Gov4You is a federal government agency responsible for managing and sharing citizen information for large groups of the population. The Gov4You department was created almost 15 years ago to meet the election promise of providing better information services to the citizens. The department was setup to provide complete digital services for citizens. The digital citizen services must cater to the large demographic differences, and for those that are digitally savvy as well as those without any access to the Internet. These services are currently provided by several different departments that sometimes require physical visits by the citizens to the departments with a lot of paper work for identification and service request forms. However, citizens demand better services that use digital platforms in 24 × 7 formats. This concept of providing service using a digital transformation is referred to as ‘Smart …

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management has been written by an international team of leading academics, practitioners and rising stars and contains almost 550 individually commissioned entri

This study investigates how the absorptive capacity of scientific spin-offs affects the benefits and challenges of customer involvement in the development of radical innovations. We conducted 36 interviews in 3 spin-offs over 4 years to collect data regarding customer involvement in the development of radical innovations. The findings show the importance of spin-offs developing both potential and realized absorptive capacities to internalize customer knowledge and technology emergence awareness and to simultaneously offset customers' lack of technical knowledge in formulating their needs. Both market and technical knowledge appeared to be important for spin-offs, and these were available from both customers and the parent research center. The findings' main implication is spin-offs need a blending capability to balance between (1) market and technical knowledge, (2) market-pull and technology-push approaches, (3) the involvement of customers and parent research centers, and (4) potential and realized absorptive capacities. This study contributes a conceptual framework on the blending capability of customer involvement in the development of radical innovations and a set of propositions for future research.

The art and science of technology and innovation management has been theorized by many management scholars over the past several decades. This symposium attempts to discuss and integrate some of the most important concepts of technology and innovation management. In particular, the symposium revisits the contributions of knowledge management, collaborative community of firms, dynamic capabilities, and open innovation to argue how these theories apply for today’s complex situation of technology and innovation management. At the same time, the symposium looks at how they would provide an outlook towards the potential challenges, barriers and opportunities of future businesses. We believe that this symposium aims to further deepen our understanding of management theories, with a particular emphasis on the openness of organizations and markets to co-create values as a part of the conference theme,

I am excited about this new journal focused on the subject of organization design. In my view, organization design is a central issue in the field of management. Designing an organization requires an understanding of strategy, as we pointed out some time ago (Miles & Snow, 1978). For example, if you want to be a prospector (a first-mover strategy), you have to design your firm to move quickly in new directions, which is likely to require that it be arranged so that various kinds of teams can interact across organizational units and levels. Designing an organization to follow a first-mover strategy also requires both an understanding of leadership and a commitment to the free flow of information throughout the organization. Leaders must understand how cross-functional teams pursue ideas and opportunities, and they must facilitate collaborative knowledge sharing to drive innovations that help the firm operate entrepreneurially. Because an organization is a complex, dynamic system, perhaps no other single topic is so deeply implanted at the core of management, organization theory, and organizational behavior as organization design. Moreover, organization design once was, and could be again, the topic of an ongoing dialogue between managers and academics focused on business organizations.

Most firms identify market opportunities for their new technologies after they have been developed. This article discusses the design of a “futures group” which can help to synchronize a firm’s technology and market development. A futures group designed to span more than one organization could lead to simultaneous market development for multiple technologies.

Firms increasingly face competitive pressures related to rapid and continuous adaptation to a complex, dynamic, and highly interconnected global environment. Pressing challenges include keeping pace with shorter product life cycles, incorporating multiple technologies into the design of new products, cocreating products and services with customers and partners, and leveraging the growth of scientific and technical knowledge in many sectors. In response, we observe experimentation with new organization designs that are fundamentally different from existing forms of organizing. We propose that these new designs are based on an actor‐oriented architectural scheme composed of three main elements: (1) actors who have the capabilities and values to self‐organize; (2) commons where the actors accumulate and share resources; and (3) protocols, processes, and infrastructures that enable multi‐actor collaboration. We demonstrate the usefulness of the actor‐oriented scheme by applying it to organizations drawn from four different sectors: global professional services, open source software development, computer equipment, and national defense. We discuss the implications of the actor‐oriented architectural scheme for future research on organizational forms as well as for managers who are involved in designing organizations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Current firm experiments within a set of knowledge driven segments of the global economy suggest the possible rebirth of the managerial values and commitments to participative leadership and collaborative creativity that flourished in the US in the 1960s. Potential barriers include a focus on short term profits and intellectual property protection that restrict both within and between firm knowledge sharing to drive innovations across complementary markets. While growing knowledge resources suggest possible achievements well beyond previous levels, the required collaborative capabilities appear to demand a recommitment among management scholars to field research and the sharing of insights with managers across levels and firms.

