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The research analyzes good practices in health care “management experimentation models,” which fall within the broader range of the integrative public–private partnerships (PPPs). Introduced by the Italian National Healthcare System in 1991, the “management experimentation models” are based on a public governance system mixed with a private management approach, a patient-centric orientation, a shared financial risk, and payment mechanisms correlated with clinical outcomes, quality, and cost-savings. This model makes public hospitals more competitive and efficient without affecting the principles of universal coverage, solidarity, and equity of access, but requires higher financial responsibility for managers and more flexibility in operations.

In Italy the experience of such experimental models is limited but successful. The study adopts the case study methodology and refers to the international collaboration started in 1997 between two Italian hospitals and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC – Pennsylvania, USA) in the field of organ transplants and biomedical advanced therapies.

The research allows identifying what constitutes good management practices and factors associated with higher clinical performance. Thus, it allows to understand whether and how the management experimentation model can be implemented on a broader basis, both nationwide and internationally. However, the implementation of integrative PPPs requires strategic, cultural, and managerial changes in the way in which a hospital operates; these transformations are not always sustainable.

The recognition of ISMETT’s good management practices is useful for competitive benchmarking among hospitals specialized in organ transplants and for its insights on the strategies concerning the governance reorganization in the hospital setting. Findings can be used in the future for analyzing the cross-country differences in productivity among well-managed public hospitals.

By drawing on various theoretical approaches and a gender perspective, this paper aims to examine business model (BM) experimentation as a step towards BM experimentation capabilities as an outcome and, as such, a key antecedent to firm performance.

In this paper, using a unique data set of 444 European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the authors draw on various theoretical perspectives to devise a structural equation model that examines BM experimentation as a step towards business model innovation (BMI) as an outcome and, as such, a key antecedent to firm performance. Potential differences are examined between female-owned and non-female-owned businesses with regard to hypothesized relations.

Multi-group analysis results reveal that drivers of BM experimentation and the paths linking BM experimentation to overall firm performance are different for female owners in comparison to male owners.

Theoretical and practical implications are various. For SME entrepreneurs, experimenting with their BMs does lead to improved performance.

Theoretical and practical implications are various. For SME entrepreneurs, experimenting with their BMs does lead to improved performance.

Despite the increasing number of papers focussing on the relationship between BM and firm performance, the focus on female entrepreneurship, gender differences and BMI, more specifically the process of BMI as BM experimentation, is relatively rare.

The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

Some organizations are responding to the opportunity of innovation, while others are not. Harvard innovation expert Stefan H. Thomke says a key reason for the slow pace of innovation is that most organizations lack "a culture of experimentation." In this article the author explains the impediments to establishing such a culture. 10;

In his latest book, Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, 10;Thomke says, to create a culture of experimentation, firms need “a new model of leadership,” which cultivates curiosity, emphasizes data-informed decisions, experiments ethically, sets grand challenges and establishes systematic training and support for rapid experimentation. Those are all positive steps in the direction of creating a culture of experimentation.

But they won’t be enough because the underlying management model of most big organizations is explicitly aimed at preventing the very kind of experimentation that Thomke is recommending.

In a digital world, technology has made it radically simpler and quicker and cheaper to carry out and evaluate multiple experiments. The whole organization needs to become an organic living network of high-performance teams. In such firms competence resides throughout the organization and that innovation can and must come from anywhere. 10;

An important discussion of how top down managements squelch experimentation and thus throttle innovation.

Project management practices have been losing its central place in innovation processes within the companies due to its excessive control-oriented phased approach. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose and examine the project management practitioners' experiences on the systematic use of an experimentation framework to manage innovation projects.

Three case studies were carried out in three different Brazilian companies for a ten month period. The authors have chosen these companies for the following reasons: they were all in an innovation context; they have never carried out a project based on experimentation and they had previous experience with project management traditional tools.

The findings have shown that our framework can contribute to the project management available toolkit; once the rigid experimentation process, the authors’ proposed made it easier for project management practitioners to adapt to more flexible approaches. Nonetheless, stakeholders' involvement has shown to be a key success factor on the deployment of the framework.

Managers still need to add expertise in flexible methods into their managerial skills, so they are able to deal with innovation just as they deal with traditional processes they were trained to. This suggestion can also be extended to the business schools.

