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The role and contributions of blue and gray collar employees in strategy making in practice are generally ignored, and left out of scientific inquiry. However, the authors argue that they are “hidden actors” in the strategy making process, and “silent heroes” of the strategy. Their participative role is generally seen limited to operational phases of strategy. Nevertheless, recent literatures have fruitful implications on blue and gray collars workers’ contributions in formulation phase. Upper echelon (Hambrick, 1987; Hambrick & Mason, 1984) and strategy as practice (SAP) literatures (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Whittington, 2006) are suggested to be closely scrutinized since the former has incorporated the middle- and low-level teams of management in the explanation (Carpenter, Geletkancz, & Sanders, 2004), and the latter takes “practice” as a prominent research perspective, and thus enable us to approach strategy phenomena from a wider context of practitioners, practices, and praxis (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2002). Overall, this chapter suggests that future studies could question the hidden assumptions behind strategy approaches to trace the assumed image and role of blue and gray collars in strategy making, and go further to integrate their deserved role in strategy process, content, context, and cognition.

This chapter develops a conceptual understanding on open strategy through a systematic literature review. With a sample of 148 publications, the authors examine the key debates in the field of open strategy and identify a number of limitations such as an excessive definitional focus and a lack of distinct empirical analysis of research in the field. The author’s analysis clarifies open strategy by classifying its main characteristics and harnessing the different aspects together in a comprehensive definition. In doing so, the authors examine how the underpinnings of open strategy can be conceptualized in order to provide a research agenda for how future empirical investigations into open strategy could progress our understanding of an evolving practice.

Researchers have shown increased interest in open innovation – that is, the inflow and outflow of ideas, or the collaborative efforts of innovating – while previous research on acquisitions of innovative firms has foremost focused on the inflow only. Open innovation, however, introduces several new challenges related to acquisitions of such firms, not the least related to intellectual property rights and innovative skills that may be distributed among several parties. This paper explores what issues the literature on open innovation and acquisitions deals with related to acquisitions in open innovation environments.

A systematic literature review is conducted to achieve the purpose of the paper. Two main questions are addressed. First, how can acquisitions be understood in relation to open innovation? Second, what does the open innovation literature say on matters of distributed innovations in relation to acquisitions?

The paper concludes that there is a quite limited amount of research concerning itself with open innovation and acquisitions combined. Furthermore, acquisitions are for the most part seen as a means to reach innovation in transaction-based transfers between parties.

With acquisitions of innovative firms, in general, being seen as an important means to reach new ideas, while open innovation is on the rise, the juxtaposing of these phenomena would be of high practical and theoretical relevance to study further.

Organizations increasingly view their internal staff as a source of innovation and change and tend to involve an increasing number of organizational members in strategy work. This inclusion is a form of decentralized strategy and usually takes place in meetings. This chapter explores how meetings can become a planned emergence strategy for unlocking endogenous innovation potential. Data have been gathered from a still ongoing field project in which employees of six public offices such as the police or fire brigade participate. The public offices’ administration is characterized by a traditional division of responsibility, meaning that strategy has so far been the business of only few people at the top of the organization. For the first time in this organization, managers and other specialists at various organizational levels have been invited to partake in the new bottom-up strategy format Think Tank. The goals of the Think Tank are to identify the needs of the employees, to find and show potential, create a subculture and encourage innovation. The Think Tank meetings are attended by highly motivated employees who want to develop further organizational goals. The investigation illustrates that exchange on an equal basis, voluntary participation and mixed teams form the foundation for planned emergence strategy meetings. The interactions within the groups are characterized by participants having a positive attitude and avoiding negatively connoted behavior. In the strategy meetings, the various organizational members are enabled to join forces and contribute to strategic renewal. Strategic renewal is essential in a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex world. This chapter illustrates how meetings can facilitate strategic renewal through planned emergence.

This research attempts to examine the co-creation process involving Chiayi City International Band Festival (CIBF). It deploys a questionnaire survey which assesses the level of activity involvement, preference to local products, and place attachment. The questionnaire is pretested, which utilizes college students as the samples to screen the clarity of wordings covered in the questionnaire and the reliability of the study scales. Subsequently, 342 festivity attendees, who are not local residents, are invited to participate in the survey. Structural equational modeling is used to test the study hypotheses. The results show a mediating effect of co-creation between activity involvement and place attachment.

This chapter aims to develop a conceptual framework to probe evidence of open strategy (OS) phenomenon as being practiced by adaptive small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing industries. Specifically, this study focuses on the act and doing of strategy communications, based on a set of readying and entrepreneurial practices, involving a plurality of internal and external actors (i.e., owner manager/entrepreneur, middle managers, shop floor employees, suppliers, etc.). The empirical study is based on a deep collaboration with a Scottish SME that supplies outsourced bottling and packaging services to the Scotch Whisky industry through a seven-year longitudinal qualitative inquiry. This study finds that the OS phenomenon is classified into transparent, participatory, and inclusive practices. These nested OS practices are enacted progressively as particular events are unfolding during organizational lifecycle and renewal processes. Sustaining temporal openness in strategy is underpinned by important boundary readying practices in SMEs.

For the last four decades, the alignment of strategy and digital technology has persisted as one of the most critical and bothersome issues for senior government executives. Against this backdrop and drawing on the fruits of an extended program of collaborative research between 1995 and 2020, this chapter draws attention to how government organizations foster effective alignment and how this is achieved through four distinct cycles of alignment work. Considering that this work is heavily people- and organization-centric, the chapter calls for greater involvement of organization development and change scholars and practitioners in this important area of organizational life and work.

Strategic management is traditionally seen as an exclusive managerial task rather than inclusive where accountability is reserved for top managers. However, contemporary strategy management practices increasingly pay attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by engaging with broader internal and external stakeholders via more open business models such as ecosystems. Hence, central to our examination is the concept of openness disposition, which in the context of strategic management refers to the tendency of individuals, collectives, and managers to make strategy transparent, participatory, and/or inclusive, or look for closure. While openness in strategy is regarded as a positive means of contemporary management, fostering diversity, creativity, innovation, and empowerment, there are some researched downsides too. The purpose of this chapter is to address the openness puzzle in strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of bottom-up strategy initiatives, and investigate the associated dilemmas, if any in the context of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We contribute to addressing the performative effects of the dynamic expansion and contraction in openness within the SME strategy process while using the concept of openness dilemmas, tensions, and disposition. Using the Management Control Theory, this chapter will combine theory with SME practitioners’ experiences of bottom-up strategy initiatives to increase EDI in their organisations. Based on findings that emerged from a four-year longitudinal multiple case study research with 10 European SMEs, we found that bottom-up strategy exercises are more interactive. They consider a greater number of views, increase legitimacy, and EDI at the workplace, and yield more process benefits, but are time-consuming and difficult to organise that require special attention to the capability, reciprocity, and credibility dimensions.