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This paper highlights that the strategic use of design, a competitive pattern typically associated with creative industries, those creating and trading meanings, also characterizes industries that produce functional or utilitarian goods not typically considered creative. The paper explores the origins of this phenomenon in the context of three industry settings: cars, speciality coffee and personal computers. The analysis theorizes three distinct strategic paths that explain how design may become an institutionalized aspect of competition in industries that are not creative. We explain how firms link their products to the identities of their users, how design is linked to stakeholders' emotions and visceral reactions to products and how intermediaries are relevant to enhancing attention to design. Illuminating these strategic paths allows harnessing some of the well-established understandings about competition in creative industries towards understanding competition in noncreative industries.

This chapter introduces the volume’s theme by considering how the forces of globalization and complexity are leading organizations to reshape and redesign themselves, how meeting the challenges of sustainable effectiveness and shared value require multiorganization networks and partnerships, and how networks and partnerships develop, function, and can produce both private benefits and public goods.

We apply findings from social and political evolution frameworks, partnership and collaboration research, and design for sustainability concepts to induce the likely conditions required for sustainable effectiveness from a network perspective.

Successful partnerships and collaborations in service of sustainable effectiveness will require individual organizations to change their objective function and build new and varied internal and external capabilities.

The chapter sets the stage for the volume’s contributions.

An essential part of any customer experience management strategy is providing a seamless experience. One of the roadblocks, often a recurring barrier, is the presence of silos. Many people see corporate silos as a function of the organisational structure. But that is only one part of the problem. Influencing siloed mindsets across the length and breadth of the organisation is probably a more significant challenge. The siloed structure and mindset together impact the culture of the organisation that, in turn, affects their quality of customer experience management. This chapter covers the essential aspects of understanding the meaning of silos, including a historical, cultural and organisational perspective on what creates silos. While silos are inevitable, their adverse consequences are not. This chapter provides directions on how to overcome the adverse aspects of silos, thereby enabling better management of customer experiences. Multiple examples, from a customer as well as an organisation point of view, are used to highlight this dimension. The chapter also covers the role of a leader in breaking a silo culture and enabling successful application of various strategies for customer experience management.

First and second order learning lie at the center of an organization's ability to exploit its core competencies or explore for new opportunities. Strategic leadership lies at the center of this learning process. Strategic leaders enable organizations to learn by telling stories about what the organization is, what the organization does, and what the organization can become. They also enable competence carriers to come together to solve current and future problems by networking. These processes are explored.

Despite an increase in businesses started by celebrities, we have limited understanding as to how celebrity entrepreneurs benefit new ventures. Drawing on a reputational capital perspective, we develop the notion of celebrity capital and show how it can be used to uniquely differentiate the venture and to overcome liabilities of newness. We discuss how celebrity capital can negatively influence the venture when negative information about the celebrity surfaces and in terms of limiting the scope of the venture. We discuss the different strategic implications of celebrity capital for ventures using celebrity entrepreneurs versus endorsers.

This chapter addresses the dynamics in inter-organizational relations. The authors probe the value networks so prevalent within contemporary ­manufacturing to put forward that their basic cooperation/competition duality manifests itself in practical terms as capability, appropriation, and governance paradoxes. The authors conducted a longitudinal ethnographic study aimed at capturing the process by which inter-organizational collabor­ation in ­manufacturing value networks is enacted. Our study finds that inter-organizational relations are “nested” in that a relationship plays out over an interpersonal network where the inter-organizational relationships are a framework for action, while simultaneously interpersonal interactions affect how the inter-organizational relationships take shape and evolve. Furthermore, we found that inter-organizational dynamics is essentially a stratified process. Solving particular and concrete problems at the surface level, with regard to specific collaboration issues between organizations, simultaneously shapes truces with regard to the underlying capability, appropriation, and governance paradoxes.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

In spite of escalating efforts to curb abuse, fraud, and corruption in Congress, members of Congress persist in violating the norms, rules, and laws that aim to ensure they behave ethically. This chapter combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to describe congressional corruption in the modern era. Case studies illustrate consequential financial scandals while also differentiating four categories of corrupt financial practices.

Existing datasets on congressional scandals span the time period from 1972 to 2010, and this chapter extends the dataset to 2018. The analysis next uses the dataset to answer important questions empirically. Which types of scandals occur more often? Have these scandals grown more common or less common over time? What are the consequences of financial scandals for representatives' careers as public servants?