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This paper provides the strategic direction and coordination mechanism selection for the intelligent transformation of manufacturing enterprises.

A theoretical framework is developed through grounded theory and case analysis.

Collaboration value is the building block of the intelligent product ecosystem. The ecosystem is upgraded via a path of product coordination, platform coordination and network coordination.

This paper provides a framework for enterprises to build an intelligent product ecosystem.

The proposed intelligent product ecosystem framework is new to the literature and lays down a fruitful avenue for future research.

How do entrepreneurs use simple rules to build their business models? Based on an inductive study of three Chinese Internet and technology firms, the authors find that business models emerge from simple rules that entrepreneurs learn from their experience. Simple rules also guide entrepreneurs to actualize and exploit opportunities in the marketplace, and they can help business models evolve through market feedback, especially in internationalization. This paper aims to delve into the black box of entrepreneurial decision-making and offer a better depiction of the business model development process in uncertain and fast-changing environments and thus provide guidance for future entrepreneurs.

Following the case method (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003), the authors first present a thick description of characteristics of three companies and the dynamics of their business models. They then code these descriptions into first-order measures. Finally, they aggregate these measures into abstract constructs. They constantly compare the theoretical constructs and the emerging theory with the existing literature on business models.

The authors generate three key insights from the findings: business models emerge from simple rules learned from entrepreneurs’ experience, simple rules help entrepreneurs exploit and actualize opportunities in the marketplace and simple rules help businesses expand and evolve business models through market feedback, especially in internationalization.

This paper falls into the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship – an emerging new field of strategic entrepreneurship – and is concerned with how businesses create and sustain a competitive advantage while simultaneously identifying and exploiting new opportunities. The authors bring people – the individual decision-makers for businesses – back in strategy research and depict a more realistic picture of the behavior of successful entrepreneurs and their business model development process.

Brand crowdfunding, launched through brands’ social media platforms, can provide a myriad of crowdfunding and branding benefits, such as strengthening brands’ social networks, validating product launches, generating mass exposure and enabling cocreation. Gamification positions brand crowdfunding as an exciting and joyful activity that more deeply engages prosumers. Anchored on resource-based theory, theory of planned behavior and service-dominant logic, this paper aims to develop a brand crowdfunding framework for established brands with insights from two emerging markets: China and India.

A deductive cross-sectional design is used to gather data from an established brand’s (e.g. Xiaomi) social media followers in China (n = 826) and India (n = 358), which is analyzed through PLSc-SEM.

The results reveal that social media brand engagement is an antecedent of brand crowdfunding participation, brand crowdfunding intention is a predictor of brand loyalty and gamification is a significant moderator in technology-oriented societies.

The paper develops a brand crowdfunding framework that provides insights on how established brands can leverage crowdfunding to enhance their new product development process. The results contribute to the social media brand engagement, crowdfunding, gamification and emerging markets literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between different mechanisms for integrating national archival resources, leading to the development of a knowledge management-based framework for facilitating the optimal utilization of national archives resources in China.

The study adopts a mixed-methods approach consisting of a review of existing mechanisms for integrating national archival resources and site visits and interviews for investigating the effectiveness of these mechanisms in real world practices for managing and utilizing national archives resources in China.

The knowledge management-based framework is shown to be useful for building interdependence, interconnections and interactions between diversified integration mechanisms to meet national, societal and public needs in China. The framework is significant for rearranging the role of knowledge management in collaboration to protect the value of national archives resources as the knowledge asset of a state. It can reengineer the knowledge management activities in communication to share the value of national archives resources as the knowledge asset of a society. Furthermore, the framework can reconfigure knowledge management artifacts in connectivity to increase the value of national archives resources as the knowledge asset of the public.

The review of the related literature is selective rather than comprehensive, and the interviews are based on a self-selected convenience sample, which is rather skewed demographically.

The proposed framework can be used to guide the development of a national strategy for the effective integration of national archives resources to promote a better delivery of public-centric knowledge services in a specific society.

This study provides a knowledge management framework for the effective integration of national archives resources toward their optimal utilization. It contributes to the examination of the role of different integration mechanisms in interactive knowledge management processes and the advancement of academic debate on the effectiveness of these mechanisms for the integration of national archives resources to facilitate their optimal utilization in China.

The purpose of this study is to identify and explain the role of individuals’ awareness and motivation in facilitating knowledge sharing (KS) in the real world of practice, as well as to establish areas of convergence between theory and practice that can be of use to both academics and practitioners involved in knowledge intensive organisations.

This study used Grounded Theory (GT) as an inductive methodology to collect, analyse and interpret data from multiple case-studies. 44 participants from Chinese software organisations were selected on the basis of their role in SW design and development and were interviewed using a semi-structured interview script. The data analysis followed a Straussian approach to coding, which consists of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. The analysis focused on the impact of individuals’ awareness and motivation to share knowledge.

