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This paper aims to examine the key challenges experienced and lessons learned when organizations undergo large-scale agile transformations and seeks to answer the question of how incumbent firms achieve agility at scale.

Building on a case study of a multinational corporation seeking to scale up agility, the authors combined 36 semistructured interviews with secondary data from the organization to analyze its transformation since the early planning period.

The results show how incumbent firms develop and successfully integrate agility-enhancing capabilities to sense, seize and transform in times of digital transformation and rapid change. The findings highlight how agility can be established initially at the divisional level, namely with a key accelerator in the form of a center of competence, and later prepared to be scaled up across the organization. Moreover, the authors abstract and organize the findings according to the dynamic capabilities framework and offer propositions of how companies can achieve organizational agility by scaling up agility from a divisional to an organizational level.

Along with in-depth insights into agile transformations, this article provides practitioners with guidance for developing agility-enhancing capabilities within incumbent organizations and creating, scaling and managing agility across them.

Examining the case of a multinational corporation's exceptional, pioneering effort to scale agility, this article addresses the strategic importance of agility and explains how organizational agility can serve incumbent firms in industries characterized by uncertainty and intense competition.

Companies are discovering the power of crowdsourcing as a source of new ideas for products and services. It is assumed that the personal engagement and the continuous involvement with a company’s products or services over a period of several weeks positively affect participants’ loyalty intentions toward the host companies. The research leads the authors to challenge this assumption. In addition to mere participation in crowdsourcing initiatives, the authors argue that perceptions of fairness will explain changes in customer relationship-related consequences such as loyalty, perceived innovativeness and product interest. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors analyzed a real-life crowdsourcing contest launched by a leading lighting manufacturer and investigated the impact of two fairness dimensions (distributive and procedural) on participants’ future behavioral and attitudinal intentions (n=121). The analysis was performed with SEM.

The results suggest that fairness perceptions are significantly related to evoked product interest, perceived innovativeness and loyalty intentions. The analysis reveals that the influence of the fairness dimensions is asymmetric: while distributive fairness can be considered as a basic factor that must be fulfilled in order to avoid negative behavioral consequences, procedural fairness instead is an excitement factor that causes truly positive behavioral consequences.

The results are particularly relevant for companies launching a crowdsourcing competition under their own brand name, and for broadcasting platforms. For companies with no relations to end-users, these findings may not be as relevant.

Organizers of crowdsourcing contests should be aware that such initiatives can be a double-edged sword. Fair Play is a must to gain the positive effects from crowdsourcing initiatives for both new product development and the customer relationship. For companies lacking the capabilities to manage crowdsourcing initiatives professionally it is advisable to rely on intermediary broadcasting platforms.

The research is the first to investigate systematically the consequences of fairness perceptions in a real-life crowdsourcing idea contest. The authors demonstrate the asymmetric nature of fairness perceptions on three different outcome variables that are important for the customer relationship.

Crowdsourcing initiatives, especially the format of idea and research contest have provided companies with unique and inventive opportunities to capitalize on users’ innovative potential and knowledge. Inspired by the potential, nonprofits are beginning to use the principles of crowdsourcing to develop better solutions for social problems. This research aims to enhance our knowledge on crowdsourcing for social innovation. Since the crowdsourcing initiative hinges on individuals' willingness to participate in these projects and their motivation to contribute valuable insights and ideas, we introduce a new framework that aligns participants’ motives with potentially offered incentives. The conducted empirical study at the ScrapLab design contest finds that participants indeed differ in their preferred incentives. It shows that participants not only strive for monetary but also nonmonetary incentives such as an internship, a party with friends, or the support of a social project, once they can choose. The results further highlight, that those participants, differing in their incentive preference, also show different types of contribution behavior. Our research contributes to a better theoretic understanding of the impact of various incentive structures on contribution behavior. From a managerial perspective, it provides guidance in adopting prize structures to justify participation and contribution behavior in crowdsourcing initiatives.

