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Business model innovation is a key element for firms' competitiveness. Its development can be supported by the establishment of an actor-oriented scheme to overcome hierarchical structures. The actor-oriented scheme is characterized by intra-organizational networks of relationships that can be established and dissolved between individuals. However, we lack an empirical perspective about its establishment; therefore, the purpose of this research is to advance our understanding of intra-organizational networks for supporting business model innovation.

Individuals create and manage knowledge aimed to innovate the business model through cognitive search and experiential learning mechanisms. Knowledge is spread within organizations by using intra-organizational advice networks, whose patterns reflect the presence of an actor-oriented scheme. This work applies social network analysis to network data from a multi-unit organization specializing in personal care services. We use a Logistic Regression-Quadratic Assignment Procedure to analyze intra-organizational network data on managers' advice exchange related to the learning modes of cognitive search and experiential learning.

Our research empirically identifies the main elements of an actor-oriented scheme in a business model innovation process. We find that managers are able to self-organize, because they are not influenced by their organizational roles, and that commons for sharing resources and protocols, processes and infrastructures enable advice exchange, thus showing the presence of an actor-oriented scheme in business model innovation process.

This research is based on a cross-sectional database. A longitudinal study would provide a better understanding of the network evolution characterizing the innovation process.

The results of our study support organizational decision-making for business model innovation.

This study provides empirical evidence of how an actor-oriented scheme emerges in a business model innovation process.

The Globally Networked Organization (GNO) is an archetype of the geographically distributed, globally integrated, and organizationally networked information-age multinational enterprise. While its organizational form has been widely discussed, methods for providing strategic direction to all or part of a GNO have been largely overlooked. We propose the concept of strategic animation as an innovative leadership approach to strategic management in the GNO and offer a set of guiding principles for installing such a system in organizations. Strategic animation employs sophisticated incentives to motivate voluntary buy-in, utilizing principles of self-organization to replace the command and control of the unitary firm and the uncertainty and transactional costs of real markets. This makes possible virtual integration of the multiple highly separable businesses that comprise the value-added proposition of the firm and encourages the development of emergent processes for both exploitation and renewal of assets. From a scholarly perspective, this model suggests a new framework for studying the strategic direction of GNOs. For practice, it offers an organizational solution to conditions where process control is preferred, but command of resources is limited. Strategic animation, set in motion through multiple managerial actions, facilitates the timely and flexible responses to chaotic environments that are the sine qua non of today’s global businesses.

The megaproject is a vital innovation ecosystem for participants engaging in technological adoption and integration to achieve project goals. The purpose of this paper is to examine how ecosystem captains build and operate a megaproject innovation ecosystem (MIE). To be more specific, we conducted an in-depth case study to identify the roles played by ecosystem captains in establishing and managing a megaproject innovation ecosystem.

Based on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge project, the data we collected range from 2010 to 2019 and include semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and archival documents. We employed an inductive theory building approach to address our research question and analyzed our data using the coding process and Atlas.ti software.

We find that the ecosystem captains themselves are client organizations that have evolved with the ecosystem during four distinct yet inter-related phases. In addition, we find that the captains’ roles of the client organizations include two typical activities: ecosystem establishment and ecosystem collaboration. The ecosystem captains first frame problems, plan innovative activities, set rules, and select participants for the establishment of the ecosystem, and then orchestrate resources, buffer conflicts, incorporate innovative networks, and cultivate an innovation culture to create a collaborative ecosystem.

This study proposes a theoretical framework showing how ecosystem captains engage in MIE to manage innovative activities during different stages. It highlights the importance of captainship roles in client organizations in a megaproject.

The actor‐oriented systems approach, developed by the author and others, is applied to a comparative analysis of inflation and anti‐inflationary policies in Great Britain and Switzerland. Inflation is viewed as a systemic phenomenon, the result of a structure of linked decision settings. The devaluation‐inflation loop characterizing the British situation is then compared with the revaluation‐low inflation loop occurring in the Swiss case, while criticism is directed at the prevailing economic models which do not allow adequate forecasts because they do not incorporate self‐steering human actors.

This chapter falls into two parts. The first offers a theoretical overview of three actor perspectives on issues of development intervention: (a) activity theory, (b) actor-network theory and (c) actor-oriented interface analysis. The second provides an illustrated discussion of the usefulness of actor perspectives for understanding the encounters that take place between ‘development experts’ (local and foreign) and so-called ‘beneficiaries’. The argument draws upon ethnographic data relating to issues of development interface, actor identities, networks and discourse.

This paper makes a conceptual contribution by intersecting two strands of literature (return to work following health issues and industrial relations) to facilitate our understanding of the potential role of social dialogue in supporting return to work (RTW) following the diagnosis of a chronic illness. It conceptualises the levels and channels through which various actors and their interactions may play a role in RTW facilitation within the actor-centred institutional framework.

The paper uses an exploratory design based mainly on desk research but is also informed by roundtable discussions done in six countries as part of a larger project.

The conceptual and analytical framework (CAF) is developed to explain how various actors interact together in ways shaped by the RTW policy framework and the industrial relations systems, resulting in a continuum of RTW facilitation situations.

There is limited research on return-to-work policies following diagnosis of chronic illness from a comprehensive actor-oriented perspective. The existing literature usually focusses on just one stakeholder, overlooking the role of social dialogue actors. By bridging the two streams of literature and incorporating all potential actors and their interactions in a unitary model, the proposed framework provides a valuable tool to further discuss how successful RTW after a diagnosis of chronic illness can be facilitated.

In studying the relationship between Cybernetics and Social Science, theories and research in Sociocyber‐netics are examined. The focus is on researchers who apply Cybernetics to the study of society and its social systems and processes. References are backed by a new 300‐item bibliography of the relevant system literature, compiled for the article.

The nature of sociocybernetics as a foundational science of human action, and some of the basic results in this line of research, and their consequences as to the governability, planning and control of social systems are discussed.

Health-care systems currently face great challenges, including an increasing elderly population. To respond to this problem, a hospital emergency department, three municipalities, and self-employed general practitioners in Denmark decided to collaborate with the aim of reorganizing treatment of elderly acute ill patients. By establishing a small-scale collaborative community and through an action research process, we show, how to jointly explore and develop a new organization design for in-home hospital treatment that enables the health professionals to collaborate in new ways, and at the same time to investigate and improve this cocreation process and codesign of knowledge among multiple different stakeholders.