How do incumbent firms use diversification to modify corporate scope in times of technological change? The literature has examined diversification as a portfolio configuration, distinguishing between related and unrelated diversification and assessing its performance implications. Yet, this literature hasn’t elaborated on how firms redefine corporate scope when new technologies blur industry boundaries and challenge incumbents’ competitive positioning. Our Structural Topic Modelling of the yearly reports of Royal Philips N.V. from 1950 to 2024 – juxtaposed to real evidence of strategic actions – shows that a period of apparently unrelated diversification, associated with the implementation of new technologies, provides room for strategic change. We contribute to diversification literature by theorising unrelated diversification not only as a possible source of inefficiency, but also as a transitional strategic space - a time when firms seek new strategic positioning and modify corporate scope. We also contribute to strategic renewal by showing how language reveals the gradual formation of a new corporate scope before its full employment in the firm’s portfolio choices. We suggest that managers employ diversification not only to promote immediate relatedness but also to preserve optionality, recombine capabilities, and construct a new corporate scope.

Experimentation plays a vital role in firms’ activities and strategies. Yet, we still have a scant understanding of the processes underpinning experimentation for business modelling in startups. Through a qualitative longitudinal case, we investigate how a startup reshapes its value proposition and engages with external market stakeholders – in this case end customers – when their heterogeneity could not be catered by the first business model designed by the entrepreneur. We look at cases where a business model, originally envisioned with a single value proposition, needs to cater different groups of customers (i.e., product users, buyers, and beneficiaries) with diverse expectations in terms of value and engagement. Our study identifies a ‘selection loop’ process formed of three different experimentation phases – environment-based stress, cognitive-driven adaptation, and stakeholder-led evolution. This process contributes to better understand how managerial cognition drives business model design and experimentation towards a “fit” between the entrepreneur’s cognitive model and the stakeholders in the external environment. We also advance the cognitive perspective on business models as we take a cognitive lens to explore experimentation as a process to identify and adapt a business model to emerging evidence about a startup’s customers.

Firms reconfigure their resources when responding to changes in their external or internal environment, often by incorporating new knowledge and resources in collaboration with external stakeholders. However, the reconfiguration process is challenging, costly, and often fails. The firm’s history plays an important role in the resource reconfiguration process being path dependent. Path dependency, debatably, leads to lock-in effects that prevent reconfiguration. However, we argue that this is a very limited viewpoint. In this paper, drawing empirical evidence from the digital games industry, we contend that path dependency constrains the reconfiguration action space and can potentially improve strategic planning by identifying the paths of least resistance. Depending on the extent of the reconfiguration, we identify two alternatives: direct reconfiguration (horizontal reconfiguration) or increasing the complexity by incorporating additional configurations (vertical reconfiguration).

Research on clusters highlights that some areas display superior conditions to locally nurture concentrations of businesses. But why do certain industries—despite ascribing their origin to specific...

Translating knowledge from research producers to research users is the key for firms to achieve competitive advantage in the long term. Translation and exchange seldom rely on the design and use of knowledge maps that help to identify and visualise the key constructs and the primary connections among them. Despite the existing literature on knowledge translation has analysed various practices, it has neglected to use tensions as a means to translate, transfer, and create new knowledge. This research aims at cross-fertilising business model literature with tensions to show how a business model framework can be used to identify and solve tensions in a firm's strategic choices. This paper employs a longitudinal case study observing a leading company in the professional ovens industry. The research expands on the value triangle by arguing that tensions can be encompassed in complex frameworks that visualise a business model. It also shows to what extent leveraging on tensions can help researchers translating knowledge to practitioners and other stakeholders. The literature has analysed several tools and techniques to translate knowledge. However, no previous studies have investigated the role of the tensions' analysis of business models as an effective method to translate knowledge.

Technological innovation and competitive pressure push incumbent manufacturers to transform into hybrid service providers making servitization one of the most relevant drivers for value creation. Servitization trajectories affect, however, the long-term prospects of firms as changes in strategic and organizational aspects may become necessary to drive the change. Despite the scale and implications of the phenomenon, literature provides scant evidence of the process and main implications of shifting from a product-based to a solution-based business model. Thus, our work is centered around the question: “To what extent the process of servitization can lead incumbents to form an ecosystem?”. To respond to this question, we qualitatively investigate Philips, the Dutch firm that has been among the first to shift from a product-based business model to a service-centric one study. We investigate the process of formation of an ecosystem in the healthcare industry and we present a set of three strategic choices - each enabled by a set of three factors - that modify an incumbent’s internal resources and external network of strategic partnerships as well as its organizational structure.

