PurposeChina has climbed from 22nd in the Global Innovation Index Rankings in 2017 to 11th in the 2022 due to the transition of its manufacturing firms from assemblers to system integrators. This paper examines how firms can enhance their innovation capability through inbound and outbound open innovation.Design/methodology/approachThis paper applies both open innovation and a knowledge-based view and proposes a conceptual framework that encompasses innovation capability and the significance of tacit knowledge acquisition. A questionnaire was designed to collect relevant data from 139 Chinese manufacturing firms in six regions to test this framework.FindingsThe authors found that inbound open innovation has a stronger impact than outbound open innovation on synergistic innovation capability. The acquisition of skill-based tacit knowledge has a slightly stronger intermediary role between open innovation (no matter inbound or outbound) and synergistic innovation capability than cognitive tacit knowledge does.Practical implicationsFirms should improve external tacit knowledge acquisition efforts to generate new knowledge, inspire the innovation passion of employees and implement ambidextrous open innovation.Originality/valueThis paper makes a good first step to analyze the effect of ambidextrous open innovation on the synergistic innovation capability of Chinese manufacturing firms. It verifies the role of skill-based and cognitive tacit knowledge acquisition and provides new reflections on open innovation strategy in emerging economies, thus enriching open innovation and knowledge-based theories.

Electronic participation (e-participation) has become an increasingly important phenomenon. Drawing from the information system success model and political efficacy, we built a research model that investigates how government feedback quality, information quality, and channel quality associated with an e-participating channel can affect people's electronic political efficacy, which, in turn, can influence users' post-adoption attitudes and behaviors. We also explored the relationship between offline political efficacy and electronic political efficacy. Based on data that we collected from a survey, we found that electronic political efficacy distinctly differs from offline political efficacy though the latter influences the former one. Four channel features (i.e., government feedback quality, information quality, media richness, and social presence of citizens) can affect electronic political efficacy, which, in turn, has a positive influence on e-participation continuance intention and positive word of mouth. We also found that government feedback quality negatively moderated the impact that offline political efficacy had on electronic political efficacy. This study provides useful insights for both researchers and practitioners on the power of electronic channels in electronic participation in public discourse.

PurposeThis study focuses on understanding how channel features can affect people's intention to continue to use an electronic channel in public affairs and their recommendation behaviors. Specifically, three different channels are focused on: email, microblogs and online meetings.Design/methodology/approachA research model on an e-participation channel based on the channel-disposition framework was developed and an online survey was conducted to collect data from 397 individuals who used three e-participation channels to validate seven hypotheses.FindingsThe study found that information quality, channel interaction quality and the social appearance of other citizens all had a significant impact on users' intention to continue to use an electronic channel, which, in turn, affected their recommendation behaviors. However, the impact differed across the three e-participation channels. Information quality had a stronger impact on microblog and online meeting users' intention to continue to use these channels than on email users' intention to continue using email to participate in public affairs. Channel interaction quality had a stronger impact on email users' intention to continue to use email than on microblog and online meeting users' intention to continue to use these channels in public affairs.Originality/valueThis study helps better explain how various channels and their features can affect participants' use intentions and behaviors in e-participation. It also provides practical guidance for government to better manage e-participation channels and effectively engage citizens in public affairs.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to understand how IT capabilities for knowledge management and process integration can build a firm's agile process capabilities for sensing, strategic decision and responding. The study also investigates how the three agile capabilities affect firm performance in different competitive environments.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted a large-scale field survey with firms in the United States. Survey invitations were sent to business executives of the target firms. A total of 254 complete samples were collected for our hypotheses test.FindingsThe results confirm the overall significant roles of IT capabilities in the three agile capabilities. The results further reveal that the IT capability for knowledge management has a higher influence on sensing capability, while the IT capability for process integration has a higher influence on responding capability. Moreover, strategic decision and responding capabilities are more important in the high market competition. However, in the low market competition, sensing capability becomes more important while responding capability demonstrates a negative impact on firm performance.Originality/valueThis study helps both academics and practitioners better understand a firm's IT-agility-performance mechanism. Particularly, our findings guide how to achieve agile capabilities and what to focus on under the different levels of market competition.

Sharing economy has grown dramatically and created many new business models these days. As one type of sharing economy, bike sharing has experienced the exponential growth within short time. With keen competitions, many bike-sharing startups face the challenges in service delivery and profit generation. This study attempts to understand the development of these start-ups by examining how three entrepreneurship processes (i.e., bricolage, effectuation, and causation processes) take places when they address various internal and external challenges. We conducted a case study in a bike sharing company in China and collected qualitative data using semi-structured interviews. The preliminary findings suggest three entrepreneurship processes occurred and shaped the strategies and operations of the company. We expect the findings can contribute to digital innovation and sharing economy literature.

