interested in the occurrence of innovation but in the outcome. Does it result in more jobs and economic growth? Is it expected to reduce carbon emissions, to advance renewable energy production and energy storage? How does innovation support the Sustainable Development Goals? From the innovation indicator perspective, innovation can be identified in surveys, but that only shows that there is, or there is not, innovation. To meet specific policy needs, a restriction can be imposed on the measurement of innovation. The population of innovators can be divided into those meeting the restriction, such as environmental improvements, and those that do not. In the case of innovation indicators that show a change over time, such as “inclusive innovation,” there may have to be a baseline measurement followed by a later measurement to see if inclusiveness is present, or growing, or not. This may involve social as well as institutional surveys. Once the innovation indicators are produced, they can be made available to potential users through databases, indexes, and scoreboards. Not all of these are based on the statistical measurement of innovation. Some use proxies, such as the allocation of financial and human resources to research and development, or the use of patents and academic publications. The importance of the databases, indexes, and scoreboards is that the findings may be used for the ranking of “innovation” in participating countries, influencing their behavior. While innovation indicators have always been influential, they have the potential to become more so. For decades, innovation indicators have focused on innovation in the business sector, while there have been experiments on measuring innovation in the public (general government sector and public institutions) and the household sectors. Historically, there has been no standard definition of innovation applicable in all sectors of the economy (business, public, household, and non-profit organizations serving households sectors). This changed with the Oslo Manual in 2018, which published a general definition of innovation applicable in all economic sectors. Applying a general definition of innovation has implications for innovation indicators and for the decisions that they influence. If the general definition is applied to the business sector, it includes product innovations that are made available to potential users rather than being introduced on the market. The product innovation can be made available at zero price, which has influence on innovation indicators that are used to describe the digital transformation of the economy. The general definition of innovation, the digital transformation of the economy, and the growing importance of zero price products influence innovation indicators.
Article
An Institutional Perspective on Corporate Governance
Ilir Haxhi
Concerned with the structure of rights and responsibilities among corporate actors, corporate governance focuses primarily on the monitoring of executive boards, the protection of minority shareholders, corporate reporting and disclosure, and the improvement of employee participation in the corporate decision-making process. An institutional theory–driven approach helps position corporate governance as a social construct that reflects formal institutional rules as well as the informal practices that prevail when formal rules are absent, weak, or ambiguously defined. The institutional context thus constitutes a framework for corporate governance that captures not only the internal structures of corporations but also the institutional arrangements and national business systems in which these corporations are embedded. The actor-centered institutional perspective provides a comprehensive, in-depth, and nuanced picture not only of current governance structures but also of the characteristics and practices that prevail within and across different corporate governance models. Overall, adopting an institutional perspective underscores the importance of recognizing that corporate governance at the national level remains a key unit of analysis for explaining its diversity because it highlights the role of national institutions and their powerful institutional actors.
Article
Institutional Theory in Organization Studies
Robert J. David, Pamela S. Tolbert, and Johnny Boghossian
Institutional theory is a prominent perspective in contemporary organizational research. It encompasses a large, diverse body of theoretical and empirical work connected by a common emphasis on cultural understandings and shared expectations. Institutional theory is often used to explain the adoption and spread of formal organizational structures, including written policies, standard practices, and new forms of organization. Tracing its roots to the writings of Max Weber on legitimacy and authority, the perspective originated in the 1950s and 1960s with the work of Talcott Parsons, Philip Selznick, and Alvin Gouldner on organization–environment relations. It subsequently underwent a “cognitive turn” in the 1970s, with an emphasis on taken-for-granted habits and assumptions, and became commonly known as “neo-institutionalism” in organizational studies. Recently, work based on the perspective has shifted from a focus on processes involved in producing isomorphism to a focus on institutional change, exemplified by studies of the emergence of new laws and regulations, products, services, and occupations. The expansion of the theoretical framework has contributed to its long-term vitality, though a number of challenges to its development remain, including resolving inconsistencies in the different models of decision-making and action (homo economicus vs. homo sociologicus) that underpin institutional analysis and improving our understanding of the intersection of socio-cultural forces and entrepreneurial agency.