Despite the critical role of the pre-commercialization phase, little is known about industry-level dynamics where focal areas nurture user entrepreneurship and ultimately industry inception. By conducting an historical case study on the emergence of the global sport climbing industry through the RockMaster event in Arco (Italy), this study examines an under-theorized type of phenomenon, the “catalyzing places”—iconic venues which trigger and sustain processes for industry inception and emergence. We show how these places can potentially exert, over communities of practice on a global scale, three distinctive types of forces—centripetal, catalyzing, and centrifugal—and originate cyclical processes which foster industries through the establishment of new entrepreneurial ventures, products, technologies, and practices. We discuss the implications for theory and practice on industry inception, spaces, and user entrepreneurship.

A huge amount of data, characterised by its sheer volume, variety and velocity (3Vs), is generated by peoples actions and machine activities. This is referred to as Big Data, which is gaining attention from academics and practitioners alike who are exploring its potential in the decision-making process. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the negative externalities - the risks and consequences of Big Data. We offer a more balanced perspective of this global phenomenon by exploring the Dark Side of Big Data. Using primary and secondary cases, we present a classification framework of risks and, building on theories on risk management, offer a structured approach to evaluating the characteristics of each risk type, in order to determine how best it can be mitigated

This study contributes to understanding the effects of crowdfunding on the value creation process in the digital game industry. Specifically, it integrates the value chain logic with the platform logic to examine collaborative value creation enabled by opening up the business models of game developers to the crowd. Through a multiple case design this research shows that the benefit of using crowdfunding goes well beyond fundraising. As an implementation of open innovation, crowdfunding unifies the channels that bring capital, technology and market knowledge from the crowd into the game. This finding leads to the exploration of a new complex system of interactions between game developers and value chain stakeholders, and invokes the analysis of crowdfunding as a form of technological platform to identify and analyze new types of collaboration and competition. This research limits its findings to the effects of reward-based crowdfunding. Other forms of crowdfunding require further investigations. The paper also aims to help practitioners understand how crowdfunding is transforming the game industry.

Big Data has been hailed as the next big thing' to drive business value, transform organisations and industries, and reveal secrets to those with the humility, willingness and tools to listen' (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013: 5). However, despite growing interest from organisations across industry sectors, Big Data applications appear to have concentrated on delivering incremental change and operational efficiency improvements, with little evidence on using Big Data to facilitate strategic, transformational change. In this paper, we explore how Big Data can be used across different sectors in leading organisations and examine the ways in which it is fostering change in the core operations models of organisations. A definition of operations model' is developed and the core dimensions of an operations model are then examined, namely capacity, supply network, process and technology, and people development and organisation. Through a series of case studies, we examine the role of Big Data in affecting some, or all, of these dimensions in order to generate value for the organisation by optimising, adapting or radically transforming the operations model. Following our analysis, we develop a tentative framework which can be used both for understanding how Big Data affects operations models, and for planning changes in operations models through Big Data. We set out a new research agenda to systematically understand the full potential of Big Data in transforming operations models.

The study presented in this paper investigates companies operating in the UK video-game industry with regard to their levels of survivability. Using a unique dataset of companies founded between 2009 and 2014, and combining elements and theories from the fields of Organisational Ecology and Industrial Organisation, the authors develop a set of hierarchical logistic regressions to explore and examine the effects of a range of variables such as industry concentration, market size and density on companies' survival rates. The analysis addresses locational dimension of the video-game industry is considered by introducing an extra regionally-related variable into the models, associated with the number of video-game university programmes locally available. In addition, companies are investigated with regard to their organisational type in order to identify potential effects associated with their intrinsic organisational structures.Findings from the analysis confirm that UK video-game companies operate in an increasingly globalised market, limiting the effects related to any operation conducted at a local level. For instance, a higher supply of specialised graduates within spatial proximity does not contributt significantly to increase the chances of survivability of video-game companies, although different locations seem to provide better conditions and higher life expectancy, mainly due to positive network effects occurring at a local level. Results seem also to suggest that investing in managerial resources increases businesses' survival rates, corroborating evidence about the significant role entrepreneurs have for companies operating within innovative and technologically intensive industries. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.

