Search results

Societal grand challenges have moved from a marginal concern to a mainstream issue within organization and management theory. How diverse forms of organizing help tackle – or reinforce – grand challenges has become centrally important. In this introductory paper, we take stock of the contributions to the volume on Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges and identify three characteristics of grand challenges that require further scholarly attention: their interconnectedness, fluidity, and paradoxical nature. We also emphasize the need to expand our methodological repertoire and reflect upon our practices as a scholarly community.

This study employs the social ecology model to comprehensively explore the complex challenges young Black men face in South Africa and aims to highlight the importance of collaboration in addressing these multifaceted issues.

A multidisciplinary approach combines insights from sociology, education and the health literature with regard to government reports and academic data, and provides a holistic analysis of challenges faced by young Black men. Furthermore, it emphasises formal and informal learning, social and environmental influences and health disparities.

Young Black men in South Africa encounter complex challenges throughout their developmental journey, including limited family support, educational barriers, financial constraints, societal expectations and health disparities. Therefore, collaboration among stakeholders is essential for creating an equitable and inclusive environment that supports their development.

This research provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by young Black men in South Africa by emphasising the interconnectedness of informal education, economic empowerment and healthcare. Future research should focus on longitudinal studies, cultural influences and international comparisons, informing evidence-based interventions for a more equitable society.

In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative’s success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders’ aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.

While sustainability-oriented education is increasingly placing importance on engaging students in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes with societal actors and authentic challenges in the centre, little research attends to how and what students learn in such educational initiatives. This paper aims to address this by opening the “black box” of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum with transformational sustainability ambitions.

Realist evaluation was used as an analytical frame that takes social context into account to unpack learning mechanisms and associated learning outcomes. A socio-cultural perspective on learning was adopted, and ethnographic methods, including interviews and observations, were used.

Three context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations were identified, capturing what students placed value and emphasis on when developing capabilities for leading sustainability transformations: engaging with complex “in-between” sustainability challenges in society with stakeholders across sectors and perspectives; navigating purposeful and transformative change via backcasting; and “whole-person” learning from the inside-out as an identity-shaping process, guided by personal values.

The findings of this paper can inform the design, development, evaluation and comparison of similar educational initiatives across institutions, while leaving room for contextual negotiation and adjustment.

This paper delineates and discusses important learning mechanisms and outcomes when students act as co-creators of knowledge in a sustainability-oriented educational initiative, working with authentic challenges together with societal actors.

The dynamics of modern life lead to societal changes that affect innovation systems. Entrepreneurship is an important driver for fostering adaptive capacities of innovation systems in such uncertain and complex environments. This study aims to gain a detailed understanding of how (innovative) entrepreneurship can promote innovation systems, leading to more sustainable societies. A particular focus is placed on migrant entrepreneurship in the digital economy, as a concrete implication of innovative entrepreneurship, and its role within the Austrian innovation system.

In order to develop a shared system understanding from a scientific and practical perspective, transdisciplinary multistage system modeling was applied. The transdisciplinary discourse involved 14 experts, and several system models were iteratively co-created during the course of the research.

The main result demonstrates the interrelationship between the innovation system and migrant entrepreneurship in the digital economy, which includes six core reinforcing loops: (1) the mindsets of entrepreneurs, (2) the role of international collaboration, (3) the role of entrepreneurial education, the financial sphere in regard to (4) government and (5) private funding, as well as (6) the impact of formal procedures.

The authors present and discuss the relational dynamics of this complex phenomenon as well as the applied transdisciplinary approach, with the aim of identifying a potential way to improve the sustainable impact of (migrant) entrepreneurship considering the case of the Austrian innovation system.

This chapter explores the empirical and empathetic approaches employed by a group of fieldworkers from Japan who collaborated with individuals from different parts of Southeast Asia. Their objective was to address shared societal challenges and mentor the next generation of future talents. Additionally, research administrators at Kyoto University conducted an online survey and organized study group meetings focused on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) coordination, engaging approximately 700 partners in ASEAN. While formal job guidelines for hiring full-time research administrators are rare in the region, many researchers and government officials in ASEAN recognised the importance of these coordination skills and values in advancing STI projects. Coordinating ASEAN-Japan projects has demonstrated that practical experiences with skilled professionals and strong interpersonal skills aligned with Asian cultural values that prioritize conscience and altruism. As a next step, the region will require appropriate human resource training and assessment programs tailored to local STI needs.

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.

This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

Although the industrial application of drones is increasing quickly, there is a scarcity of applications in manufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to explore current and potential applications of drones in manufacturing, examine the opportunities and challenges involved and propose a research agenda.

The paper reports the result of an extensive qualitative investigation into an emerging phenomenon. The authors build on the literature on advanced manufacturing technologies. Data collected through in-depth interviews with 66 drone experts from 56 drone vendors and related services are analyzed using an inductive research design.

Drones represent a promising AMT that is expected to be used in several applications in manufacturing in the next few years. This paper proposes a typology of drone applications in manufacturing, explains opportunities and challenges involved and develops a research agenda. The typology categorizes four types of applications based on the drones’ capabilities to “see,” “sense,” “move” and “transform.”

The proposed research agenda offers a guide for future research on drones in manufacturing. There are many research opportunities in the domains of industrial engineering, technology development and behavioral operations.

Guidance on current and promising potentials of drones in manufacturing is provided to practitioners. Particularly interesting applications are those that help manufacturers “see” and “sense” data in their factories. Applications that “move” or “transform” objects are scarcer, and they make sense only in special cases in very large manufacturing facilities.

The application of drones in manufacturing is in its infancy, but is foreseen to grow rapidly over the next decade. This paper presents the first academically rigorous analysis of potential applications of drones in manufacturing. An original and theory-informed typology for drone applications is a timely contribution to the nascent literature. The research agenda presented assists the establishment of a new stream of literature on drones in manufacturing.

This study aims to examine the entrepreneurship profiles of migrants and refugees relying on a neo-configurational approach that increases understanding of causal complexity, equifinality and causal asymmetry patterns to high entrepreneurial intentions in the two groups.

Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method, the authors analysed 52 respondents – migrants and refugees. The findings show the existence of equifinality in which different configurations can lead to high and low entrepreneurial intentions, underlying that traumatic experiences have a major role in entrepreneurial intention. It also demonstrates that core conditions are associated with refugee’s configurations and causal asymmetry. The cross-sectional character of this research impedes the searching for a better causal relationship. The lack of studies that approach the subject of refugees makes it challenging to develop a robust theory in this sense.

The paper highlights five main configurations – two related to migrants’ profile and three related to refugees’ profile – that enable expanding the current knowledge and practices to better customize practices to increase entrepreneurial intention.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research using a configurational approach to explore migrant and refugee entrepreneurship intention profiles.