Article
International Research and Development and Knowledge Sourcing by Multinational Corporations
Kazuhiro Asakawa and Jaeyong Song
Internationalization of R&D facilitates knowledge sourcing of multinational corporations (MNCs) on a global scale. As MNCs internationalize R&D, they not only engage in domestic-driven R&D but are actively involved in overseas-driven R&D. And accordingly, the role of overseas R&D laboratories often evolves, from applying the HQ-generated innovation to local market, to innovating locally and contributing to the parent company. Within an MNC boundary, knowledge flows have become multidirectional: on top of the most typical knowledge flows from headquarters (HQ) to a subsidiary, reverse knowledge flows from a subsidiary to HQ as well as horizontal knowledge flows among overseas subsidiaries have become more salient. In addition to knowledge flows within a firm, increasing attention has been paid to external knowledge sourcing, i.e., knowledge sourcing from foreign locations outside the firm. MNCs commonly engage in local knowledge sourcing, i.e., sourcing knowledge from an overseas local environment, to tap into local hotbeds of innovation. But MNCs are also increasingly conducting global knowledge sourcing, i.e., sourcing knowledge from around the world, to practise global open innovation. Theoretically, knowledge sourcing in international R&D has often been examined from the capability and embeddedness perspectives. The effect of capability has been discussed in connection with motivation, autonomy, and mandates of subsidiaries. The effect of embeddedness has been discussed in connection with complementarity between external and internal embeddedness. As future research agenda, the following are suggested. First, cross-fertilization among the research fields of international R&D, global innovation, and open innovation deserves further attention. Second, greater research focus can be placed on managerial processes of global knowledge sourcing. Third, further research can be advanced on global knowledge sourcing at the team level. Fourth, the association between corporate governance and global knowledge sourcing can be investigated further. Fifth, much more attention needs to be paid to microfoundations of global knowledge sourcing. And lastly, further evolving patterns of global knowledge sourcing by advanced country multinationals (AMNCs) and emerging economies multinationals (EMNCs) continue to be relevant.
Article
The Concept, Treatment, and Future of Language in Contemporary Business and Management
Terry Mughan
In the literature of business and management, language, unlike the contiguous concepts of culture and communication, did not have a recognized place until the early part of the 21st century. Isolated publications about language might have appeared occasionally in journals in subdisciplines such as marketing, communication, and international business (IB), but there was no real visible research community or concentration of output in the field. Special issues appearing in International Studies of Management and Organization, 2005 and the Journal of World Business, 2011 were significant steps in demonstrating the emergence of active researchers at this time. In 2014, the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), the top-ranked IB journal and the only such journal used by the Financial Times for its global journal rankings, published its first special issue on the subject. This landmark issue attracted 78 submissions, of which 14 were published in JIBS over two issues, and this represented a breakthrough in terms of both quality and quantity that captured the attention of all in the IB field. Many explanations have been proffered for the delay in breaching this barrier, from tacit resistance on the part of monolingual executives and institutions to methodological bias in favor of numerical data to the daunting definitional complexity of the term “language” itself and its relation to nation-level phenomena.
Article
Leader–Member Exchange: A Commentary on Long-Term Staying Power and Future Research Directions
Terri A. Scandura and Kim Gower
In 1975, the phrase “vertical dyad linkage” (VDL) was introduced to begin examining the quality of the roles between the leaders and direct reports, and it was soon discovered that the linkages ranged between high quality and low quality. That linkage progressed into “leader–member exchange” (LMX) in 1982. In essence, research reached a point where it found a continuum of the quality of the relationship between the two members. High-quality relationships put the employees into the leader’s “ingroup,” while low-quality relationships left employees on the outside looking in. It followed that those in the ingroup would have some say in the decision-making, would have easier access to the leader, and would garner more respect and “liking.”
