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To explain the origin of novel strategies I elaborate the managerial judgment perspective as an alternative to the serendipity and managerial foresight views on the origin of novel strategies proposed in the earlier literature. The managerial judgment perspective closely integrates resource-based theories and theories of managerial cognition. It builds centrally on the construct of “management’s theory of success” as a representation of managers’ beliefs and expectations concerning the factors that lead to desired outcomes in the light of Knightean uncertainty and that is formed through learning from small samples over time. The managerial judgment perspective may be seen as a theory that explains the formation of strategies independently from their eventual performance, but may also shed light on the cognitive antecedents of superior performance. It also argues for a conception of strategic agency in terms of ecological rationality.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for the intermediation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Governments may apply different form of support with the aim of increasing corporatization and internationalization of SOEs. The paper suggests a strategy based on institutional intermediation as the more efficient to drive corporatization and internationalization.

The research selected cases concerning SOEs in different industries in Europe in search of recurrences from a novel theoretical perspective. Among them, a case study concerning the Italian Space Agency explores the development of an institutional intermediary.

Government supports to SOEs appear in different forms and contribute to different results. A typology of the most recurrent forms shows three different types of actions governments have taken to support internationalization of firms. Intermediation seems the most suitable to trigger corporatization and internationalization.

The study explores institutional intermediaries as a novel supporting strategy for governments. It proposes a novel concept based upon a single case study. Further research needs to test and verify the institutional intermediaries’ impact drawing on a larger sample and different contexts.

So far, few attempts have linked corporatization to globalization. The paper tries to fill this gap between corporatization and internationalization of SOEs. Its value is the provision of a novel view that includes institutional intermediaries as instrumental to governments’ strategy that aims to bridge the two components.

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for practitioners for developing creative strategies and new business models.

This paper reviews more than 150 interviews with CEOs, directors and business unit heads from across functional areas over the past decade, and captures best practices in strategy development and business modelling.

Findings of this study were combined with a review of relevant research papers from leading academic and practitioner journals to identify three critical management practices: challenging mental models, looking beyond logic and encouraging openness for new ideas, which enable organizations to develop creative strategies for building better business models.

This paper demonstrates how these three practices combined can serve as a much needed tool for creative strategy design and development, particularly for established companies, when confronted with new forms of competition.

In order to solve the problems faced by First Order Reliability Method (FORM) and First Order Saddlepoint Approximation (FOSA) in structural reliability optimization, this paper aims to propose a new Reliability-based Design Optimization (RBDO) strategy for offshore engineering structures based on Original Probabilistic Model (OPM) decoupling strategy. The application of this innovative technique to other maritime structures has the potential to substantially improve their design process by optimizing cost and enhancing structural reliability.

In the strategy proposed by this paper, sequential optimization and reliability assessment method and surrogate model are used to improve the efficiency for solving RBDO. The strategy is applied to the analysis of two marine engineering structure cases of ship cargo hold structure and frame ring of underwater skirt pile gripper. The effectiveness of the method is proved by comparing the original design and the optimized results.

In this paper, the proposed new RBDO strategy is used to optimize the design of the ship cargo hold structure and the frame ring of the underwater skirt pile gripper. According to the results obtained, compared with the original design, the structure of optimization design has better reliability and stability, and reduces the risk of failure. This optimization can also better balance the relationship between performance and cost. Therefore, it is recommended for related RBDO problems in the field of marine engineering.

In view of the limitations of FORM and FOSA that may produce multiple MPPs for a single performance function, the new RBDO strategy proposed in this study provides valuable insights and robust methods for the optimization design of offshore engineering structures. It emphasizes the importance of combining advanced MPP search technology and integrating SORA and surrogate models to achieve more economical and reliable design.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an effective and simple technique to structural damage identification, particularly to identify a crack in a structure. Artificial neural networks approach is an alternative to identify the extent and location of the damage over the classical methods. Radial basis function (RBF) networks are good at function mapping and generalization ability among the various neural network approaches. RBF neural networks are chosen for the present study of crack identification.

Analyzing the vibration response of a structure is an effective way to monitor its health and even to detect the damage. A novel two‐stage improved radial basis function (IRBF) neural network methodology with conventional RBF in the first stage and a reduced search space moving technique in the second stage is proposed to identify the crack in a cantilever beam structure in the frequency domain. Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) technique is used in both stages to sample the frequency modal patterns to train the proposed network. Study is also conducted with and without addition of 5% white noise to the input patterns to simulate the experimental errors.

The results show a significant improvement in identifying the location and magnitude of a crack by the proposed IRBF method, in comparison with conventional RBF method and other classical methods. In case of crack location in a beam, the average identification error over 12 test cases was 0.69 per cent by IRBF network compared to 4.88 per cent by conventional RBF. Similar improvements are reported when compared to hybrid CPN BPN networks. It also requires much less computational effort as compared to other hybrid neural network approaches and classical methods.

The proposed novel IRBF crack identification technique is unique in originality and not reported elsewhere. It can identify the crack location and crack depth with very good accuracy, less computational effort and ease of implementation.

