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This paper aims to analyze the strategizing and organizing practices in the innovation process by using a processual approach. Three types of practices are examined: discursive, episodic and administrative. Their arrangement and their influence are also studied in the innovation process. The final objective is to understand the making process of the strategizing/organizing (S/O) duality, which remains today one of the major challenges of the strategy-as-practice.

The paper uses a longitudinal and qualitative methodology applied to a single case study. Primary data are based on 18 semi-directive interviews during a three-year period. Secondary data came from various meeting and reports, Web sites, newspapers and newsletters.

The results show that strategizing and organizing practices are preconditioned by the phases of the innovation process. In the idea generation, commercialization and diffusion phases, strategizing takes precedence over the organizing, whereas in the R & D phase, it is the opposite. In the industrialization phase, strategizing and organizing are carried out simultaneously. Other results highlight the influence between discursive, episodic and administrative practices in the innovation process.

This research offers guidance to practitioners of innovation who want to attain a deeper understanding of the innovation-making process and its close ties with strategizing and organizing.

The authors empirically validate the making process of the S/O duality and examine the theoretical and empirical relevance of an innovizing concept, when the innovation-making process implicitly generates the production of a new inseparable S/O duality.

The U.S. labor movement is in decline and a crisis of national leadership has emerged over conflicting prescriptions for labor's revival. Union leaders have seemingly established consensus on the need for change, but disagree about the nature of needed reform, and methods for accomplishing meaningful changes that might address the long-term crisis.

This paper strives to inform and advance debates on these issues. Two national union surveys conducted in 1990 and 1997 provide the primary evidentiary base. Given their critical role in this study, measures from the surveys and certain aspects of the surveys are scrutinized. These surveys span the “Sweeney Insurgency” and the early years of the Sweeney AFL-CIO administration. Although both surveys have supported previous cross-section based studies, no published work has expressly focused on the change and stability within national unions or the longitudinal potential these data collectively provide. Using this potential to reexamine relations between union structures, strategies, and performance, this paper seeks to establish an evidentiary base to inform the current debate about union reforms and their likely consequences. In addition, suggestions for future research on unions and approaches to studying unions are offered.

This volume brings together empirical and conceptual papers that investigate the challenges of organizing creativity in the innovation journey in and across different empirical contexts. Seen as the basis for innovating new products, processes or services, organizing creativity is studied as intentional efforts that occur in teams, organizations, and fields. What creativity is, how it is defined, negotiated and recognized is hereby co-constructed with different audiences and in different economic and societal spheres. The papers in this volume extend our understanding of these contextualized social dynamics of organizing creativity in four directions. The first direction sheds light on the temporal dynamics of organizing creativity in artistic fields. The second direction compares creative processes in arts and science, thereby examining tensions and uncertainties in the creative process unfolding in two distinctive contexts of creativity. The third direction examines identity struggles of creative agents in organizations with clashing roles, professional norms, and ambiguities in creativity assessment. The fourth and final direction unravels the communicative journey of ideas from pitching to feedback, revealing how ideas are challenged, enriched, and acquire meaning in communicative interaction. Overall, the papers in this volume contribute to a situated view of creative processes in innovation which goes beyond questions of idea generation to account for dynamics of idea development, judgment, and dissemination which involve identity struggles, evaluation, and communication – processes which are at the heart of organizing for innovation.

In order to deepen the understanding of self-organization, the purpose of the paper is to raise and analyze the state of the art in the area of innovation networks, particularly the characteristics of self-organizing, relying on the theory of complex systems to overcome any shortcomings.

The databases selected for the search were Web of Science and Scopus; the keywords searched in the titles of articles were innovation networks, complex systems, self-organization and self-organizing; the timeline of the search covers the period between 2000 and 2014 due to the presence of important studies in the field of networks starting in the early 2000s; only studies published in English were used; the articles selected were examined by first reading the titles, then the abstracts, and finally the texts in full.

The way the main constructs from the analytical perspective of innovation networks intersect with complex systems explains how self-organization is presented and how it can be allowed to occur within a view of expected benefits for the purposes of these networks.

The originality of the research lies in the questioning of the classical form of organizational management in innovation networks, essentially based on the concentration of hierarchical power.

Open service innovation is an emergent new service development practice, where knowledge on how to organize development work is scarce. The purpose of the present research is to identify and describe relevant archetypes of open service innovation. The study views an archetype as an organizing template that includes the competence of participants, organizing co-creation among participants and ties between participants. In particular, the study’s interest lies in how open service innovation archetypes are used for incremental and radical service innovation.

For the research, a nested case study was performed, in which an industrial firm with nine open service innovation groups was identified. Forty-five interviews were conducted with participants. For each case, first a within-case analysis was performed, and how to perform open service innovation in practice was described. Then, a cross-case analysis identifying similarities and differences between the open service innovation groups was performed. On the basis of the cross-case analysis, three archetypes for open service innovation were identified.

The nested case study identified three archetypes for open service innovation: internal group development, satellite team development and rocket team development. This study shows that different archetypes are used for incremental and radical service innovation and that a firm can have multiple open service innovation groups using different archetypes.

This study provides suggestions on how firms can organize for open service innovation. The identified archetypes can guide managers to set up, develop or be part of open service innovation groups.

This paper uses open service innovation as a mid-range theory to extend existing research on new service development in networks or service ecosystems. In particular, it shows how open service innovation can be organized to develop both incremental and radical service innovations.