Researchers have used the LMX-7 to examine how the quality of superior/subordinate relationships affects individual, interpersonal, and organization factors like job satisfaction, communication motives, and organizational identification (as did the original LMX scale). Although the LMX-7 remains one of the most prominent psychometric measures of LMX, researchers still debate whether the construct should be considered unidimensional or multidimensional.
While the intricacies of LMX-7 versus LMX have been argued, and with teams becoming more of an organizational resource, team–member exchange (TMX) was found to be a supported extension of LMX. While at this point TMX is lacking in the volume and pace of research, due to the difficulties of measurement among a group of people who might have a variety of leaders during the process, the existing research has produced some results that are extremely relevant, now and in the future. Examples of what has been found when the team exchange relationship is high include reduced stress, increased psychological empowerment, increased creativity, increased team performance, increased individual performance, increased organizational citizenship behaviors, increased organizational commitment, and increased job satisfaction, just to name a few.
In sum, the investigation into LMX provides a history of the field of LMX and its many iterations and the role it plays in leadership studies. This research includes LMX antecedents, consequences, moderators, mediators, and outcomes, as any field in which over 4,500 papers have been published needs an effective way to highlight the progress and pathways.
Article
The Liability of Foreignness
Jesper Edman
The liability of foreignness—or LOF—is the additional cost that multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiaries face relative to local competitors in foreign markets. The LOF arises in the form of unfamiliarity costs, relational costs, and discrimination costs in host country markets. Because these costs are unique to foreign firms, the LOF constitutes a difference in both kind and degree that distinguishes the MNE from other organizations. LOF has been addressed from a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including internalization theory, institutional theory, the resource-based view, network theory, cross cultural management, and organizational identity. The antecedents of LOF can be found in inter-country distance and dissimilarity, country-specific institutional arrangements, as well as firm-level experiences. Scholars have traced the implications of LOF to many of the critical attributes of the MNE, including internationalization patterns and country selection, entry mode choice, subsidiary performance and survival, localization strategies, and the development of firm-specific advantages. As such, the LOF constitutes one of the foundational assumptions of the international business domain..
Several research gaps and controversies remain in the LOF literature. LOF is often used as a catch-all term for the MNE’s disadvantages and costs in general, rather than the extraordinary costs faced by foreign-owned subsidiaries. Although numerous works invoke LOFs in their overall framing and theoretical argumentation, few studies explain the mechanisms behind the extraordinary costs facing subsidiaries. Empirical measurement of LOFs is rare, with many works using inter-country distance and institutional voids as proxies for LOF. Conceptually, LOF is often confounded with proximate but nonetheless distinct constructs, including the liability of newness, the liability of origin, and the liability of emergingness. A critical issue for extant and future work is to clarify the scope, boundary conditions, and operationalizations of LOF.
Article
Machine Learning in Management
Elizabeth Degefe, Krishna Savani, and Abhishek Sheetal
Although modern machine learning techniques were developed decades ago, management researchers have started using them only in the 2010s. Researchers in management have used machine learning techniques to analyze numeric data, most commonly relying on neural networks and decision trees; they have also used AI techniques to analyze text data to classify topics or model topics.
Article
Managing Surface-Level Diversity as a Business Imperative
Jacqueline A. Gilbert
Organizational diversity is regarded positively, but haphazardly embraced. The absence of a cultural mandate at work (one which includes an emphasis on managing differences) can result in minority assimilation, and in either unintended bullying or in intentional abuse. Declining stock price, loss of goodwill, inability to recruit qualified candidates, and internal havoc marked by perpetuation of firm dysfunction may occur. These outcomes are especially alarming in the face of transformative population growth, in which minorities are predicted to become the demographic majority within the United States.
