Incumbent firms struggle to renew themselves. Structural ambidexterity balances the exploitation of existing business with the exploration of new opportunities. But these inconsistent strategic agendas generate intense emotional challenges: Senior team frustration over conflicting priorities, board-driven pressures, hostile inter-unit emotions between exploitative and exploratory units, and precarious dynamics within exploratory teams. These emotional challenges undermine renewal efforts and are an underappreciated cause of organizational decline. Senior teams can address them by fostering emotional engagement with the future, expanding organizational identity, instilling discipline in exploration, and embedding empathy and self-awareness. CEOs can transform emotional hurdles into sources of innovation and renewal.

This special issue explores the transformative role of discrete events in fostering changes at different organizational levels, challenging traditional feature-oriented approaches that focus on stable attributes of individuals, groups, and organizations. Joining the growing body of event-oriented research in diverse settings, the nine published articles evoke a novel theoretical lens (i.e., Event System Theory) to examine a number of discrete events (e.g., everyday change events, organizational downsizing, merger, corporate scandal, technology implementation, the U.S.-China trade war, the Black Lives Matter movement). Their findings demonstrate the interesting ways discrete events disrupt routines, prompt adaptation, and impact individual and collective behaviors across various levels within organizations. Our further analysis underscores the importance of adopting an event-oriented perspective for a better understanding of management issues, offering new insights and directions for future research. We hope this special issue provides a robust foundation for integrating event-centric research approaches into organizational theory, emphasizing the need for continued empirical investigation and theoretical refinement in a variety of management research domains, such as strategic management, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, and human resource management.

Research SummaryWe develop new theory on incumbent firms' strategic decision-making and the associated emotional dynamics at platform transitions. Based on in-depth interviews with Nokia's senior leaders about their decision to adopt the Windows platform in 2011, we suggest that highly capable platform companies' entry into the established phone industry invalidated senior leaders' long-held core assumptions about the industry, triggering existential anxiety and stunting self-regulation. Distinct mechanisms then influenced senior leaders' emotions toward external platform options-myopic appraisals of firm competitiveness inside a platform (vs. platform competitiveness against other platforms), appraisals of changing firm boundaries, and emotional resonance of potential partners. These emotions contributed to emotional drift, with top managers ultimately favoring the emotionally attractive option. Our theorizing extends theory on platforms, strategy, and emotion.Managerial SummaryThis research provides fresh insights into how emotions play a crucial role in incumbent firms' strategic choices, especially in the context of evolving technology platforms and major industry shifts. Our research focused on Nokia's 2011 decision to adopt the Windows platform. We discovered that when new players, like platform companies, enter a market, they can unsettle longstanding beliefs, causing anxiety and decision-making challenges among top management. Specifically, we found that executives often focus too narrowly on their firm's ability to compete within a new platform rather than the platform's overall competitiveness. Additionally, changes in company boundaries and the emotional appeal of potential partners significantly influence these decisions. Executives' analyses emotionally drift such that they start favoring the emotionally attractive options.

A compelling growth ambition is a critical enabler for new ventures.

Existing research has explored the profound impact technologies may have on individuals, organizations, and industries. Recently, scholars have emphasized that multiple groups of actors—many with varying perspectives—participate in the field surrounding a new technology. The existence of different perspectives on the technology influences outcomes for the technology and the involved individuals, organizations, and industries. As the actors that participate in technological fields often reside within different organizations, it becomes important to explore how technologies are used and understood across organizational boundaries. Therefore, we seek to facilitate a conversation around how organizational members and market participants understand and use technologies across organizational boundaries. This perspective across boundaries helps scholars to consider the broad implications of new technologies which span boundaries more frequently, such as digital technologies that gather data across organizations and individuals. In this panel symposium, we bring together experts in technology to facilitate discussions on the impact of technologies across boundaries.

Management research has increasingly explored the domains of ecosystems, platforms, and open/user/distributed innovation - governance structures focused on engaging with external communities. While...

When organizations need input into their innovation or production process, they have traditionally been faced with the decision to make the input themselves or buy it through the market. However, rapidly decreasing information costs allow firms to harness external communities that are neither employees of the firm hierarchy, nor traditional contracted market participants such as supply chain partners. We introduce the managed ecosystem governance form in which a central organization engages external communities and also manages them by maintaining some degree of control over community activities. This model is evident in various organizational approaches including multi-sided platforms, crowdsourcing, and the gig economy. Building upon the knowledge-based view of the firm, we argue that these increasingly common governance models offer a wealth of opportunities, but require organizations to adopt a translucent institutional logic that is in-between the traditional closed logic of the firm and open logic of the market. To successfully employ this model, firms must learn to shepherd communities, leverage them without exploiting them, and share intellectual property rights.