The findings of this research show that the motivation for KS – a time consuming and demanding activity – is indeed related to awareness by managers and developers of the benefits of KS in their professional practice. Practitioners shared their experiences and tacit knowledge with others, partly because it was required by their companies, but also because they have a sound awareness of the need to share knowledge both inside and outside their organisations.

As a typical social science inductive study, this research is bounded by the context in which the theory proposed emerged from. Further research should be conducted into a richer variety of organisational and national contexts, as suggested by good theoretical sampling practice, which could provide further insights or contrasts.

Despite a number of theoretical propositions found in the literature, there is a clear lack of implementation strategies and models that explain the role of awareness and motivation in facilitating KS in the world of practice. This issue of applicability of theoretical propositions is now recognised as one of the fundamental key issues in KS. This study provides new and practice grounded insights in this area and is of interest to both practitioners and theoreticians as it explains and bridges the individuals’ awareness and motivation for tacit KS.

This paper introduces a research agenda on “integrated management and services for urban development records, archives and information”, a national research project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. It discusses seven aspects of the agenda: background to the research, the research aims, the research objectives and questions, focuses and hypothesis of the project, analytical framework and methodology of the project, research plans, and the expected outcomes for the study.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the role of individual learning and development in acquiring tacit knowledge in the context of the inexorable and intense continuous change (technological and otherwise) that characterizes our society today, and also to investigate the software (SW) sector, which is at the core of contemporary continuous change and is a paradigm of effective and intrinsic knowledge sharing (KS). This makes the SW sector unique and different from others where KS is so hard to implement.

The study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a multi-case study approach, composed of three successful SW companies in China. These companies are representative of the fabric of the sector, namely a small- and medium-sized enterprise, a large private company and a large state-owned enterprise. The fieldwork included 44 participants who were interviewed using a semi-structured script. The interview data were coded and interpreted following the Straussian grounded theory pattern of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. The process of interviewing was stopped when theoretical saturation was achieved after a careful process of theoretical sampling.

The findings of this research suggest that individual learning and development are deemed to be the fundamental feature for professional success and survival in the continuously changing environment of the SW industry today. However, individual learning was described by the participants as much more than a mere individual process. It involves a collective and participatory effort within the organization and the sector as a whole, and a KS process that transcends organizational, cultural and national borders. Individuals in particular are mostly motivated by the pressing need to face and adapt to the dynamic and changeable environments of today’s digital society that is led by the sector. Software practitioners are continuously in need of learning, refreshing and accumulating tacit knowledge, partly because it is required by their companies, but also due to a sound awareness of continuous technical and technological changes that seem only to increase with the advances of information technology. This led to a clear theoretical understanding that the continuous change that faces the sector has led to individual acquisition of culture and somatic knowledge that in turn lay the foundation for not only the awareness of the need for continuous individual professional development but also for the creation of habitus related to KS and continuous learning.

The study reported in this paper shows that there is a theoretical link between the existence of conducive organizational and sector-wide somatic and cultural knowledge, and the success of KS practices that lead to individual learning and development. Therefore, the theory proposed suggests that somatic and cultural knowledge are crucial drivers for the creation of habitus of individual tacit knowledge acquisition. The paper further proposes a habitus-driven individual development (HDID) Theoretical Model that can be of use to both academics and practitioners interested in fostering and developing processes of KS and individual development in knowledge-intensive organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how an organization can combine different types of open innovations and what are the key factors that may influence the combination of different open innovations.

The basic methodology of this paper is the longitudinal inductive analysis within the conceptual framework of the open innovation proposed by Dahlander and Gann (2010). In this case study of Xiaomi Tech Inc., the open innovation combination is investigated through examining 25 new products created between August 2010 and December 2016 in terms of four general types: acquiring, sourcing, selling and revealing open innovation.

In practice, the combination of different types of open innovations can be realized. A firm may combine different open innovations at three levels: a single product level, a related product cluster level and a company level. In addition, different open innovations can be combined in diverse modes. The purpose of combining different types of open innovations is to overcome the disadvantages of each type and to exploit the advantages of all different types. Many factors may affect a firm’s option of how to combine open innovations. At different development stages, a firm may make and implement corresponding strategic direction based on its innovation capacity and internal resource. For a given strategy, the firm needs to create profits and manage intellectual property in the implementation of open innovations. These factors are interacted each other, rather than isolated.

The findings of this paper are helpful for better understanding how and why an organization can combine different types of open innovations. From a managerial point of view, an organization may combine different types of open innovations to leverage advantages and avoid disadvantages of each certain type of open innovation. An appropriate combination of different open innovations can effectively improve new product development.