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Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.

Divestitures and other forms of organizational separation are not commonly associated with continuity and ongoing collaboration in inter-organizational relationships. Instead, separation is often equated with terminating relationships and gaining independence. Here, the authors argue that achieving separation does not require terminating relationships and that ongoing collaboration between separating entities may actually contribute to successful separation. The authors base this argument on the assertion that the objective of organizational separation is to achieve organizational autonomy for all entities involved and that separating entities can enable each other’s development of autonomy while remaining interdependent. The authors also discuss how collaborative separation may contribute to a range of benefits, as well as why it may nevertheless fail to emerge in practice. In this respect, the authors consider the relevance of ethical perspectives and emotional dynamics related to feelings of (dis)respect, (dis)trust, pride and shame. The authors conclude by discussing activities that may contribute to, and undermine, effective collaborative separation.

How learning is facilitated in inter-organizational projects remains underdeveloped in the literature. The aim of this study is to focus on viewing the relationship between the multiple organizations in a project, from a perspective of the learning aspect.

This research analyses the learning trajectory that occurred in the largest tunnel project in the Netherlands. Data were collected through archival documents, in-depth interviews, and site visits. Answering the research question will be done through inductive research.

The results indicate that the most significant change that exploitative learning has led to is the change in mind-set. The learning paradox of projects does not play a factor in the learning trajectory present at the GSP project.

While the research was conducted in a Dutch context, it is suggested that the findings presented would align with the experiences of construction organizations in other parts of the world.

The findings have implications for understanding learning in practical project management. The organizations need to focus on learning initiatives on people, and not on the collection of data.

This research responds to the debate over the learning in projects. Learning stimulates openness and that this has positive impact om collaboration.

Building trust and living interpersonal trust are crucial corporate executive virtues that are needed today. Once you have developed and solidified a high level of genuine interpersonal trust with all your stakeholders, especially customers, suppliers, and employees, then you are on the right path of managing and transforming your company. A high level of interpersonal trust between all stakeholders and corporates in a business situation will break down communication barriers, foster serious conversation and sharing of ideas, and will eliminate corporate transactional anxieties of fear, mistrust, guilt, rigidity, blame, and resentment. When stakeholders trust you and you trust them, then you speak freely, they speak freely, and your mutual sustained transparency is a gateway to survival, revival, and sustained corporate recovery and transformation, and steady growth and prosperity. Conversely, when there is low trust, high mistrust, and high distrust among stakeholders in a business situation, communications and conversations are stressed and fragmented, teamwork and team spirit are very low, and the company is heading toward its ruin and extermination. Such is the crucial role of interpersonal trust in business. This chapter explores the crucial phenomenon of corporate interpersonal trust. We review various cases, models, concepts, definitions, and theories of trust from the management literature in general, and from the marketing field in particular, to derive psychological, behavioral, ethical, and moral principles of corporate trust, trusting relations, and trusting strategies.

The aim of this research is to increase the understanding of how strategic and long-term innovation efforts can be organised, operated and co-created within a project-based organisational setting.

A case study with a qualitative approach was chosen, showing a critical case with powerful examples rather than representative samples, to draw conclusions from. The analysis builds on the concept of absorptive capacity, which provides a multidimensional perspective on innovation activities in organisations.

The difficulties in orchestrating an interplay between innovation processes and the construction process in itself is presented. The study identifies effects from introducing new “innovation roles” as well as comprehending implications of collaborative contract forms for innovation.

Based on a single case study, and being an in-depth empirical study, a rich description of innovation processes is provided which contributes to generalisation on processes rather than outcomes. The use of the absorptive capacity construct also contributes to a theoretically informed research on innovation in construction.

The study provides valuable insights regarding how to conduct collaborative innovation in within the frame of construction projects.

The study of a novel organisational setup, where multiple innovation processes is integrated in a construction project with a partnering contract, provides an understanding on how a construction client can manage the interplay between innovation processes and the construction process in itself. Furthermore, flows of knowledge and effects from introducing new innovation roles are unfolded.

Smart industry initiatives focus on intelligent and interconnected cyber-physical systems. These initiatives develop complex technical architectures that integrate heterogenous technologies, causing significant organizational complexity. Tapping into the digital capabilities of distant partners while capturing profit from such innovation is demanding. Furthermore, firms often need to establish and orchestrate inter-organizational collaborations without prior relations or established trust. As a result, smart industry initiatives bring together disparate organizational forms and institutional environments, distinctive knowledge bases, and geographically dispersed organizations. We conceptualize this organizational capability as ‘distant capabilities integration’. This research explores the governance mechanisms that support such integration and their relation to value capture. We analyse 11 IoT case studies organized in three categories (process, product and technologies) of smart industry initiatives. Building on existing literature, we consider different ways to describe distance, including knowledge heterogeneity and organizational, geographical, institutional, cultural and cognitive distance. Finally, we describe the governance mode appropriate for upstream (developing foundational technologies) and downstream (leveraging existing distant technologies) smart industry initiatives.

This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes “in the making,” the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production.

We conduct a literature review on forms of organizing that address grand challenges, which are operationalized as the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, as this framework is universal and widely adopted. By analyzing the articles that match our criteria, we identify six differentiable organizational forms: movements, temporary organizations, partnerships, established organizations, multi-stakeholder networks, and supranational organizations. These six forms are differentiated based on the two following categories: organizing segment and communicational technological approach. Our analysis shows that tackling a grand challenge often starts with collectives as a protest culture without any expected goal, besides sending an impulse to others. This impulse is received by criticized institutionalized organizations that have the capacity and resources to address the problem properly. However, new challenges arise as these organizations inadequately resolve these problems, thereby leading to conflict-laden areas of tension, wherein emergent organizations complement institutionalized organizations that have created the first infrastructure. To solve the most complex problems, a trichotomous relationship between different forms of organizations is necessary. Moreover, communicational technological approaches become more sophisticated as grand challenges increase in complexity.

We currently know little about how transferring can be accomplished when source- and target environments only have little in common. This chapter utilizes the case of EuroCo and AsiaCo to account for how a transfer of interrelated routines across multiple boundaries unfolds. A pragmatic and flexible approach to transferring, where coordinating actors attended to replication and adaptation as means rather than ends, is illuminated. Notably, coordinators split their work into smaller chunks by focusing on artifacts, people, and actions. As pressures to progress the transfer increased, they conceived of new ideas for performances and put the ideas to use along three trajectories focused on embedding, embodying, and enacting routines. Eventually, they blended performances from each trajectory back together into a new overarching notion of what was to be transferred. In elaborating on and discussing these findings, the chapter contributes to literature on routine transfer. Boundary conditions and avenues for future research are discussed.