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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how focal firms in supply networks manage weak and strong ties for exploration and exploitation innovation in mature industries. In doing so, the paper extends the understanding of how focal firms manage open innovation (OI).

The empirical base is a multiple case study conducted on three companies operating in mature industries in Europe.

Findings of this study reveal, analyze and explain a diverse set of OI practices in the supply networks of mature industries in which the focal firms integrate strong and weak supply ties to enhance innovation outcomes. This study provides a fine-grained view of the benefits of the additive and interactive effects of strong and weak ties in OI. More specifically, the analysis reveals an enhancing role of strong supply ties in exploration, which previously was associated solely with weak ties. Moreover, this study sheds light on the dominant and orchestrating roles of focal firms.

The findings provide insights to enhance OI practices beyond the limited role of the weak ties of the supply network and highlight the essential role of the strong supply ties in mature industries.

While previous studies have associated exploration with weak ties, findings of this study reveal that exploration-oriented activities in mature industries also extend to strong ties. In the strong ties of mature industries, this study finds there is not only the exploitation of existing knowledge but also the reconfiguration and innovation of products.

This study aims to analyze what promotes the adoption of open innovation (OI) in the foodservice sector. Specifically, it seeks to shed light on the bottom-up mechanisms (the microfoundations) that allow a foodservice firm to organize for OI.

The research design is an in-depth exploratory case study with 18 semi-structured interviews. The findings have been triangulated with documentation available on the corporate website, the project reports and direct observation. Data were analyzed using an inductive approach, coding individual interview transcripts.

This study identifies three categories of capabilities that have to be spread to different organizational levels: the capability to sense organizational triggers to change, to develop external collaborations and knowledge exchanges with different parties and the management's ability to be aware of organizational imperatives and the need to proceed with process adjustment. Results highlight the importance of sensing organizational triggers, allowing a quick switch between new strategies in implementing an OI approach. It was crucial for the company to co-develop new products and services with a large audience of stakeholders, not only limited to customers. The case remarks on the required ability of the organization and management team to activate mechanisms aimed at reconfiguring the competencies within each business unit, keeping an alignment with the needs of the stakeholders.

The study emphasizes the multi-level characteristics of OI and provides a framework for microfoundations on how to organize for OI. Results contribute to the recent debate on the skills and routines an organization should design and promote within their employees.

By the view of attention-building activities as “tools of power,” the authors investigate the impact of subsidiary involvement in attention-building activities on the strategic influence of subsidiaries within multinational corporations (MNCs).

The study is based on survey data from 110 international subsidiaries located in Sweden. Five hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling with linear structural relations.

The study shows that organizational commitment and external scouting activities, as two attention-building activities, do not directly affect the ability of subsidiaries to gain a strategic influence in MNCs. Rather, the results provide support for the importance of headquarters’ positive attention as a mediator between such activities and subsidiary strategic influence. This implies that subsidiaries do not receive any strategic influence through these activities unless they receive explicit positive attention from the corporate headquarters.

This study contributes to the micro-political view of the MNC by offering insights into the impact of attention-building activities of subsidiaries as a potential source of strategic influence for MNC subsidiaries.

This study aims to determine how sustainable development (SD) demands (according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) SD themes from 2005) are connected to the contents of education, research, development and innovation (RDI) in higher education institutions (HEI). Education and the RDI nexus may affect HEI’s capability to handle SD-related wicked problems and enhance their societal impact.

This paper examined SD-oriented curricula contents of two universities (Brazil and Finland) and counted the number of SD-related research outcomes. In addition, conceptual modelling was used to analyse the mechanisms that may be directing HEIs’ SD work in local innovation.

The data showed a convergence deviation in the RDI of SD-related subjects between the two HEIs. There was no correlation between SD-oriented education and RDI-work in either HEI. Education and RDI processes have different UNECE SD themes at the focal point, and the education-research nexus is lacking. This difference indicates that new SD-related knowledge produced through RDI was not effectively used in education. Modelling revealed that the convergence in RDI outcomes arose from the same kind of local business, industry and societal challenges, implementing effective stakeholder pressures into HEIs. The results may indicate that stakeholder SD needs were not directly transferred into the competence qualification of the curriculum.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first quantitative study to reveal the independence of universities’ SD-related RDI subjects on educational curricula.

The purpose of this paper is to use Twitter data to mine personality traits of basketball players to predict their performance in the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Automated personality mining and robotic process automation were used to gather data (player statistics and big five personality traits) of n = 185 professional basketball players. Correlation analysis and multiple linear regressions were computed to predict the performance of their NBA careers based on previous college performance and personality traits.

Automated personality mining of Tweets can be used to gather additional information about basketball players. Extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness correlate with basketball performance and can be used, in combination with previous game statistics, to predict future performance.

The study presents a novel approach to use automated personality mining of Twitter data as a predictor for future basketball performance. The contribution advances the understanding of the importance of personality for sports performance and the use of cognitive systems (automated personality mining) and the social media data for predictions. Scouts can use our findings to enhance their recruiting criteria in a multi-million dollar business, such as the NBA.

