Search results

Implementing a new organizational strategy effectively nowadays is said to require open strategizing practices. The purpose of this paper is to examine the adoption of three intertwined open strategizing practices in conjunction with a transformational leadership style towards effective strategy implementation.

The study was conducted within 37 geographically dispersed locations of a Dutch governmental organization. The top managers and senior managers were surveyed at two points in time (n T1 = 548; n T2 = 414) and group interviewed at T2. Exploratory factor and linear regression analyses were performed. The qualitative data pertaining to the specific way in which leaders can impact the relationship between open strategizing practices and strategy implementation was analyzed using the Gioia methodology.

As hypothesized, transformational leadership moderates the positive relationship between open strategizing practices and effective strategy implementation. This moderating effect was corroborated through the interview data in which the managers stressed the need for “intrinsically motivated” and “empowering” leaders to effectively support the adoption of their own locally-developed location strategy, as part of the overall strategy.

Despite the timely focus on the three intertwined open strategizing practices, the findings are only based on the perceptions of the various top and senior managers employed by one Western public sector organization.

Top and senior managers who need to improve their organization's strategy implementation can apply the here tested three open strategizing practices. They should also be aware of the key role of transformational leadership.

The authors contribute to the “open” strategy-as-practice domain by showing how top and senior managers' transformational leadership style supports the beneficial effects of adopting the three practices.

Establishing a competitive advantage in today's dynamic environment involves optimizing an organization's exploration and exploitation strategy. This paper aims to explore how an open innovation strategy complements the organization's ambidextrous strategy in attaining a competitive advantage. Organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capability theories are also explored to investigate the impact of open innovation on the organization's ambidextrous strategy and competitive advantage – especially inbound and outbound open innovation.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review using Boolean search techniques, which was focused on the research fields of the sub-areas of general management, strategy, innovation, organization studies, information management, entrepreneurship, international business, marketing, and economics, supplemented by the snowball technique.

Organizations that combine their ambidextrous strategy with open innovation attributes achieve a competitive advantage through developing their dynamic capabilities by which organizations change their value proposition. This study also shows that an ambidextrous strategy should no longer be viewed as a structural solution implemented by management, but also as a bottom-up intervention. Additionally, the authors found that the organization's dynamic capabilities establish a feedback loop, which changes the organization's ambidextrous strategy to resolve the efficiency–agility paradox.

Previous research has focused on strategic orientation; however, hardly any research has investigated how the interrelatedness of open innovation, organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities support a competitive advantage. The authors present a conceptual model that inspires new research avenues.

This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of boundary management when firms should implement open innovation.

The relevant literature on strategic management, firm boundaries and open innovation fields is revised and critically assessed. An interpretive-qualitative methodology is applied to analyse empirical data obtained from a questionnaire and subsequent interviews of a sample of Italian listed firms. By critically integrating literature review and empirical analysis, a framework is provided with the objective of supporting open innovation implementation.

The study shows that on the one hand, open innovation and many modern paths of growth are connected to a firm's boundaries and that on the other hand, boundary management plays a key role in the implementation of open innovation.

The paper has implications for practitioners by driving them to shift the focus of open innovation implementation towards the management of boundaries, in which boundary capabilities and activities play a key role.

This paper sheds light on the advantages and risks that can jeopardize a successful opening up innovation processes without the effective management of boundary studies. Thus, the authors identify and propose causes for reflection and tools maximizing potentiality and reducing risks in the implementation of such processes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the business model and the strategic intent to adopt an open collaboration initiative influence the perceived quality of collaboration outcomes.

This paper presents a framework to analyze the role of the strategic dimension and the operational dimension in open collaboration initiatives through multiple case studies in three companies to understand how the open collaboration initiative was deployed and how was the level of the alignment between these two dimensions.

The studied cases revealed that when an open collaboration initiative starts in the strategic dimension and there is an alignment between the organizational dimension and operational dimension, the collaboration outcomes are clearer and more traceable.