The case studies have shown that traditional project management practices can also be applied in innovation projects. So despite of generally being the opposite of an experimentation process, those practices are relevant in project management discipline, which means that formal project management training is still a good ally to project management practitioners.

To meet their ambitious targets for a circular economy, multinationals need to speed up their innovation efforts. This requires experimentation capability. But it is not clear what this capability entails, and how companies can build it. The purpose of this paper is to give companies guidance on how they might develop experimentation capability for the circular economy.

We conduct in-depth interviews with innovators in frontrunner multinationals, H&M, IKEA and Philips. We use the Gioia method to analyse our data.

This article identifies novel institutional, strategic, and operational actions that build experimentation capability for a circular economy.

The identified actions help innovation managers experiment and speed up their innovation efforts for a circular economy.

To reverse environmental degradation, multinationals need to transform their dominant linear take-make-waste business models. This research provides actions that help them organize this transformation.

This article is based on extensive research with leading multinationals and reveals novel insights on how to innovate for a circular economy.

Seeks to develop a model of different, contradictory, and even paradoxical, trends and approaches to management development (MD). Reviews current generic approaches to MD and offers a framework for the analysis of these approaches, based on Kolb’s work on experiential learning. Develops a four‐old analytical model which embraces both the practice and theory of MD in the UK and elsewhere. Makes brief mention of attempts to develop programmes for strategic managers, as opposed to more generic, usually operational manager‐oriented, programmes. Examines the relative paucity of advice on the development of strategic managers and whether there are qualitative differences between developing strategic and other managers.

This study enriches the theory of effectuation by discussing the four independent dimensions of effectuation and their relationships with causation. Additionally, we fill the gap in prior literature by showing how entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture. Our study of 171 practising entrepreneurs regarding their entrepreneurial decision-making logic yielded multiple findings. The authors find that entrepreneurs rely on causation as well as effectuation in their decision-making; the more experienced entrepreneurs are, the more they actually use causation; and entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture firm.

While it is widely recognized that firms in an era of technological ferment exist under conditions of significant uncertainty and ambiguity, little is known about the exact processes through which firms explore their ideas and resolve uncertainty. Arguing that our understanding of the era of ferment is much less developed than other aspects of the technology life cycle, we examine the micro-dynamics of technology-based entrepreneurial firms during this period. We focus on the role of purposeful experimentation as a key form of learning for start-ups firms in the era of ferment. Our approach contrasts with the prevailing view in the literature in which the era of ferment is characterized by extensive experimentation across firms, with each firm representing a single data point in an industry-level experiment. It also extends the learning literature by focusing on start-ups and taking the perspective that learning can encompass purposeful experimentation as well as local search and chaotic adaptation in the era of ferment. Building on the literature on experimental design, we propose a definition and taxonomy of purposeful experimentation. The taxonomy defines the experimental landscape as having three domains – technological, product and business model; and two dimensions – degree of simultaneity and degree of parameter manipulation. We examine this framework using data from a technology-based start-up and find evidence for purposeful experimentation as a key element of the firm’s learning strategy. We also highlight the organizational constraints and challenges that are associated with experimentation. Our findings emphasize the importance of entrepreneurial action, choice and internal experimentation processes.

This paper aims to explore management control in the strategic development of business model and managerial innovations. The issue is approached from the perspective of managerial work, aiming to outline what managers consider as essential elements of management control in these often iterative and learning-intensive developmental activities.

The study is based on the views of 20 managers engaged in strategic development and its control in various organisations. The interview data consist of the respondents’ experiences and project cases involving non-technological innovations. Qualitative content analysis is used to identify three key concepts of management control of business model and managerial innovations.

The findings suggest that with managerial and business model innovation, appropriate management control could be established by aligning the innovation being developed with the strategic story of the organisation, leveraging co-creational projects and experimentation with close customer contact.

The focus of this qualitative research is on building an initial framework. Future research could expand understanding of managerial work and accounting by examining this study’s outcomes in more practical detail in various contexts.

The findings of this study lead managers and researchers to consider management control of non-technological innovations as an enabling system supporting successful innovations.

This study adds a unique perspective to the literature by conceptualising and offering managerial implications for management control in the context of strategic development of non-technological innovations.