The purpose of this article is to analyze how social media activities, in specifically the Facebook page of a car manufacturer, and user interactions with these brand related activities affect the perception of brands and ultimately influence consumers purchase decision. Based on an online survey with users of the corporation's Facebook fanpage, and in accordance to hierarchy of effects theory the author's findings show the positive effect of fanpage engagement on consumers' brand awareness, word of mouth (WOM) activities, and purchase intention. The findings further indicate that annoyance with the fanpage due to information overload leads to negative effects on fanpage commitment and to decreased WOM activities. From a theoretical standpoint the results of this study contribute to understanding of the value-enhancing potential of social media campaigns.

To answer the authors' research questions and test their hypotheses, a study was set up in cooperation with the car brand MINI. To test their hypotheses, the authors applied structural equation modeling with AMOS 18.

The article analyzes the influence of brands’ social media activities and participants' social media involvement on the purchase decision process of consumers. Their findings demonstrate that engagement with a Facebook fanpage has positive effects on consumers' brand awareness, WOM activities and purchase intention. Results further indicate that annoyance with the fanpage leads to negative effects in respect to the overall commitment to and involvement with the fanpage and WOM. The authors' research shows that social media activities indeed affect the purchase decision-making process.

New marketing communication reality presents new challenges and opportunities for companies as purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by social media interactions. People rely more than ever on their social networks when making those decisions. Nevertheless, outcomes of social media activities are still disputed in practice. The effects of social media campaigns on consumers' perception of products and brands as well as the effects on purchase decisions have yet to be better understood. This study therefore investigates how social media activities, in specific the Facebook appearance of a car manufacturer, affect the perception of brands, and ultimately influence the purchase decision process of consumers while considering the risk of creating annoyance. From a theoretical standpoint the results of this study contribute to understanding of the value-enhancing potential of social media campaigns and demonstrate how the perception of brands is influenced through this new communication channel. For brand managers this study is of value, as it shows that social media activities do have a positive influence on brands as they support their management of the purchase process.

Brent B. Allred is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and International Business at The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, VA. He earned his Ph.D. in Strategic Management/International Business at The Pennsylvania State University. His current research interests are in technology sourcing and patent rights. He has published in various journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Management International Review, the Journal of International Management, Academy of Management Executive, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Under certain conditions, a mass of people can be smarter than the best expert – even if the expert is part of the group. In this paper we show how leaders can improve decision making by tapping into the collective intelligence of their organization.

Based on James Surowiecki’s four conditions of collective intelligence (cognitive diversity, independence, utilization of decentralized knowledge, and effective aggregation of dispersed knowledge), we discuss how leaders can tap into the wisdom of the crowd of their organizations.

We show how leaders can increase cognitive diversity in decision making, access decentralized knowledge in their organizations, encourage individuals to contribute their knowledge without interference from peer pressure, conformity or influence from superiors, and how knowledge can effectively be aggregated to make wiser decisions.

While various tools exist to reap the collective intelligence of a group, we argue that leaders also must change their attitudes and leadership styles. Using evidence from various studies and several examples we show what leaders can do to make smarter decisions.

This study unravels the intellectual structure of virtual reality (VR) in digital marketing (DM) research, identifies core research gaps and presents future research avenues. The study also conducts a performance analysis of publications in the field and identifies the most important stakeholders of the stated topic.

The Web of Science database was used to retrieve the publications that were relevant to the topic between 2012 and 2022. Biblioshiny, a shiny app for the Bibliometrix R package, is used to conduct a bibliometric analysis by decoding the results into several visual representations.

This report includes the most prolific contributors, keyword analysis results, productive nations, authors and connections, as well as the most often cited publications on VR in DM. In DM research, numerous perspectives on VR were looked at, explored and revealed.

The findings provide a new perspective and understanding of the issue for researchers in order to improve their research insights in the field. This study will also benefit marketing practitioners in ensuring the sustainability and innovativeness of technology used to run their DM campaigns.

This research provides the first bibliometric analysis of the citation works and productivity in the field of VR in DM using Biblioshiny, identifies core research gaps and provides future research agenda which can be useful to advance the research understanding in this context.