The notion of smart cities is growing in prominence in the digital economy. The integration of urban infrastructures with information and communication technologies enables the development of new operations models. Digitised infrastructures offer opportunities for public and private organisations to design and deliver more customer-centric products or services, particularly for those that require geographical proximity with consumers in the online to offline (O2O) context. A framework is developed and used to analyse three case examples. These cases illustrate the emergence of new operations models and, demonstrate how smart cities are redefining the characteristics of operations models around their scalability, analytical output and connectivity. We also explore the feasibility, vulnerability and acceptability of each new operation. This paper contributes to our understanding of how smart cities can potentially transform operational models, and sets out a research agenda for operations management in smart cities in the digital economy.

Game Intelligence is knowledge gained by the player or by analysing the data players generate by playing digital games. Serious games for education, raising public awarenesss or changing the players' behaviour are well established and have provided Game Intelligence for decades [1]. However, more recently a trend has begun, inspired by the success of FoldIt [2], [3], of developing games for scientific discovery. These games lower the barrier of entry to complex scientific topics, allowing gamers to contribute to cutting edge research. We argue that this approach is currently underutilized and explore a vision where these games have wider impact. Furthermore, we will discuss the potential of extracting Game Intelligence from games designed originally for entertainment, potentially making all games into scientific discovery games.

The crowd matters. Abrahamson, Ryder and Unterberg explain this (apparently intuitive) concept by looking at how organizations acknowledge the value of external talent and decide to tap into it. Bu...

The digital games industry - along with the music, lm and book industries - is commonly referred to as part of the creative industry. However, although they can all be grouped under the same label, the digital game industry is the only one that is natively digital. During the past decade, the industry experienced a phenomenal growth in terms of social and economic significance. However, the impact of the industry, in socioeconomic terms, has remained unexplored in academic literature. Our project, NEMOG1, leverages on the impact that the high degree of innovation has on all the stakeholders along the industry value chain, it addresses the changes enabled by technology in terms of business models and industrial organizational structure. To do so, the first year of research has focused on three research issues: the analysis of the impact of technology on business models innovation in the digital game industry, the mapping of the evolutionary trajectory of the industry's business model in-novation process [8], the innovation mechanisms that fuelled this particular path and growing areas of potential uses of digital games outside of purely entertainment purposes.

Since 1990, Business Models emerged as a new unit of interest among both academics and practitioners. An emerging theme in the growing academic literature is focused on developing a system that employs business models as a focal point of enterprise classification. In this paper we attempt a historical analysis of the video game industry business model evolution and examine the process through the prism of two-sided market economics. Based on the biological school of phylogenetic classification, we develop a cladogram that captures the evolution process and classifies the industry's business models. The classification system is regarded as a first attempt to provide an exploratory and descriptive research of the video game industry, before attempting an explanatory and predictive analysis, and introduces a system that is not governed by the industry's specific characteristics and can be universally applied, providing a map for researchers and practitioners to test organisational differences and contribute further to the business model knowledge.

In 2010 the European Commission (EC) undertook a review of its current Universal Service Obligation (USO) to discuss whether or not broadband should be included in it. In fact, convergence of telephony, internet and media, further market liberalization and rapid technological development in the broadband market challenge the traditional definition of USO and increasingly question its notion of a “basic set of communication services”, which does not include broadband. In this context, the paper looks at the origins, the theoretical arguments for, and the empirical basis of the USO in light of the ongoing debate in the EU, and links these arguments to technological developments and changing demand conditions in European broadband markets. The authors propose that the European Commission should include in its future USO regulation provisions for a wider set of services based on Next Generation Access (NGA) networks rooted in the EC's new regulatory approach. Even if these provisions have not been included in the new USO framework in November 2011 further discussions are needed to account for the new realities of broadband markets in the European Union.

A number of regional initiatives have recently revived the Italian broadband sector, although their fortunes vary depending on governance, market and geographical issues. However, all these initiatives jointly succeeded in sparking a heated debate on how public-private interplay can facilitate the deployment of broadband networks in a country still lagging behind European frontrunners such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. In the light of European Union regulation and recent case law, the paper examines three regional initiatives (Progetto Banda Ultra Larga Lombardia, Trentino Network and Lepida Emilia Romagna) by using the conceptual model on public private interplay developed by Nucciarelli, Sadowski, and Achard (2010). Thereafter, the paper elaborates on initiatives' ups and downs to focus on conditions and trigger events that have made them a success or a failure story. Lessons learnt conclude. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.