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The aim of this special issue is to better understand the strategy and change interface, in particular, the (sub)processes and cognitions that enable strategies to be successfully implemented and organizations effectively changed. The ten papers selected for this special issue reflect a range of scholarly traditions and, thus, as our review and integration of the relevant literatures, and our introductions to the ten papers demonstrate, they shed light on the strategy and change interface in starkly different ways. Collectively, the papers give us more insight into the recursive activities, and structural, organizational learning and cognitive mechanisms that are encouraged or deliberately established at organizations to allow their people to successfully implement a strategy and effect change, including achieve greater levels of horizontal alignment. Moreover, they demonstrate the benefits associated with establishing platforms and/or routines designed to overcome decision-makers’ cognitive shortcomings while implementing a strategy or making timely adjustments to it. We conclude our editorial by identifying some yet unanswered questions.

The paper “Linking learning, customer value, and resource investment decisions: Developing dynamic capabilities” by Graham Hubbard, Angelina Zubac, and Lester Johnson suggests that strategic capabilities are developed when market learning processes are directly integrated into a firm's investment processes. Explicitly linking market learning processes and resource investment decisions is essential in building and maintaining competitive advantage. Based on a broad theoretical exploration, this paper presents six derived hypotheses about learning and dynamic capabilities development:H1Successful firms have higher levels of dynamic capabilities than less successful firms.H2Dynamic capabilities are more important and better developed in successful firms in dynamic markets than in mature markets.H3Successful firms learn more about customer value than do less successful firms.H4Managerial perceptions of how customer value can be created are more aligned in successful firms than less successful firms.H5Resource investment decision making is more aligned with market learning processes in successful firms than less successful firms.H6Firms in dynamic markets are more oriented to customer learning than those in mature markets.The paper argues that previous work on analyzing capabilities of organizations has not been directly linked to how firms actually learn, specifically about customers and about ways of creating customer value. Yet it is the process of learning about customers that is critical for creating value for customers and for targeting investments in resources that support the activities and processes necessary to create and deliver that value. The integration of learning about customers into resource investment decision processes is thus argued to be critical to the creation of firm value and to the development of dynamic capability in an organization.

This paper suggests that firm strategic capabilities are developed through accumulated learning and associated investment processes and that it is these learning processes, and the resource investments that follow from decisions about them, rather than the activities or resources of the firm per se, that provide a basis of sustainable competitive advantage. Specifically, we suggest that gathering information about customer behavior, the managerial perceptions that come from learning about customer behavior, and the investment decisions that follow from those perceptions provide the basis for the development, or for the failure to develop, of firm capabilities. We further argue that such learning processes will differ with market environments, and that firm performance will reflect such learning processes actually develop in different market environments.

Drawing on concepts from the resource-based view, the dynamic capabilities school, and competence-base theory, this chapter develops a value chain framework for evaluating and managing resources and capabilities. In common with activity-based value chains, our framework is a method for representing and analyzing the firm, and identifying what may be its optimal configuration. However, as opposed to an activity-based value chain, our approach is specifically designed to help clarify interrelationships between a firm's various assets and capabilities. Thus, it may help researchers and managers alike to analyze to what extent a firm's successes may be attributed to a certain set of resources and capabilities and whether there is scope to further develop them to advance the firm's strategies. Our value chain framework can be used singly or in conjunction with an activity value chain framework, depending on the strategic problem being addressed. However, we suggest that our resource and capabilities value chain will be most useful when determining how a firm's business processes should be funded, what resources and capabilities should make them up, or how these decisions could affect the firm's present organizational structure.

The paper aims to explain why the customer value construct is important to resource‐based view (RBV) scholars and how one might define it to study it.

By a summary of the ideas behind the RBV and previously applied definitions of customer value, the paper explains why Woodruff's multidimensional definition of customer value is suited to studying customer value from a managerial perspective. To this end, it develops a framework and derives three research questions for studying how managers use the firm's resources to create customer value.

It was found that to understand how managers invest in dynamic capabilities to create customer value one must identify how a firm's managers develop a shared understanding of their customers' values and the firm's capacity to deliver on them. This shared understanding will need to reflect customers' multidimensional values and what is most important to the firm.

These phenomena are best studied qualitatively because the focus is on understanding how managers work together and use the resources at their disposal to create customer value. The performance effects of different resource investment decisions can be examined by including high and low performing firms in the study dataset.

The paper describes a framework that can explain how managers map customer value and its different dimensions against the resources at the firm which they believe can deliver an optimal product and service mix to the firm's customers.

This issue of Research in Competence-Based Management focuses on a range of fundamental issues in developing competence theory and undertaking competence-based research.

As entrepreneurial top management teams in multidivisional forms are typically treated in pertinent literature as the default organizational solutions for developing dynamic capabilities, the emerging innovative organizational forms tend to be overlooked, even though they could be a viable means of transforming established enterprises. The present case study examines how Haier's microenterprise and platforms influenced the firm's dynamic capabilities development.

The paper presents a qualitative case study of Haier Group Corporation in China.

The findings indicate that Haier employed a loosely coupled relationship between its headquarters and the microenterprises, developed quasi market-based exchange relationships and established peer-to-peer learning opportunities and coordination among its microenterprises. Data analyses further revealed that Haier has adopted three-step routines to capture market opportunities and enhance operational efficiency. This research extends the sensing-seizing-reconfiguration model typically recommended in the existing literature. It also demonstrates that organizational configuration is an important aspect of dynamic innovation. In summary, the study results showcase microdivisionalization as a new way for developing dynamic capabilities to better adapt to the ever-changing market environments.

In summary, our study showcased microdivisionalization as a new way for firms to change the organization structure and business strategies to better adapt to the ever-changing market environments.