Background: The information technology (IT) project environment in developing economies is complex and dynamic due to their unique social, technological, cultural, and political contexts. However, the unique risk factors involved in IT projects in developing economies have seldom been discussed in the literature. This study proposes a conceptual framework for identifying risks in IT projects by considering the unique characteristics of project management in developing economies. Method: 17 project cases were examined via a series of expert interviews in Cambodia and Uganda. The interview results were coded into a total of 257 risk incidents, which were used to validate the proposed framework. Particularly, the risk incidents of each economy were matched with 16 risk categories under the proposed framework. The matched results were conceptualized into unique risk factors of each economy. Results: Our results reveal that the most critical risks in both economies involve the lack of structured and standardized project management (PM) processes, and misunderstanding and poor decision-making due to the lack of project experience and technical knowledge in local stakeholders. In addition to these shared risk factors, the two economies show distinct risk granularities. Particularly, IT projects in Cambodia are more vulnerable to cultural uniqueness while IT projects in Uganda suffer more with complex stakeholder structures. Conclusions: The proposed framework serves as guidance to identify IT project risks in developing economies. Furthermore, the identified risk factors using the framework proposed by this study help project managers or stakeholders recognize and mitigate the unique IT project risk factors in the two developing economies.

Bike sharing economy has experienced the exponential growth in the last decades and enormous large user base has drawn a lot of attention from the public. With keen competitions, many bike sharing startups face the challenges of online platform development and offline bike logistics management. It is important to understand how these companies leverage different resources (e.g. financial, labor, equipment, technology, knowledge, etc.) to redesign business process, reshape business strategy and internal organizational structure along the company development process. This study attempts to understand this changing process by applying causation, effectuation, and bricolage approaches to examine how a company acquire and use various resources to achieve goals. A case study in a leading sharing bike company in China will be conducted. This study makes the contribution to the understanding of sharing bike economy and digital firms' development.

Innovation activities of private firms are crucial for sustainable economic growth in every society. Therefore, the majority of firms around the world spend large amounts of capital (money, time, and human resources) in searching for novel innovative opportunities in the marketplace. In our study, we sought to understand how the openness of firms’ external search strategies (external search breadth and external search depth) affects firms’ innovation capabilities as measured by awareness, decision-making, interpretation, and implementation capability. Furthermore, using survey data collected from 112 Chinese manufacturing firms over a six-month period, this study conducted an empirical analysis about the association between firms’ innovation capabilities on the type of innovation (exploratory innovation vs. exploitative innovation). This study also provides important managerial insights for manufacturing companies.

The existing literature shows that individuals’ default behavior of Peer to Peer (P2P in abbreviation) online lending has a great influence on observers’ default intention. However, how is the observer’s default intention influenced by the P2P online lending defaulter? What variables mediate or moderate the relationship between the individual’s default behavior and the observer’s default intention? These important questions remain to be resolved. This paper aims to address these unresolved questions. Through making carefully designed two experiments, our research results show that: the individual’s default behavior can rise the observer’s default intention due to current imperfect Chinese P2P Online Lending punishment regulations; the observer’s moral disengagement level and pragmatic self-activation level are the two mediating variables whereas the intimacy level between the defaulter and the observer is the variable moderating the relationship between the individual’s default behavior and the observer’s default intention. Intimacy level can also moderate the relationship between the individual’s default behavior and the two mentioned mediator variables. The paper also provides some related management suggestion about P2P online lending.

Although research recognizes the role of IT and organizational agility on firm performance, a research gap to investigate IT-enabled agility at strategic and operational levels exists. In this study, we define operation-level agility as a firm's ability to respond to market changes or emerging opportunities by quickly modifying its business routines. In contrast, we define strategic-level agility as a firm's ability to define long-range investment decisions and implement them to accommodate strategic moves and business initiatives. We investigate how IT can empower these two levels of agility, and, in turn, how these two levels of agility can influence firm performance. We also examine the relative roles of the two levels of IT-enabled agility in manufacturing and service settings. We use survey data to validate the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that, in general, IT leads to superior firm performance through agility at both levels. Further analyses, however, suggest that IT-enabled operation-level agility is a stronger success factor for service firms and IT-enabled strategic-level agility is more critical in manufacturing firms. Our findings provide a theoretical insight regarding the industry-specific values of IT-enabled agility at operation and strategic levels and practical implications for organizational IT deployment under specific industrial settings.

Empowering leadership is crucial in modern software development. However, there is a lack of studies on how empowering leadership affects agility in software development. To fill this gap, we investigate the role of empowering leadership in agility in software development through the lens of transactive memory systems (TMS) theory. In this conceptual paper, we propose a theoretical framework in which TMS plays a mediating role between empowering leadership and agility. This framework advances our understanding of the value of empowering leadership practices in developing TMS, which in turn helps software development teams achieve agility. The proposed leadership practices and their categories also provide guidelines for effectively exercising empowering leadership.

Leadership is crucial for agile team effectiveness and performance. The roles played by project leaders have significantly changed in agile methodologies, but very limited studies on leadership have been conducted in the agile software development context. Motivated by this gap, this study aims to investigate the roles of various leadership styles in agile methodologies and understand how different types of leadership can collaboratively improve an agile project’s performance. We will conduct an exploratory case study to develop a research model. Our study will contribute to the theoretical understanding of leadership roles in agile projects. The findings will also provide guidance to project management practices.

