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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.

This paper aims to present an interdisciplinary approach for the development and design of place brands, which goes far beyond communication strategies and advertising campaigns. The so-called “Brand-driven Identity Development of Places” (short: BIDP) approach provides a structured three-phase model that can serve as a practical guide for the development of commercial, touristy, urban and rural places.

Longitudinal collaborative action research over a time span of 20 years plus extended case study research supported the evolution of the BIDP approach.

BIDP is a circular three-phase model starting with the definition of the intended place brand identity, which in Phase 2 becomes translated into concrete touchpoint experiences along the main constituents of the place, and finally materialising into the new place format. The case study of the City of Innsbruck is prototypically used to illustrate the application of the designed approach and to report achieved results.

Place brand development based on translating socio-cultural meanings into touchpoint experiences to materialise and align place constituents is opening up new avenues to initiate and govern place development. At present, the approach is based on case studies in the western region of Austria and South Tyrol.

The three-phase model represents a practical tool for place brand managers, who want to renew and to develop their place format in a structured way. The BIDP model can be applied for all forms of places.

Foremost, the described place branding collaborations reassure the proposition of Olins (2002) and Schmidt (2007) that place branding is a crucial internal project that unites groups of people around a common strategic vision providing sense and direction besides reaching out to the traditional customer–stakeholder audience.

A structured model for brand-driven place development, which evolved during 20 years of longitudinal collaborative action research with executives and representatives of commercial, touristy, urban and rural places, BIDP locks into anthropological research findings where cultural meanings are considered as the main source for the construction of brand identities.

This paper investigates the ways managing directors (MDs) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involve employees in strategic conversations. The paper examines how managers interact with employees in strategic conversations, and why the managers do so (or do not), to generate empirically grounded knowledge about the nature of internal openness in SMEs.

This study employs a general inductive approach and is based on in-depth interviews with 60 Swedish MDs with development and growth ambitions.

The paper develops a model of employee involvement in strategic conversations based on the nature and intensity of the MD–employee interaction. A key finding is that SMEs exhibit wide variation in terms of employee involvement, from virtually no employee involvement to, in some cases, far-reaching company democracy. The reasons for this variation are complex, but personal preferences and company size are shown to have an impact, as does, to some degree, ownership structure. In contrast to existing research, the limitations and drawbacks of involving employees in strategic conversations are outlined.

The study provides important insight into MDs' views and practices of internal openness in strategic conversations in SMEs. A model of employee involvement in strategic processes is outlined, and potential limitations of internal openness are highlighted.