This paper aims to optimize and evaluating the performance of the crowd networks through analyzing their information sharing patterns. That is, in a crowd network, the qualities of accomplishing tasks are highly dependent on the effective information sharing among intelligent subjects within the networks. Hence, proposing an adaptive information-sharing approach can help improve the performance of crowd networks on accomplishing tasks that are assigned to them.

This paper first introduces the factors that affect effectiveness of information-sharing pattern: the network topology, the resources owned by intelligent subjects and the degree of information demand. By analyzing the correlation between these factors and the performance of crowd networks, an Adaptive Information Sharing Approach for Crowd Networks (AISCN approach) is proposed. By referring to information needed for accomplishing the historical tasks that are assigned to a crowd network, the AISCN approach can explore the optimized information-sharing pattern based on the predefined composite objective function. The authors implement their approach on two crowd networks including bee colony and supply chain, to prove the effectiveness of the approach.

The shared information among intelligent subjects affects the efficiency of task completion in the crowd network. The factors that can be used to describe the effectiveness of information-sharing patterns include the network topology, the resources owned by intelligent subjects and the degree of information demand. The AISCN approach used heuristic algorithm to solve a composite objective function which takes all these factors into consideration, so that the optimized information-sharing pattern can be obtained.

This paper introduces a set of factors that can be used to describe the correlation between information-sharing pattern and performance of crowd network. By quantifying such correlation based on these factors, this paper proposes an adaptive information-sharing approach which can explore the optimized information-sharing pattern for a variety of crowd networks. As the approach is a data-driven approach that explores the information-sharing pattern based on the network’s performance on historical tasks and network’s characteristics, it is adaptive to the dynamic change (change of incoming tasks, change of network characteristics) of the target crowd network. To ensure the commonality of the information-sharing approach, the proposed approach is not designed for a specific optimization algorithm. In this way, during the implementation of the proposed approach, heuristic algorithms can be chosen according to the complexity of the target crowd network.

This paper describes and discusses company spin-ins and spin-outs as a means to understand company growth in a dynamic context. The following question is asked: How can growth be understood in spin-ins and spin-outs of innovative firms? The paper suggests return on capabilities as a measure to understand growth in an open innovation context.

The empirical part of the paper consists of a single case study. Data was captured through interviews and secondary data sources.

The paper points to that resources alone do not explain strategic decisions by a company and how spin-ins and spin-outs result from the need for capabilities, changes in business foci and temporary solutions to deal with overcapacities or lack of alternatives.

The paper contributes to research by discussing contemporary issues in strategy and innovation and relating them to the resource-based view and the growth of the firm. Spin-outs, and acquisitions and divestitures as interlinked events have rarely been focused on in the literature, while they remain frequent phenomena in practice.

A network of partners helps and assists a crowdfunding platform (CFP) in scouting, assessing and selecting projects. This cooperation increases the number of successful projects by attracting a sizable number of investors, proponents and attracting marginal investors when a campaign falls short of the threshold for success. This study examines the role of partner networks in a platform ecosystem, specifically in terms of number of different partners and their diversity in the performance of the crowdfunding campaign.

Using logistic and linear regressions, we analyze a sample of 233 projects, both funded and not funded, launched by 10 Italian equity CFPs between 2014 and 2018.

Our findings indicate that the variety of partners in a platform's network influence the probability of campaign success and how much capital the proponent company raises. CFPs are resource-constrained new ventures, and a network with a wider variety of partners ensures the strategic resources and competencies that are required in an early stage market, thus facilitating campaign funding.

The variety of partner networks could help CFPs to offer unique and strategic value propositions and define the competitive positioning of platforms.

This study provides a deeper understanding of the determinants of equity crowdfunding campaign performance by emphasizing the role of CFP's network of partners on the entire crowdfunding ecosystem and its underlying organizational elements.

The motivation for this study comes from decision making related to strategic marketing orientations in international markets. The authors examine if customer orientation and customer relationship orientation perform as two distinct constructs in driving firm innovativeness, and how together they support business growth among export firms. This study aims to suggest a customer-centric strategy for export firms that drive innovativeness and growth.

An international corporation specialized in company information services provided a list of the contact information of Italian companies. The authors sent an email request to respond to an online survey and received 416 effective responses from firms operating in export markets. The authors propose and empirically test a model in which customer orientation, customer relationship orientation and innovativeness predict business growth. This model controls for the effects of firm size, industry and customer type (B2B vs. B2C).

The study findings suggest that customer orientation and customer relationship orientation are two distinct strategic orientations driving innovativeness. However, they do not directly affect business growth. Instead, they require the innovativeness of an exporter to materialize as business growth.

The results of the study recommend business strategies focusing not only on customer needs and satisfaction but also on retaining current customers and building customer relationships in international markets. Firms can learn from international customers and develop effective customer-centric strategies to spread the acquired information into the internal decision-making as it contributes to firm innovativeness and business growth in international markets.

This study is one of the pioneering studies combining customer orientation and customer relationship orientation, showing their theoretical and empirical divergence. This study is also among the first which tests how the two strategic orientations together with innovativeness promote business growth among export firms. The authors add understanding of the synergistic effects both of using customer information and developing deeper relationships on firm innovativeness and performance among exporters.