Offshoring has become a viable alternative for companies to lower software development costs and leverage labor resources worldwide. To achieve success in offshoring software development projects, a vendor must choose appropriate development methodologies. This study aims to examine how methodology fit affects offshoring project performance. The authors propose that methodology fit affects project performance through interfirm knowledge sharing between vendors and clients. In addition, the impact of methodology fit on knowledge sharing is dependent on relational capital between vendors and clients. A survey was conducted among software companies in China that provide offshoring services. 108 completed questionnaires were collected. The results confirm the authors' hypotheses.

Business intelligence (BI) is one of the technology areas that have grown tremendously. BI describes a set of concepts and methods based on data for improving business decision making. BI capabilities have become one of the important business and technical capabilities. However, BI capabilities have remained largely unexamined in academic literature. Current understandings of BI capabilities are limited and lack systematic view. In this conceptual paper, we develop a framework to define BI capabilities as a multi-dimension concept. It consists of BI infrastructure maturity, data management capability, analytical capability, collaborative governance capability, and analytics-based process capability. We also examine how BI capabilities facilitate and support sense and respond strategies in current dynamic business environment.

Business agility has been considered as one of the key organizational capabilities in the modern business environment. The current research indicates that information technologies (IT) can help firms develop agility and in turn agility can improve firm performance, but how IT leads to agility and superior performance and under what circumstances is an ongoing consideration. In particular, while current research has examined higher-order latent capacities of IT resources and capabilities, they haven’t clearly specified what IT factors can enable organizational agility and how. In this study, we investigate the distinct values of two key capabilities of agility, i.e., sensing and responding capabilities, under the different levels of market competition. We also identify three types of IT infrastructure and explore the underlying enabling processes between these three infrastructures and sensing and responding capabilities. The model test results using a large-scale field survey data indicate that responding capability becomes more important as the level of market competition increases. The results also reveal that knowledge infrastructure and data service infrastructure are the key enablers of sensing capability and that standard application infrastructure is the key enabler of responding capability. This study helps understand underlying mechanisms of IT-enabled agile processes within a firm.

Increasingly, companies are outsourcing complex IT projects to offshore locations. Such globalization trend has led to challenges for both clients and vendors. The objective of this research is to enhance our understanding of offshore IS development project success from the lens of knowledge sharing. From the vendor's perspective, we investigate the mediating role played by knowledge sharing in the success of offshore software development and identify factors that contribute to knowledge sharing in offshore software development. A survey method was used to collect data in China and validate the research model. Our findings confirm that knowledge sharing mediates the impact of the use of methodology and relationship with clients on the success of offshore software development projects; particularly, knowledge sharing has more impact on process efficiency than on product quality. This study contributes to the theoretical understandings on how development methodology and vendors' relationship with clients help overcome the challenges in off shoring software development (OSD), and how knowledge sharing functions as a mediator between these factors and success of OSD. The findings also help vendors identify critical determinants of knowledge sharing in OSD and suggest strategies to execute OSD.

This study focuses on the strategic value of information technologies in the service industry and examines the relationship between information technology (IT) service competence and firm performance. The proposed relationship is further augmented by investigating the mediating role of operation-level dynamic capability particularly for the service setting. Survey data of medium to large-size enterprises in service industries in the United States were used to validate the proposed model. The results indicate that operational reconfigurability as an operation-level dynamic capability is a significant IT-enabled mediating driving force of firm performance in the service setting. This study is an early attempt to examine the strategic value of information technologies to lead to service firms business performance, particularly through the dynamic capability at the operation level.

This study investigates the organizational value of IT-enabled strategic capabilities in specific industry settings. We propose a theory-based model of positive relationships among IT resources, strategic-level agility, and firm performance. The model also proposes the relative values of the strategic-level agility in service and manufacturing industries. Survey data of medium to large-size enterprises in the United States were used to validate the model. The results indicate that the role of strategic-level agility in leading to firm performance is more significant in manufacturing industry than in service industry. Also, the values of IT resources, i.e., IT infrastructure and IT strategic planning, vary under the different industries. Our findings, although significant, challenge the conventional perspective on the core competence of service and manufacturing industries and thus call for further investigations on the strategic role of IT in the two distinct industries.

Few studies in technology acceptance have explicitly addressed the acceptance of replacement technologies, technologies that replace legacy ones that have been in use. This article explores this issue through the theoretical lens of mental models. We contend that accepting replacement technologies entails both mental model maintenance and mental model building: mental model maintenance enables users to apply their knowledge of the legacy technologies, and mental model building helps users acquire new knowledge and reform their understanding to use replacement technologies. Both processes affect user perceptions about replacement technologies, which in turn affect user intentions to use them. In addition, this study explores how perceived compatibility between replacement and legacy technologies affects both mental model processes. A research model was developed and empirically tested with survey data. The results in general support our arguments. Based on the findings, we offer a few suggestions that can promote user acceptance of replacement technologies.