This conceptual article argues that the mutual relevance of grand challenges and organization and management studies is best approached phenomenologically. Rather than constituting objects to be theorized or denoting special empirical contexts, grand challenges structure researchers' attention and shape their interpretations of the processes and systems of deliberation through which collective action is coordinated. From this perspective, grand challenges require researchers to innovate their understandings of deliberation and to ensure that newly generated knowledge is redirected towards management and policymaking. The article integrates the Carnegie School theory of organization with French pragmatic sociology's theory of justification, or economies of worth, to develop a phenomenological model of situated deliberation that links decision-making with moral reasoning. This model highlights deliberation's articulated, evaluative, contestable, and trans-institutional character, as well as its grounding in the cognitive capacities and sociality of actors and observers - regardless of the scale, scope, or stratification of the underlying coordination problems. Building on this framework, the article advocates that grand challenge researchers adopt the standpoint of entrepreneurial observers: actors anchored by socio-economic and scientific commitments who envision the integration of previously disjointed social systems of deliberation to orient collective action.

The competition between business ecosystems is relevant not only for strategic management, but also for health policy and regulators. Regulation is one key factor in ecosystem competition, and government and regulatory bodies implement new pharmaceutical legislations, policies, and guidelines contributing to business environments capable of attracting startups, biotech firms, and pharmaceutical industry investments in innovative medicines and technologies. Implications for patients and societal welfare require a thorough analysis of strategies aimed at enhancing the competitive advantage of the European Union (EU) in attracting pharmaceutical companies to prioritize the submission of their innovative medicines. This analysis is essential for ensuring that patients have timely access to new treatments, that society benefits from advances in healthcare, and could foster the competitive advantage of the European regulatory ecosystem. Here, we present data from 47 interviews with pharmaceutical industry professionals, offering direct insights into regulatory ecosystem competition and global health policy. Our report underscores the necessity for effective strategies that enhance the competitive advantage of the European regulatory system.

Innovation in open collaboration projects involves producers and users, both private and corporate, each engaging in and pairing problems with solutions. While the innovation literature has focused predominantly on motivations to contribute, we face a paucity of insights into how incentives shape the producers' and users' choice to design and contribute solutions for problems and needs expressed by others. We explore, in the case of Open Source software development, if and how different actor types and task complexity can be linked to such collaborative problem-solving, where one developer solves another's problem instead of working independently. Patterns of problem-solution pairing in a large Open Source Software development project identify corporate users as ranking first in attracting solutions to their problems. We find that collaboration occurs systematically and actors' perceived incentives are shaped inside and outside the open collaboration project, namely via options to sell complementary services to corporate users. In order to pair solutions with problems of corporate users, significant effort in understanding their needs is required from innovators, extending the viability of the open collaboration model into the domain of producer innovation that regularly incurs communication and coordination costs. Our findings advance theory on open collaboration as a unique form of organizing innovation. We discuss implications and insights for management and policy.

This study investigates the relationship between product modularity and innovation in 101 research and devel-opment (R&D) teams. The key contribution and the departure from prior empirical work consists in bringing into relation multidimensional operationalizations of these two concepts. Product modularity is composed of standardization and reconfigurability and innovation of novelty and efficiency. The literature provides argu-ments for both negative and positive relationships between standardization and the two types of innovation, while positive relationships are argued for product reconfigurability. The empirical findings corroborate most of the theorizing, although negative relationships are found for standardization. This study contributes to the literature by unpacking the understanding of the concept of product modularity in R&D organizations since the multidimensional approach resolves some of the ambiguity from previous studies. The modularity litera-ture long called for studies to empirically investigate product modularity in more than one dimension implying a number of theoretical implications discussed here.

The economies of worth, a theory of moral cognition and coordination by sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist Laurent Thevenot, are increasingly used in organization and management studies. We critically review a broad selection of this literature to assess what has been gained from the interdisciplinary translations of the original theory. We identify in the literature multiple patterns that contribute from different angles to a consistent set of concepts for research at the intersection of organizations, socio-technological change, and morality. We also indicate theoretical and methodological developments that would further enrich these gains.