The increased importance of knowledge creation and use to firms' global competitiveness has spawned considerable experimentation with organizational designs for product development and commercialization over the last three decades. This paper discusses innovation-related organizational design developments during this period, showing how firms have moved from stand-alone organizations to multifirm network organizations to community-based organizational designs. The collaborative community of firms model, the most recent organizational design in this evolutionary process, is described in detail. Blade.org, a purposefully designed collaborative community of firms dedicated to the continuous development and commercialization of blade servers, a computer technology with large but unforeseeable market potential, is used as an illustrative case. Blade.org's organizational design combines a community "commons" for the collective development and sharing of knowledge among member firms with explicit institutional mechanisms for the support of direct intermember collaboration. These design elements are used to overcome the challenges associated with (1) concurrent technological and market experimentation and (2) the dynamic coordination of a complex emergent system of hardware, software, and services provided by otherwise independent firms. To date, Blade.org has developed more than 60 new products, providing strong evidence of the innovation prowess of the collaborative community of firms organizational model. Based on an analysis of the evolution of organizational designs and the case of Blade.org, implications for innovation management theory and practice are derived.

T he 21s-century promises to offer abundant opportunities if the firms and nations of the world can design organizational mechanisms to fully utilize the knowledge generated by modern science while finding solutions for the problems that economic progress has created—including global warming and the starkly visible income inequalities that exist across various segments of the global economy. Fortunately, in both the public and private sectors, our understanding of how the global economy works has increased, as evidenced by the emergence of widely effective business and management approaches that are spreading around the world. Indeed, it is our belief that recent experiments involving new organizational approaches will prove to be valuable in addressing not only the exciting economic opportunities of this century but also the pressing challenges that currently plague global society. In order to explore current organizational developments, we present a dynamic theory of organization design and show how it explains the four major designs that have appeared in the U.S. since the latter half of the 1800s: U-form, M-form, matrix, and multi-firm network. We describe how the components of each of these traditional designs reflect the economic and sociopolitical conditions of their birth period. We then use our theory to predict the shape of a new organizational design – a collaborative community – as well as its uses and benefits. Overall, we observe that recent decades have brought an increased awareness that global resources are commons in the keeping of all nations and societies. Such shared interests require the use of community values and collaborative capabilities in emerging organizational designs if their full benefits are to be obtained and shared. We describe two types of situations in which large-scale multi-party collaboration is required in order to successfully pursue global opportunities or to resolve global problems: (1) situations in which a large number of actors depend on and contribute to a commons and (2) situations in which a large number of actors share a common goal and each actor provides its complementary contribution to the larger system in a coordinated manner.

Inter-organizational models are both a well-documented phenomena and a well-established domain in management and business ethics. Those models rest on collaborative capabilities. However, mainstream theories and practices aimed at developing these capabilities are based on a narrow set of assumptions and ethical principles about human nature and relationships, which constrain the very development of capabilities sought by them. This article presents an Aristotelic–Thomistic approach to collaborative entrepreneurship within and across communities of firms operating in complementary markets. Adopting a scholarship of integration approach and evaluating the six studies of communities of organizations, we contribute an inter-organizational network model based on the assumptions about human motives and choice offered by Aristotle. We argue that the sustainability of inter-organizational communities depends on how rich is the set of assumptions about human nature upon which they are based. In order to develop and sustain collaborative capabilities in inter-organizational communities, a set of assumptions that takes both self-regarding and others’-regarding preferences as ends is required to avoid any kind of instrumentalization of collaboration, which is an end in itself. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Every generation of managers experiments with new organizational forms-new business models and the organizational structures and management processes required to support them. Much of the current experimentation with business and organizational models is occurring in knowledge-intensive industries such as biotechnology, computers, telecommunications, and medical and scientific equipment. The principal business model emerging in these and similar industries can be called market exploration. Market exploration is a firm's pursuit of opportunities created by intersecting technologies and markets. The market exploration process is complex, involving technology development, product development, and commercialization in collaboration with customers and other firms, as well as involving the orderly development of markets that have large but unknown potential. Firms that want to be effective at market exploration must organize specifically for innovation-they must be able to build and manage an I-form organization. This article shows how many firms are moving towards and improving the I-form organization and discusses its purpose, key features, and benefits.