The study highlights the need to consider the involvement and the internal alignment between strategic and operational dimensions when deploying an open collaboration activity if they want to achieve all the benefits.

The presented framework can help managers to evaluate and understand how open collaboration activities are deployed within the company.

The study shows that when an open collaboration initiative is planned, its results and benefits can be extended to local communities by developing them.

This study aims to analyze the open collaboration initiative’s contribution to the overall organizational performance through the alignment between the organizational dimension and operational dimension perspective.

The food industry is a well-established and complex industry. New entrants attempting to penetrate it via the commercialization of a new technological innovation could face high uncertainty and constraints. The capability to innovate through collaboration and to identify suitable strategies and innovative business models (BMs) can be particularly important for bringing a technological innovation to this market. However, although the potential for these capabilities has been advocated, we still lack a complete understanding of how new ventures could support the technology commercialization process via the development of BMs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To address this gap, this paper builds a conceptual framework that knits together the different bodies of extant literature (i.e. entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation) to analyze the BM innovation processes associated with the exploitation of emerging technologies; determines the suitability of the framework using data from the exploratory case study of IT IS 3D – a firm which has started to exploit 3D printing in the food industry; and improves the initial conceptual framework with the findings that emerged in the case study.

From this analysis it emerged that: companies could use more than one BM at a time; hence, BM innovation processes could co-exist and be run in parallel; the facing of high uncertainty might lead firms to choose a closed and/or a familiar BM, while explorative strategies could be pursued with open BMs; significant changes in strategies during the technology commercialization process are not necessarily reflected in a radical change in the BM; and firms could deliberately adopt interim strategies and BMs as means to identify the more suitable ones to reach the market.

This case study illustrates how firms could innovate the processes of their BM development to face the uncertainties linked with the entry into a mature and highly conservative industry (food).

The review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of platform opening and cooperation and points out potential research directions for scholars.

This study searches Web of Science (WOS) database for relevant literature published between 2010 and 2021 and selects 86 papers for this review. The selected literature is categorized according to three dimensions: the strategic choice of platform opening and cooperation (before opening), the construction of an open platform (during opening) and the impact of platform opening and cooperation (after opening). Through comparative analysis, the authors identify research gaps and propose four future research agendas.

The study finds that the current studies are fragmented, and a research system with a theoretical foundation has not yet formed. In addition, with the development of platform operations, new topics such as platform ecosystems and open platform governance have emerged. In short, there is an urgent need for scholars to conduct exploratory research. To this end, the study proposes four future research agendas: strengthen basic research on platform opening and cooperation, deeply explore the dynamic evolution and cutting-edge models of platform opening and cooperation, analyze potential crises and impacts of platform openness and strengthen research on open platform governance.

This is the first systematic review on platform opening and cooperation. Through categorizing literature into three dimensions, this article clearly shows the research status and provides future research avenues.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their positioning among innovation policy measures. A growing number of companies have implemented initiatives to access external knowledge to increase their innovativeness, consistently with the open innovation paradigm. Competition-based approaches have received increasing attention by the private sector as a way to access external knowledge. However, despite their potential role as innovation policy measures, a limited attention has been devoted so far to investigate them from the policymakers’ perspective.

To this aim, a two-stage empirical analysis has been carried out to develop a taxonomy of competition-based approaches. The first stage leveraged a multiple case study methodology including a sample of 20 competition-based approaches, while the second one leveraged interviews with Italian and European key informants.

This paper proposes a novel taxonomy including eight competition-based approaches, which differ among each other in terms of policy strategy, scope breadth and output required. Moreover, this paper enriches a well-established taxonomy of innovation policy instruments with the identified competition-based approaches.

This study contributes to the current debate on innovation policy by providing a taxonomy that includes eight competition-based approaches that can be exploited by policymakers to foster external knowledge search as well as their positioning among the innovation policy instruments. The taxonomy will hopefully support policymakers in identifying of the most suitable instruments in the light of their policy strategy and objectives.