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Being acquainted with both lean and action learning in theory and in practice, this study finds that the theoretical complementarity of these two research streams has traditionally been underexploited. In this conceptual paper, this study aims to advance the theoretical understanding of lean by exploring the complementarity of lean thinking and action learning leading to a proposed integrated theory of these two research streams. Target audience is the operations management research community.

By deliberately adopting a process of theorising, this paper explores, reflects upon and combines individual experiences of researching, teaching and engaging in lean and action learning as operations management scholars.

Having taken a gemba walk through the literature and practices of lean and action learning, this study views and notices a systematic and complementary relationship between the two domains. The overlapping theoretical and practical complementarities of lean and action learning suggest that these two research streams are ripe for synthesis into an integrated theory. This finding provides an opportunity to (1) progress towards an integrative design of interventions leading to more sustainable lean system adoptions and (2) add new depth to our theoretical explanation of the success and failures of lean system adoptions.

This paper contributes an original integrated theory perspective on lean and action learning.

Anxiety, depression and impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL) are commonly reported in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and are of great interest for therapeutic approaches. Based on regional differences a quantitative assessment of these factors in comparison to the general population, and the consideration of demographic cofactors, would be useful when designing specific interventions. We adopted such an approach in a German cohort of MS patients. Anxiety, depression (HADS) and HRQoL (SF-36) were measured in 49 consecutive outpatients with MS and compared to age- and gender-adjusted control groups (n=1330 for HADS; n=5087 for SF-36) extracted from German National Health Surveys. Patients with MS showed significantly increased levels of anxiety and depression as well as decreased HRQoL with the exception of mental health; the effect sizes ranged from 0.39 (depression) to 1.06 (physical functioning). As could be expected, MS patients with relapsing-remitting clinical course had better physical functioning than patients with secondary progressive MS. There were strong relations between anxiety and depression (r=0.54; P<0.01), and between neurological impairment (EDSS) and physical functioning (r=-0.80; P<0.001) as well as depression (r=0.48; P<0.05). This investigation of MS patients confirms the prevalence and impact of anxiety, depression and most of the HRQoL dimensions in MS patients and provides evidence for the usefulness of a quantitative comparison to a region-specific general population as a starting point for therapeutic approaches.

Engaging with customers and addressing unmet value have become increasingly challenging within multi-stakeholder environments of service innovation. Therefore, this paper aims to address this challenge by studying how strategic design abilities address unmet value in service engagement strategies.

The authors conducted a qualitative inductive study at a multinational corporation and interviewed marketing and design professionals on their innovation practices in service engagement strategies.

From the inductive analysis, this study identified three strategic design abilities that effectively contribute to addressing unmet value throughout the co-evolving process of service engagement: envisioning value, modelling value and engaging value. Based on this, this study proposes the emerging co-evolving loop framework of service engagement strategies.

The limitation of this emerging theory is a lack of broad generalizability with mutual exclusivity or collective exhaustiveness across industries. A theoretical implication of the framework is the integration of strategic design and services marketing towards co-created engagement strategies.

The service engagement loop framework can be of great value to service innovation processes, for which an integrated, cross-functional approach is often missing.

The findings further suggest that next to a methodological skillset, strategic design abilities consist of a distinct mindset.

This paper introduces strategic design abilities to address unmet value and proposes a novel co-evolving loop framework of service engagement strategies.

The study, by focusing on a context dominated by firms with a concentrated ownership, in which type-II agency problems (principal-principal conflicts) may occur, aims to depict which board configurations may be effective in protecting minority shareholders by mitigating the risk of controlling shareholders' expropriation via cash holdings.

The research adopts a configurational approach and empirically conducts a fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 268 Italian listed companies.

The analysis depicts three combinations of board configurations and ownership structures that can be considered effective, namely Active Independent Control, Female Active Control and Double Internal Control.

The study revisits the topic of the risk of expropriation via cash holdings in a type-II agency problem framework and delineates the meaning of board effectiveness in a mature context ruled by family firms, like Italy. Furthermore, by drawing on a configurational approach, it overcomes the causality relationship between each board characteristic and cash holdings policies and reasons from a “bundle” perspective.