Research SummaryWhy do incumbent firms frequently reject nonincremental innovations? Beyond technical, structural, or economic factors, we propose an additional factor: the degree of the top management team's (TMT) frame flexibility, i.e., their capability to cognitively expand an innovation's categorical boundaries and to cast the innovation as emotionally resonant with the organization's identity, competencies, and competitive boundaries. We argue that inertial forces generally constrict how TMTs perceive innovations, but that frame flexibility can overcome these constraints, increasing the likelihood of adoption and broadening the organization's innovation practices. We advance a theoretical model that relaxes the assumption that cognitive frames are static, showing how they become flexible via categorical positioning, and introduce a role for emotional frames that appeal to organizational members' sentiments and aspirations in innovation adoption.Managerial SummaryConfronting a technological change is one of the most difficult challenges facing any incumbent firm. Technological transitions create pressure for leaders to reframe their mental models while continuing to develop existing capabilities and product category variants. Yet at key junctures in a product class and during technological change, a concrete definition of the firm's innovation boundaries and identity hold a firm hostage to its past. We show how a flexible cognitive frame—coupled with emotional framing—helps leaders and organization members become emotionally engaged in transformation efforts and, in turn, learn about executing nonincremental innovation over time. At technological transitions, perhaps there is no more important role for leaders than to expand their cognitive frames and to infuse these expanded frames with emotion.

Systems thinking has been a mainstay of management theory and practice ever since W. Edwards Deming highlighted the importance of interdependencies driving organizational performance. At the organizational level of analysis scholars have a consensus that organizational success requires alignment of multiple elements of its system of organizing, managing and leading. Strategy, structure, processes, values, human resource systems, people, culture, and leader attitudes and behavior have to fit together if requisite organizational behavior and capabilities are to become the norm (Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967; Beer, 1980; Nadler & Tushman, 1988; Galbraith, 2002). Organizational failures occur when the organization’s environment – intensity of competition, relevant technologies and social environment – requires a transformation in the very system of high fit that previously promoted successful disciplines (Nelson & Winter, 1982). Organizations are also socio-emotional systems in which relationships and emotions play an important role in governing organizational behavior and affecting capacity for learning and change (Huy, 1999; Timo & Huy, 2016; Doz & Wilson, 2018). Over the years, two different approaches to working with organizational systems have emerged: one an expert driven approach, the other a process driven approach. The expert or consultant-driven approach treats the organizational system as a rational problem to be solved through the right diagnosis led by a limited number of skilled systems thinkers. Business process reengineering, lean/Six Sigma, and other diagnostics apply analytics to reveal objective truths about organizational performance (Liker & Morgan, 2006; Drake, et al., 2008; Hammer & Hershman, 2010). The top priority is applying expertise to analyze root causes of the problems before focusing on solutions and recommending changes to executives. The process-driven approach has a very different premise: a participative or high engagement approach is needed to ensure both accurate discovery and effective change. Because organizational systems are highly complex with myriad interdependencies, and emotions and relationships affect receptivity to change, excluding the people who live within the system on a daily basis from the diagnostic and solution identification process minimizes the likelihood of implementing the best changes possible (Weisbord, 1987; Bunker & Alban, 1992; Worley, et al., 2011). This approach assumes there are “subjective” truths to be revealed and incorporated into the solution. Strategy consultants and people who view organizations as logical problems to be solved promote the expert driven approach. Organizational development practitioners and people who care deeply about the humans in the organizational system, and who recognize the folly of ignoring their perspectives, promote the process driven approach. The former is a largely top-down approach, while the latter is bottom-up. Taken at face value, the two approaches appear to be quite different in how they discover the barriers in an organization’s system of organizing, managing and leading, and how to change such a system to improve performance. However, what do they look like in practice, when applied in the messy realities of complex organizations? Our collective experience with research and practice on organizational systems has taught us that the system’s complexity renders simplistic diagnoses ineffective. So perhaps neither a pure top-down nor bottom-up approach can necessarily be “the” dominant strategy to pursue. This panel symposium addresses this question through a structured discussion of how the theory of systems work gets applied in practice, and what appears to work best on the frontlines of organizational diagnosis and change. And, what experience tells us are the major organizational and management barriers to system transformation.

Open innovation processes promise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products, or services arising from these approaches. Certainly, crowdsourcing platforms (among other open innovation methods) have yielded striking solutions to hard scientific and technological problems—prominent examples being the