Inattention to employee misconduct prevents firms from experiencing enhanced productivity. Encouraging civil behavior is thus essential to engendering camaraderie in a diverse workforce, in which incivilities, or micro-inequities, are disproportionately targeted at minority groups. Management modeling of appropriate behavior (and swift action toward perpetrators for non-compliance) are necessary to achieve human capital integration.
Article
Mergers and Acquisitions
Paulina Junni and Satu Teerikangas
There are many types of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), be they a minority acquisition to explore a potential high growth emerging market, a takeover of a financially distressed firm with the aim of turning it around, or a private equity firm seeking short- to medium-term returns. The terms “merger” and “acquisition” are often used interchangeably, even though they have distinct denotations: In an acquisition, the acquirer purchases the majority of the shares (over 50%) of another company (the “target”) or parts of it (e.g., a business unit or a division). In a merger, a new company is formed in which the merging parties share broadly equal ownership. The term “merger” is often used strategically by acquirers to alleviate fears and send out a message of friendly combination to employees. In terms of transaction numbers, the majority of M&A transactions are acquisitions, whereas mega-merger deals gain media attention owing to transaction size.
While M&A motives, acquirer types, and dynamics differ, most M&A share the aim of generating value from the transaction in some form. Yet a prevalent dilemma in the M&A practice and literature is that M&A often fail to deliver the envisioned benefits. Reasons for negative acquirer performance stem from overestimating potential synergies and paying high premiums for targets pre-deal. Another problem lies in securing post-deal value creation. Post-deal challenges relate to optimal integration speed, the degree of integration, change, or integration management, communication, resource and knowledge sharing, employee motivation and turnover, and cultural integration. Researchers are calling for more research on how pre-deal processes such as target evaluation and negotiations influence M&A performance.
A closer look at this literature, though, highlights several controversies. First, the literature often lacks precision when it comes to defining M&A. We call for future research to be explicit concerning the type of merger or acquisition transaction, and the organizational contexts of the acquiring and target firms. Second, we are still lacking robust and unified frameworks that explain M&A occurrence and performance. One of the reasons for this is that the literature on M&A has developed in different disciplines, focusing on either pre- or post-deal aspects. This has resulted in a “silo” effect with a limited understanding about the combined effects of financial, strategic, organizational, and cultural factors in the pre- and post-deal phases on M&A performance. Third, M&A studies have failed to critically scrutinize the M&A phenomenon, including aspects such as power, politics, and managerial drivers. Fourth, scholars have tended to focus on single, isolated M&A. We call for future research on M&A programs and M&A as part of broader corporate strategies. Finally, the study of M&A has suffered from a managerial bias, with insufficient attention paid to the rank and file, such as engineers, or marketing or administrative employees. We therefore call for future research that takes a broader view on actors involved in M&A, placing a greater emphasis on individuals’ roles and practices.
Article
The New Public Management and Public Management Studies
Ewan Ferlie
The New Public Management (NPM) is a major and sustained development in the management of public services that is evident in some major countries. Its rise is often linked to broader changes in the underlying political economy, apparent since the 1980s, associated with the rise of the New Right as both a political and an intellectual movement. The NPM reform narrative includes the growth of markets and quasi-markets within public services, empowerment of management, and active performance measurement and management. NPM draws its intellectual inspiration from public choice theory and agency theory.
NPM’s impact varies internationally, and not all countries have converged on the NPM model. The United Kingdom is often taken as an extreme case, but New Zealand and Sweden have also been highlighted as “high-impact” NPM states, while the United States has been assessed as a “medium impact” state. There has been a lively debate over whether NPM reforms have had beneficial effects or not. NPM’s claimed advantages include greater value for money and restoring governability to an overextended public sector. Its claimed disadvantages include an excessive concern for efficiency (rather than democratic accountability) and an entrenchment of agency-specific “silo thinking.”
Much academic writing on the NPM has been political science based. However, different traditions of management scholarship have also usefully contributed in four distinct areas: (a) assessing and explaining performance levels in public agencies, (b) exploring their strategic management, (c) managing public services professionals, and (d) developing a more critical perspective on the resistance by staff to NPM reforms.
