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Many incumbents set up corporate ventures for their strategic renewal. These corporate ventures must enact the incumbent's goals while doing things differently to renew the incumbent's strategy. Often these corporate ventures are confronted with ambiguity caused by multiple goals imposed by the incumbent they are embedded in. To better understand how corporate ventures strategize under ambiguity, we investigate how a corporate venture's identity relates to strategizing under ambiguity arising from multiple goals. We address this question in a longitudinal study of a corporate venture which had to contribute to the incumbent's transformation into a more data-driven, circular and B2C (business-to-consumer) oriented firm. Using a longitudinal, micro-level ethnographic approach allowed us to gain in-depth insights into how corporate ventures strategize under ambiguity. We show how a corporate venture solved ambiguity and engaged in their own strategizing activities instead of following the imposed goals from the incumbent. Driven by their start-up identity which developed over time the corporate venture shifted further and further away from the imposed goals of the incumbent. The corporate venture followed its own strategizing activities and ultimately ended in a strategy drift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbents set up corporate ventures to create new capabilities needed for strategic renewal. While corporate venturing studies largely focus on creating core capabilities, such as knowledge about a new technology, we shift attention to the creation of complementary capabilities, such as finance, logistics and customer service, which are required to benefit from core capabilities. These complementary capabilities may be perceived as stable and taken for granted, yet, need to be changed when aiming for strategic renewal. Based on a four-year ethnographic study following the three internal corporate ventures within a large home appliance manufacturer we identify a process model to create complementary capabilities for strategic renewal. Our findings show how corporate ventures and incumbents jointly create complementary capabilities and contribute to the literature on corporate venturing and capability creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given their complex, company-specific and history-dependent nature, organizational capabilities are generally considered as the foundation of a firm's long-term strategy and as major source of competitive advantage. While the strategic significance of firm capabilities is uncontested, we still have an incomplete understanding how they emerge, develop, and change over time. In particular, given discontinuously shifting environments, the question of how incumbent firms reconfigure their capabilities in response to such changes and successfully move from one capability configuration to another, is of great significance. It is the aim of this symposium to push the discussion and advance the theoretical understanding in this realm. Topics such as capability rigidity, learning barriers, capability integration and redeployment as well as dynamic capabilities will be covered. The symposium will bring together different capability scholars and provide a platform for a productive discussion of how to push the field forward. * Overcoming social breakdowns in capability reconfiguration * Presenter: Joakim Hans Netz; Jönköping U. * Presenter: Patrick Reinmoeller; IMD * The best of two worlds? Corporate ventures for capability renewal of an incumbent * Presenter: Kathrin Borner; Vrije U. Amsterdam * Presenter: Fleur Deken; Vrije U. Amsterdam * Presenter: Hans Berends; Vrije U. Amsterdam * Presenter: Frans Feldberg; KIN Research, VU Amsterdam * Reconfiguring or rather redeploying capabilities in the face of technological change? * Presenter: Stefan Konlechner; Johannes Kepler U. Linz * Presenter: Arne Keller; Vienna U. of Technology * Presenter: Wolfgang H. Guettel; TU Wien * Overcoming barriers to the open innovation capability: A cognitive perspective * Presenter: Ralf Wilden; Macquarie Business School, Macquarie U. * Presenter: Krithika Randhawa; U. of Technology, Sydney * Presenter: Siegfried P. Gudergan; Waikato Management School [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The value that products and services have for users increasingly depends on their complementarity with other products and services, organized in ecosystems. This study is situated in the smart home industry where digital products offer innumerable possibilities for combination, so that it is difficult or even impossible for firms to address them all. This leads to a coordination challenge in ecosystems. Through a multi-method comparative case study, we found that users are active players who not only select combinations designed by companies or simply mix and match products, but also design novel combinations that are of value to them, and share these with others. We find that users design more combinations than firms, but that firm-designed combinations have on average more users. By doing so, users contribute to value creation in ecosystems as they turn potential complementarity into actual, specific complementarity. We discuss implications for research on innovation ecosystems and user innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze how data characteristics can influence value realization. Many studies on data-driven value realization characterize data as universal and de-contextualized resources that are similar across various contexts, and assume that data inherently enable organizations to realize value. We criticize these assumptions and thus call for a perspective that treats data as a contextually situated actor. We frame data-driven value realization as a strategizing process in which data play different roles and study this process at a European postal service organization. We examine how organizational actors strategized with data over time, causing the organization to move in different strategic directions. We theorize how different characteristics of data influenced how the organizations moved across two dimensions: 1) exploring beyond vs. exploiting the existing value proposition, and 2) closed vs. open modes of collaboration. We show that a given characteristic of data can have different influences on value realization, depending on the strategic direction of the organization. Relatedly, we show that data characteristics do not only enable, but also limit organizations to realize value. As such, we contribute to theories on why organizations may struggle to realize value from data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data analytics (BDA) has gained significant impetus as a breakthrough technological development. Yet, systematic empirical evidence on how organizations transform BDA opportunities into economic or social values is scattered in the literature. Therefore, we performed a systematic literature review to examine: How do organizations actualize the value potentials of BDA? The study contributes to the accumulation of scientific evidence on six contested organizational dynamics at work-practice, organizational, and supra- organizational levels that are constitutive to the process of actualizing BDA value potentials. We critically examine what can be perceived as unique to BDA that has potential bearings on its value actualization, and subsequently articulate lines for future research. The review therefore serves as a point of departure for extending existing theories on value actualization by looking into the case of BDA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]