Purpose – This chapter offers a unique examination of the influence of a city’s electoral arrangements and political culture on the governing capacity of minority mayors. Highlighting the important roles played by institutional context in shaping the agendas and opportunities for minority mayors enriches the scholarly discussion of descriptive representation.Approach – I employ case study examinations of the three minority mayors elected from the city of Denver, Colorado, focusing prominently on current mayor Michael B. Hancock. I utilize archival data consisting of accounts from local newspaper stories, journal articles, and written recollections from the mayors themselves to evaluate how well three distinct electoral strategies—including a novel strategy, which I have termed as the issue agreement coalition model—aid mayors in advancing the interests of their shared race constituencies. I evaluate these strategies by assessing relevant policy outcomes and economic indicators.Findings – Observational comparisons lead me to conclude that across a variety of issue domains, the issue agreement coalition model provides minority mayors with the greatest capacity to advance their shared race constituencies’ interests, whereas the deracialization model provides the least.Value – This chapter is of value to students of urban politics, particularly those interested in descriptive representation. The novel electoral strategy introduced here provides scholars with a new paradigm allowing for richer evaluations of minority mayoral tenures. Additionally, the focus on the relationship between institutional context and mayoral governing capacity can aid scholars’ understanding of the unique opportunities and limitations facing minority mayors.

Following the lead of neighboring fields such as strategy and organization studies, entrepreneurship is gradually joining in the adoption of a practice perspective. Entrepreneurship as practice (EaP) is thus a nascent domain of investigation where the methodological debate is still unsettled and very fluid. In this paper, the authors contribute to this debate with a focus on family entrepreneurship.

The authors develop a conceptual paper to discuss what it entails to look at family entrepreneurship through a practice lens and why it is fruitful. Moreover, the authors propose a research strategy novel to the field through which such investigation can be pursued, namely process tracing, and examine its inferential logic.

Process tracing is a strategy of data analysis underpinned by an ontology of causal mechanisms. The authors argue that it complements other practice methods by inferring social mechanisms from empirical evidence and thereby establishing a connection between praxis, practices and practitioners.

Process tracing helps the articulation of an “integrated model” of practice that relates praxis, practices and practitioners to the outcome they jointly produce. By enabling the assessment of impact, process tracing helps providing prima facie evidentiary grounds for policy action and intervention.

Process tracing affinity with the practice perspective has been so far acknowledged only to a limited extent in the social sciences, and it is, in fact, a novel research strategy for the family entrepreneurship field.

Metamodels are widely used to replace simulation models in engineering design optimization to reduce the computational cost. The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel sequential sampling strategy (weighted accumulative error sampling, WAES) to obtain accurate metamodels and apply it to improve the quality of global optimization.

A sequential single objective formulation is constructed to adaptively select new sample points. In this formulation, the optimization objective is to select a sample point with the maximum weighted accumulative predicted error obtained by analyzing data from previous iterations, and a space-filling criterion is introduced and treated as a constraint to avoid generating clustered sample points. Based on the proposed sequential sampling strategy, a two-step global optimization approach is developed.

The proposed WAES approach and the global optimization approach are tested in several cases. A comparison has been made between the proposed approach and other existing approaches. Results illustrate that WAES approach performs the best in improving metamodel accuracy and the two-step global optimization approach has a great ability to avoid local optimum.

The proposed WAES approach overcomes the shortcomings of some existing approaches. Besides, the two-step global optimization approach can be used for improving the optimization results.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper concentrates on setting out a range of strategic entrepreneurial approaches that are adopted during economic booms or economic crises. Those entrepreneurs who apply themselves creatively to pivoting their business strategy during a recession give themselves the opportunity to reap the highest rewards if their approach is successful. This may involve adapting existing strategies or forming novel ones amid considerable uncertainty. The mental capacity for enduring these scenarios is what sets entrepreneurs apart as insatiably evolving, knowledge-gathering leaders who can transform society despite the odds being against them.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

This study aims to examine the relationship between organizational capacity, slack resource, platform strategic choice and firm performance. It also tackles the endogenous issues regarding the strategic choice of platform types.

This study uses Heckman’s two-stage procedures to examine the relationship between the variables. The sample in this study comes from Compustat annual company and segment files. The sample used in the main analysis consists of 252 individual corporations globally and 3,528 firm-year observations from 2004–2017.

The empirical results suggest that: (1) firms are more likely to develop physical platforms than virtual platforms when they possess higher levels of available slack, potential slack, research and development (R&D) capacity and marketing capacity; (2) in general, firms developing physical platforms perform better than firms developing virtual platforms after the endogeneity bias are controlled; and (3) firms that choose to develop physical platforms perform better than if they had chosen to develop virtual platforms.

This study contributes to the platform research literature by proposing the endogenous role of platform type choice in firm performance in the context of the retail industry. Prior conceptual and theoretical platform studies have seldom focused on the retail industry through a strategic choice perspective. Furthermore, one of the contributions of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the research’s prediction using data from actual firms carried out by global physical and virtual platform companies. This study also presents many opportunities for further explorations on the relationship between firm strategic choice and firm performance in the context of platform retail industry.

The findings of this study suggest that firms must realize that their performance is not necessarily affected by these platform type choice determinants in terms of potential slack, available slack, R&D capacity and marketing capacity. By contrast, they should pay more attention to developing physical platforms if it is possible. The study findings indicate that although virtual platforms have grown rapidly because of the development of technology, firm performance is at all times superior when firms choose to develop physical platforms.

Prior platform studies have focused on the topic of network structure, platform architecture, pricing strategy, platform leadership and platform design and governance within the context of video game industry, software industry, hardware industry and telecommunications industry. Seldom of them focus on other industries through a strategic choice perspective. Furthermore, one of the contributions of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the research’s prediction using data from actual firms carried out by global physical and virtual platform companies.