This paper examines a new inter-organizational form which is emerging from collaborative innovation processes within and across communities of firms operating in complementary markets. Idea sharing think tanks around high tech centers at leading universities and, more generally, around clusters, are well-documented phenomena. These inter-organizational processes and forms rest on collaborative capabilities. However, mainstream theories and even policies aimed at developing these capabilities are based on an incomplete set of assumptions about human nature, which constrain the very development of capabilities sought by them. The argument of this paper is that the sustainability of the processes and results of the emergent inter-organizational communities depends on a richer set of assumptions about human nature than that provided by mainstream management theories. The risks and demands involved in the design and operation of cross-organization collaborative communities require a challenging set of assumptions about human nature, which go far beyond the notion of enlightened self-interest embedded in neo-classical economics and even beyond the more complex models of human needs and motivation currently employed. Building on this argument and the evaluation of actual communities of firms, this paper contributes an inter-organizational network model based on the assumptions about human motives and choice offered by Aristotle. The conclusions of this paper are twofold. First, it argues that enlightened self-interest hinders rather than fosters the process of developing collaborative capabilities, given that this process will stop when difficulties affecting the pay-offs of the relationship arise in the short run. Second, it explains that a set of assumptions that takes both self-regarding and other' regarding preferences as ends is required in order to develop and sustain collaborative capabilities in the analyzed inter-organizational communities. Members of such communities have to understand and share these assumptions on a continuing basis in order to sustain their collaborative efforts and outcomes.

U.S. leadership in technological innovation has remained an important source of national income and pride. Indeed, recognizing that advanced economies compete primarily on the basis of innovation, U.S. scholars were among the early leaders in studying and describing effective organizational approaches to knowledge creation, sharing, and utilization. Nevertheless, despite their established capabilities, U.S. firms apparently still make use of only a fraction of their available knowledge. While the U.S. still has the world's leading research universities and is home to many world-class firms that champion technology and innovation, there are growing concerns that the business values And practices essential to the creation and sharing of knowledge and its full utilization in innovation initiatives may not be evolving at the same pace in the U.S. as they are in some of its leading foreign competitors. This article examines some of the current criticisms and concerns about management practices in U.S. firms and discusses the management theories behavioral prescriptions that are critical to maintaining global leadership in innovation-based economic competitiveness.

The supply chain is the central organizing unit in today's global industries. We describe how supply chains have evolved over the last three decades, arguing that their organizational history can be divided into three periods. In the first period, the primary focus was on how to make operations throughout the supply chain more efficient. In the second period, the focus shifted from efficiency to effectiveness as leading firms began to incorporate the ideas and expertise of their suppliers and partners into the management of the supply chain. In the current period, some firms are beginning to explore how supply chains can be extended across industries in addition to operating efficiently and effectively within industries. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Undaunted by over a decade of scholarly criticism (e.g. Bebchuk and Fried, 2005; Ghoshal and Moran, 1996), senior American executives have stood firm on their moral beliefs about the free-enterprise system – beliefs that justify extravagant increases in executive compensation despite declining firm competitiveness, and the preservation of corporate profits through outsourcing to low-wage countries, layoffs and reductions in benefits for American workers. Of course, moral positions are built to withstand rational critiques. The current moral foundation was laid in the 1980s when President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher successfully wrapped the US and British economies in a cloak of righteousness as part of their efforts to bring down what was often referred to as the ‘godless’ Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and its allies. Given the power of moral beliefs, and the fact that managers’ values reflect broader societal values – a linkage examined in depth in the 1950s and 1960s (Bendix, 1956; Parsons, 1959; Sutton et al., 1956; Weber, 2001; Weber and Parsons, 1968) but mostly ignored in the management literature today – we believe that any attempt to substantially reorient US firms must consider the moral underpinnings of the policies that guide them. A focus on business practices and the managerial values and beliefs underlying them is particularly important, we suggest, because the USA and other advanced countries compete primarily on the basis of knowledge-driven innovation and entrepreneurship (Baumol, 2002; Baumol et al., 2007). Knowledge is shared most freely in organizational settings where trust is anticipated and consistently maintained. Trust, in turn, is created and sustained when equitable treatment is valued and pursued by both the leaders and members of firms. In such settings, the excitement and pleasure of creating value through collaborative innovation is reinforced over time by the equitable sharing of rewards (Miles et al., 2005). It is our contention that the managerial values essential to the creation of conditions such as these have been eroding in the US marketplace for more than two-and-a-half decades, a decline that threatens to weaken the ability of US firms to compete through continuous product and service innovation. Indeed, the relative US position on key indicators of social and economic health has noticeably declined, a phenomenon that began in the midto late 1970s. While the disparity between executive and hourly employee wages is the most dramatic difference between US firms and their international competitors, STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 5(4): 423–435 DOI: 10.1177/1476127007083350 Copyright ©2007 Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) http://so.sagepub.com

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.– Yogi Berra

The supply chain is the central organizing unit in today's global industries. We describe how supply chains have evolved over the last three decades, arguing that their organizational history can be divided into three periods. In the first period, the primary focus was on how to make operations throughout the supply chain more efficient. In the second period, the focus shifted from efficiency to effectiveness as leading firms began to incorporate the ideas and expertise of their suppliers and partners into the management of the supply chain. In the current period, some firms are beginning to explore how supply chains can be extended across industries in addition to operating efficiently and effectively within industries.