While NPM scholarship is now a mature field, further work is needed in three areas to assess: (a) whether public agencies have moved to a post-NPM paradigm or whether NPM principles are still embedded even if dysfunctionally so, (b) the pattern of the international diffusion of NPM reforms and the characterization of the management knowledge system involved, and (c) NPM’s effects on professional staff working in public agencies and whether such staff incorporate, adapt, or resist NPM reforms.
Article
Open Innovation
Jennifer Kuan
Open Innovation, published in 2003, was a ground-breaking work by Henry Chesbrough that placed technology and innovation at the center of attention for managers of large firms. The term open innovation refers to the ways in which firms can generate and commercialize innovation by engaging outside entities. The ideas have attracted the notice of scholars, spawning annual world conferences and a large literature in technology and innovation management (including numerous journal special issues) that documents diverse examples of innovations and the often novel business models needed to make the most of those innovations. The role of business models in open innovation is the focus of Open Business Models, Chesbrough’s 2006 follow-up to Open Innovation. Managers have likewise flocked to Chesbrough’s approach, as the hundreds of thousands of hits from an online search using the term open innovation can attest. Surveys show that the majority of large firms were engaging in open innovation practices in 2017, compared to only 20% in 2003 when Open Innovation was published.
Article
Optimal Distinctiveness
Karl Taeuscher
Optimal distinctiveness research is a rapidly growing area of scholarship that integrates key theoretical insights from strategic management and institutional theory. Strategic management research highlights differentiation as a key driver of competitive advantage and superior performance, while institutional theory emphasizes conformity as a central driver of organizational legitimacy and resource acquisition. Optimal distinctiveness research synthesizes these two perspectives and explores the tension that arises from conflicting pressures for differentiation (distinctiveness) and conformity (similarity). This emerging body of research departs from traditional positioning research in strategic management—which primarily explored corporations’ strategic positions within mature industries—by attending to a variety of competitive settings (e.g., newly emerging market categories, online marketplaces), forms of differentiation (e.g., based on product features, narratives, or category affiliations), levels of analysis (e.g., business level, product level), and performance outcomes (e.g., customer demand, resource acquisition, audience evaluations). By advancing understanding about a broad array of phenomena, optimal distinctiveness research has profound implications for strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organization studies.
A central concern in this rapidly growing body of research is to understand how positions on the continuum between similarity and distinctiveness affect performance outcomes. Early optimal distinctiveness research showed that organizations often benefit from positioning themselves near the middle of this continuum, where the relationship between their distinctiveness and performance resembles an inverted U-shape. Over time, however, scholars spotlighted various contingencies that shape the distinctiveness–performance relationship, pointing to important boundary conditions under which organizations derive the most desirable (i.e., optimal) outcomes through low or high levels of distinctiveness. Extant research also shows that organizations can strategically alleviate the tension between differentiation and conformity by, for instance, buffering legitimacy in alternative ways or by differentiating on dimensions that do not impose any related conformity pressures. Scholarship further explores the sources of heterogeneity in organizations’ distinctiveness, including the conditions and strategic considerations that lead organizations to pursue distinctiveness. Toward this aim, extant research particularly emphasizes organizations’ strategic efforts to attain optimal distinctiveness through storytelling and other symbolic forms of differentiation and conformity. Collectively, these explorations help to understand why, when, and how organizations pursue distinctiveness and how distinctiveness shapes varied performance outcomes.
Article
Organizational Neuroscience
Sebastiano Massaro and Dorotea Baljević
Organizational neuroscience—a novel scholarly domain using neuroscience to inform management and organizational research, and vice versa—is flourishing. Still missing, however, is a comprehensive coverage of organizational neuroscience as a self-standing scientific field. A foundational account of the potential that neuroscience holds to advance management and organizational research is currently a gap. The gap can be addressed with a review of the main methods, systematizing the existing scholarly literature in the field including entrepreneurship, strategic management, and organizational behavior, among others.