This chapter asks how we can understand the managerial practices in open innovation, a recently popularized way of organizing innovative work. Open innovation implies opening up the borders of the organization, creating a context where conventional steering and managerial tools no longer apply. Utilizing a collaborative research approach, following an open innovation collaboration over 8 years, this chapter outlines the managerial practices that direct the collaboration. These practices are important for meaning making and identity creation in the collaboration and can be understood as a form of authorship, a continuous intervention strategy to manage, develop and change the organizational context.

The purpose of this paper is to document and analyse the processes underpinning the Southern African Social Innovation Camp (the Camp). This paper details the theoretical basis on which the Camp was designed and assesses the ways in which the participants experienced the camp in light of these theoretical principles.

A qualitative research design was used with four sources of data: participant reviews of the Camp, in-depth interviews with stakeholders, the researcher’s field notes and a reflective blog posted online by one of the participants. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis.

Three themes emerged from the analysis. The Camp as a foreign but safe space that moves people out of their comfort zones, enabling innovative thinking; the importance of discipline and rigour in self-organising groups; and the interplay of diversity feedback and trust/mistrust. The theoretical principles which informed the design of the Camp were clearly evident in these themes.

No evaluation of the degree of innovativeness/quality of the prototypes. While the focus of the study was on participants’ experiences, a clearer indicator of the innovativeness and usefulness of the prototypes would have provided greater insight.

The study describes a theoretical framework for designing innovation groups and establishes the usefulness of the framework for analysing the group processes. Based on the results, recommendations for effective functioning in innovation groups are proposed: group diversification; discipline and rigour in group facilitation; vigilance in eliminating hierarchy; and managing the interplay between diversity, feedback and trust.

The purpose of this study is to explore the interplay among self-organization, networks and sustainable innovations within microfinance institutions (MFIs) and to examine the extent to which organizational resilience plays a significant role in shaping these dynamics as a mediator.

This paper adopted a cross-sectional research design combined with analytical and descriptive approach to collect the data. Smart partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to construct the measurement model and structural equation model to test the mediating effect under this study.

The results revealed that organizational resilience is a significant mediator in the relationship between self-organization, networks and sustainable innovations among microfinance institutions in Uganda.

The data for this study were collected only from microfinance institutions in Uganda. Future studies may collect data from other formal financial institutions like commercial banks and credit institutions to test the mediating effect of organizational resilience. More still, the study adopted only a single approach of using a questionnaire. However, future research through interviews may be desirable. Likewise this study was cross-sectional in nature. Therefore, a longitudinal study may be useful in future while investigating the mediating role of organizational resilience traversing over a long time frame.

A possible implication is that microfinance institutions which desire to have sustainable innovative solutions for their business operations in disruptive circumstances may need to scrutinize their capacity to be resilient and self-organize.

Microfinance institutions play a great role to the underserved clients. Thus, for each to re-organize to be able to provide services that meet users’ needs, without physical products so as to ensure long-term financial and social welfare combined with the ability to bounce back and adapt in times of economic downturn to avoid mission adrift.

While most studies have been carried out on organizational resilience, this paper takes center stage and is the first to test the mediating role of organizational resilience in the relationship between self-organization, networks and sustainable innovations, especially in microfinance institutions in Uganda. This paper generates strong evidence and contributes to the powerful influence of organizational resilience in enhancing the level of sustainable innovations based on self-organization and networks.

Reports research which aimed to find the organizational conditions required for companies considering innovating their operating core by adopting any advanced manufacturing technology, and implementing and operating this technology effectively. Describes a model of the organization of manufacturing innovation which was used in longitudinal case studies of the adoption, implementation and early operation of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), to analyse these processes and to find the conditions affecting their level of success. It appears that the activities, innovation roles, organizational arrangements and slack resources which are required according to the model determine most of the success of the innovation process. Concludes that the model contributes to our understanding of how to organize and manage complex processes such as manufacturing innovation.

The present study aims to address the emergence of platform-organized open innovation (OI). The research has the two main aims: the first is to increase the understanding of the performance of OI by investigating how the achievements of OI are measured in situated practices from a performative and strategic knowledge management (SKM) orientation. The methodological disadvantages of not pre-given case selection are partially counterbalanced by the second aim of the research, which is to extend existing SKM theory and examine how platforms create knowledge as they include actors and digital devices, thereby potentially redistributing relations of accountability.

Building on performativity theory, the paper studies how the achievements and knowledge created in OI are managed and evaluated in practice. The case description draws on different sources from a spiral case study, as openness is performed by platform, firm, crowd and innovation intermediaries.

The paper illustrates how a strategy of digitally enabled openness brings its own issues as platforms enable knowledge sharing and perform a redistribution of accountability. In the heterarchies studied through this research endeavor, managers and their team members were accountable not only to multiple units, or teams, across the organization, but also to the crowd. The case material demonstrates that the ecology of devices and their performative struggles create lateral accountability.

While recent streams of research suggest that the context of OI (i.e. distributed sources of knowledge for innovation) shifts the unit of analysis of organization design from the individual firm to networks of actors organized on platforms, the authors find that the focal firm still remains a key conceptual parameter in SKM research, which, in turn, makes it difficult to capture the suggested radicality of OI.

The authors show, that in practice, the firm has to take into account the performance of the external crowd and at times put resources into its training and education. In heterarchy, distributed authority is assumed to be facilitated through lateral accountability, whereby the traditional principles of vertical authority no longer hold, but rather, managers and their team members can be accountable to multiple units, or teams, across the organization.

The paper develops a performative theory of openness. OI is a model, strategy and socio-material practice whereby digital designs create an ecology of devices that can enact all kinds of openness. Ultimately, the current paper proposes that SKM and OI theory need to consider how platforms perform relations of accountability beyond the boundaries of the single organization.