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Global mindset is an important theme in the international business strategy and organizational behavior literatures. However, these different paradigms define and operationalize global mindset in disparate ways, which creates problems for conducting empirical research as the disparity hampers the development of testable models. This article seeks to unify the different paradigms by introducing a third perspective from cognitive psychology that clarifies the process of mindset activation. We apply a process model of mindset activation to global mindset to build a theory of mindset switching relevant for global leaders. We operationalize global mindset as a dynamic process of mindset switching and suggest that the most appropriate mindset for a situation can be primed to activate. We also propose cosmopolitanism and cognitive complexity as antecedents to appropriate mindset activation and mindset switching. Finally, we suggest that mindset/situation congruence results in global leader creativity and boundary spanning. By applying the cognitive psychology literature to global mindset research, we clarify the process of global mindset and why it is important for leaders to understand how different primes might activate the most appropriate mindset. Our model provides a means for managers to become more cognitively aware of how they problem solve in a highly complex and multilayered world. This paper proposes a unique, dynamic model that captures dualities of global leadership. The model provides a new perspective of global mindset that is testable with existing measures and procedures.

In this section, we offer a careful and systematic review of the theoretical and empirical studies relating to global mindset that have been published in books and peer-reviewed journals. This review includes studies that use differing terms to refer to the idea of global mindset but consider the same general concept. At the same time, we exclude studies that do not specifically pertain to global mindset but concentrate on such areas as global leadership, expatriates, and expatriation, even though they may focus on similar underlying themes found in the global mindset literature. We then identify two fundamental themes in the global mindset literature – cosmopolitanism and cognitive complexity – and use these concepts to develop a new integrative approach to global mindset.

Research has highlighted the cognitive nature of the business model intended as a cognitive representation describing a business’ value creation and value capture activities. Although the content of the business model has been extensively investigated from this perspective, less attention has been paid to the business model’s causal structure – that is the pattern of cause-effect relations that, in top managers’ or entrepreneurs’ understandings, link value creation and value capture activities. Building on the strategic cognition literature, this paper argues that conceptualizing and analysing business models as cognitive maps can shed light on four important properties of a business model’s causal structure: the levels of complexity, focus and clustering that characterize the causal structure and the mechanisms underlying the causal links featured in that structure. I use examples of business models drawn from the literature as illustrations to describe these four properties. Finally, I discuss the value of a cognitive mapping approach for augmenting extant theories and practices of business model design.

The paper describes six major approaches within strategic groups research: the industrial organization perspective (the IO-view), the strategic choice perspective, the strategy types perspective, the cognitive perspective, the customer perspective, and the business definition perspective. The two most promising perspectives to make real advances in the strategic management discipline seem to be the cognitive view and the business definition perspective. The purpose of a grouping based on business definitions is to provide an insight, as objective as possible, of the industry’s substructure which also corroborates with the cognitive maps of the industry which the CEOs have in mind. From a practical point of view, the classification of firms in groups based on commonality in business definition (buyer scope, product scope, geographical scope and degree of vertical integration), allows managers to compare their own firms with comparable firms (the firms within the same group). The research concerning strategic groups in the Belgian beer brewing sector and the Belgian electrical wholesale sector is presented. The major problems within the strategic groups research are discussed.

Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a priority for managers across industries, but it represents a notoriously difficult innovation, with several challenges, many of which are cognitive in nature. The received literature has variously suggested that one way to overcome challenges to BMI, including cognitive ones, and support the cognitive tasks is using visual representations. Against this background, we aim at offering a contribution to the emerging line of inquiry at the nexus between business models (BMs), cognition and visual representations. Specifically, we develop a new method for visual representation of the BM in support of simplification of the cognitive effort and neutralisation of cognitive barriers. The resulting representation – a network-based representation, anchored on the activity-system perspective and offering complementarity and centrality/periphery measures – allows to visually represent an existing BM as a network (nodes and linkages) of interdependent activities and to express information related to the degree of centrality/periphery of single activities (nodes) with respect to the rest of a BM configuration. This information, we argue, is potentially very valuable in supporting the cognitive tasks involved in business model reconfiguration (BMR). We guide the reader to progressively appreciate how the development of the proposed method for visual representation is anchored to two main characteristics of BMR, namely the discovery-driven nature of BMR and the path-dependent nature of BMR. We offer initial insights on the cognitive value of such a type of representation in relationship to the simplification of the cognitive effort and the neutralisation of cognitive barriers in BMR.