Collaborative practices underlie the creation of innovation yet how and when these practices emerge is not well understood, particularly given the presence of flexible and open workspaces. Based on seven case studies of entrepreneurial Tech/FinTech firms in London, we explore how collaborative spaces lead to collaborative practices, when they do. Our findings suggest the enabling and inhibiting role of interstitial spaces (e.g. informality and spatiality) and identify catalysts in the emergence of collaborative practices in a coworking space. A theoretical and critical contextualisation advances our understanding of how collaborative practices emerge and articulates the conditionality of openness in the form of underlying mechanisms for collaboration and, subsequently (open) innovation outcomes. We discuss implications for future research and management of coworking spaces.

In the literature, the concept of the business model is claimed to help us understand how the firm links its value creation strategy with that of value capture. Here we elaborate on this idea by carefully examining what is happening along both sides of the buyer-seller boundary under different conditions, paying special attention to specific investments related to the engagement surrounding the transaction. We compare the firm that puts its offer on the market using the product business model with the same firm using the solutions business model, which provides the buyer with additional value dimensions on the original offer in exchange for the buyer undertaking firm specific investments that create a lock-in between the buyer and the seller. The combination of the superior buyer value and the “lock-in” gives the opportunity for the seller to make additional profits. Our ideas can be extended to Specific investments by buyers in the engagement process can be especially promising in multisided platform businesses where solutions style engagement can be employed with every customer group, amplifying traditional platform because of the complementarities arising on both sides of the buyer-seller boundary. We use the concept of articulate the business model ideal types as a way of framing our ideas into that provide a useful toolkit for strategists and managers to unlock these profit opportunities. Finally, we explore the implications for strategy, competitive advantage and the theory of the firm.

Communities have captured the attention of strategic management given their importance as source of firm innovation. Prior literature suggests that feedback from peers in the community has a significant effect on the productivity of individuals in solving innovation problems shared within the community. In this paper we focus on a source of feedback that has been ignored in prior work: machines. Specifically, we study the effect of two types of feedback (performance and solution) offered by humans and machines on community members' productivity in solving innovation problems. Borrowing from Attentional Control Theory, we hypothesize that performance feedback from a machine and performance and solution feedback from a human have distinct individual effects and interact in affecting productivity. We examine our hypotheses using data from an Open Source software development community, in which 1,219 developers produce 36,878 solutions to successfully solve 5,108 problems. The results suggest that human and machine performance feedback act in opposing directions taken separately: negative human performance feedback increases productivity while negative performance feedback from a machine decreases productivity. Further, machine performance feedback, even if negative, tends to positively moderate the negative impact of human solution feedback in the community: hence machine feedback is productivity enhancing. Human and machine feedback interact in complex ways because the machine feedback triggers emotional states in humans that change the way community feedback is processed. We discuss implications for the strategic management of innovation communities

Exogenous shocks propel organizations to pursue resilience to absorb strain, adapt to disruption, and continue performing their work. While prior research has offered insights into how resilience is activated to bounce back in the light of a shock, we turn our attention to digital resilience: the sociotechnical processes through which organizations cope with adversity, maintain operations, and ultimately pursue transformative activities by deploying and engaging with digital technologies. The absence of significant prior digital transformations leaves many organizations scrambling to build resilience during a shock, such as the pandemic, and opens an opportunity for theorizing the process and implications for digital infrastructure. Through a 2-years longitudinal qualitative study of how Greek primary school teachers practiced digital resilience in the face of COVID-19, we identify three distinct mechanisms of digital resilience and develop a grounded model on how these mechanisms cultivate the emergence of settled or contested infrastructural relations. Our study extends theory on the emerging field of digital resilience by highlighting its processual, sociotechnical, and generative nature and offers a relational view on digital infrastructure evolution.