Article
Platformizing Organizations: A Synthesis of the Literature
Pankaj Setia, Franck Soh, and Kailing Deng
Organizations are widely building digital platforms to transform operations. Digital platforms represent a new way of organizing, as they leverage technology to interconnect providers and consumers. Using digital technologies, organizations are platformizing operations, as they open their rigid and closed boundaries by interconnecting providers and consumers through advanced application programming interfaces (APIs). Early research examined platformized development of technology products, with software development companies—such as Mozilla Foundation—leading the way. However, contemporary organizations are platformizing nontechnology offerings (e.g., ride-sharing or food delivery). With growing interest in platforms, the basic tenets underlying platformization are still not clear. This article synthesizes previous literature examining platforms, with the aim of examining what platformization is and how and why organizations platformize.
Article
Privatization of State-Owned Enterprises
David Parker
Theoretical developments in economics, alongside evidence that state-owned enterprises were often inefficient and unresponsive to consumers, led to a substantial program of privatizations from the 1980s. Privatization can take a number of forms, from the outright sale of state-owned assets to private investors to forms of public-private partnership, such as contracting out and franchising of public services. Privatization was promoted in both developed and developing countries, and large-scale privatizations occurred in Europe, Latin America, China, and the former communist economies of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular. Privatization revenues rose substantially from the late 1980s internationally. Taking the years 1988 to 2016, revenues from sales are estimated to have been around $3,634bn. In terms of main sectors of the economy affected, privatizations have particularly occurred in telecommunications, transport and logistics (mainly railways, airlines, and airports), other utility businesses (especially energy companies), and finance. Numerous empirical studies suggest that the performance of the privatized businesses and services has been mixed. While privatization has led to some impressive economic gains, in a number of countries, wider governance issues relating to political and legal systems have led to disappointing outcomes. Privatization has not always led to the removal of state interference in the management of businesses and services. Corruption and cronyism have blighted a number of privatizations. State sell-offs have led to income and wealth redistribution with gainers and losers from the process. Some privatizations have led to spectacular capital gains for investors. The impact of privatization on employment and working conditions remains unclear.
There are a number of issues that deserve further investigation, namely the consequences of privatization for technological change and innovation, competition policy, and income and wealth distribution. A further subject for investigation is how the effective and efficient management of state-owned enterprises can be best achieved. The boundary between the private and public sectors remains fluid, with a number of enterprises returning to state ownership as political and economic conditions change.
Article
Product and Innovation Portfolio Management
Vinícius Chagas Brasil and J.P. Eggers
In competitive strategy, firms manage two primary (non-financial) portfolios—the product portfolio and the innovation portfolio. Portfolio management involves resource allocation to balance the important tradeoff of risk reduction and upside maximization, with important decisions around the evaluation, prioritization and selection of products and innovation projects. These two portfolios are interdependent in ways that create reinforcing dynamics—the innovation portfolio is the array of potential future products, while the product portfolio both informs innovation strategy and provides inputs to future innovation efforts. Additionally, portfolio management processes operate at two levels, which is reflected in the literature's structure. The first is a micro lens which focuses on management frameworks to boost portfolio performance and success through project-level selection tools. This research has its roots in financial portfolio management, relates closely to research on new product development and marketing product management, and explores the effects of portfolio management decisions on other organizational functions (e.g., operations). The second lens is a macro lens on portfolio management research, which considers the portfolio as a whole and integrates key organizational and competitive concepts such as entry timing, portfolio management resource allocation regimes (e.g., real options reasoning), organizational experience, and the culling of products and projects. This literature aims to set portfolio management as higher level organizational decision-making capability that embodies the growth strategy of the organization. The organizational ability to manage both the product and innovation portfolios connects portfolio management to key strategic organizational capabilities, including ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities, and operationalizes strategic flexibility. We therefore view portfolio management as a source of competitive advantage that supports organizational renewal.