Entrepreneurial opportunity (EO) identification pertains to the core processes of entrepreneurship and innovation. The initial phase of this process starts with individual cognition, which is why cognition has been established as a critical theoretical perspective.

Knowledge and new information have been confirmed as essential cognitive impact factors. However, it is not understood well, how individuals apply those factors and how they actually identify innovative and economically viable EOs. To address the limitations of current research, this chapter investigates the current literature on underlying cognitive processes of opportunity identification.

The literature analysis demonstrates that there is not a single cognitive process but rather a magnitude of different micro-mechanisms that are necessary for the successful identification of EOs. The findings are grouped to four categories of cognitive processes and entail their micro-mechanisms: pattern recognition, information processing, and creative thinking. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that those micro-mechanisms have seldom been related to each other within the scope of opportunity identification. This chapter closes this gap by discussing and contrasting and the different process categories and respective micro-mechanisms and suggests an integrative theory development and avenues for future research.

This double volume presents the state of the art in research on the microfoundations of institutions. In this introductory chapter, we develop an overview of where the emerging microfoundational agenda in institutional theory stands and in which direction it is moving. We discuss the questions of what microfoundations of institutions are, what the “micro” in microfoundations represents, why we use the plural form (microfoundations vs microfoundation), why microfoundations of institutions are needed, and how microfoundations can be studied. Specifically, we highlight that there are several traditions of microfoundational research, and we outline a cognitive, a communicative and a behavioral perspective. In addition, we explain that scholars tend to think of microfoundations in terms of an agency, levels, or mechanisms argument. We delineate key challenges and opportunities for future research and explain why we believe that the debate on microfoundations will become a defining element in the further development of institutional theory.

This chapter introduces electroencephalography (EEG), a measure of neurophysiological activity, as a critical method for investigating individual and team decision-making and cognition. EEG is a useful tool for expanding the theoretical and research horizons in organizational cognitive neuroscience, with a lower financial cost and higher portability than other neuroimaging methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging). This chapter briefly reviews past work that has applied cognitive neuroscience methods to investigate cognitive processes and outcomes. The focus is on describing contemporary EEG measures that reflect individual cognition and compare them to complementary measures in the field of psychology and management. The authors discuss how neurobiological measures of cognition relate to and may predict both individual cognitive performance and team cognitive performance (decision-making). This chapter aims to assist scholars in the field of managerial and organizational cognition in understanding the complementarity between psychological and neurophysiological methods, and how they may be combined to develop new hypotheses in the intersection of these research fields.

Part I of this chapter applies the principles of the philosophy of science and the derived scientific method to analyze the foundational concepts and core proposition of the Resource-Base View (RBV) as popularized by Barney (1986, 1991, 1997). This analysis identifies seven fundamental conceptual deficiencies and logic problems in Barney's conceptualization of “strategically valuable resources” and in Barney's VRIO framework for identifying strategically valuable resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. Three problems – the Value Conundrum, the Tautology Problem in the Identification of Resources, and the Absence of a Chain of Causality – relate to the RBV's and VRIO's failure to provide an adequate conceptual basis for identifying strategically valuable resources. The Uniqueness Dilemma, the Cognitive Impossibility Dilemma, and an Asymmetry in Assumptions about Resource Factor Markets result in an inability of the VRIO framework to support identification of resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. More fundamentally, the core proposition of the RBV – that resources that are strategically valuable, rare, inimitable, and organizationally embedded are sources of sustainable competitive advantage – is argued to result directly in the Epistemological Impossibility Problem that precludes use of the scientific method in RBV research. This chapter argues that until these conceptual deficiencies and logic problems are recognized and remedied, the RBV – in spite of its current popularity – is and will remain theoretically sterile and incapable of contributing in any systematic way to the development of strategy theory.

Part II of this chapter then suggests how foundational concepts developed within the competence perspective on strategy provide essential remedies for the identified deficiencies and problems in the RBV – and thereby provide a more conceptually adequate basis for representing the nature of firms in the scientific study of their interactions and competitive outcomes.