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Time is a crucial yet scarce resource in innovation management. However, the way in which entrepreneurial enterprises (SMEs) allocate temporal resources in innovation remains largely unexplored. We propose a conceptualization of innovation polychronicity, which is defined as the extent to which a firm’s innovation culture promotes simultaneous engagement in multiple innovation activities. Based on this conceptualization, we propose that either low or high levels of innovation polychronicity lead to better firm performance. Analysis of data gathered from a survey of 127 SMEs and archival sources provides support for the proposed U-shaped relationship. We further find that innovation synchronization moderates this relationship. The findings contribute to the broader literature on innovation and temporality in organizations.

Research has focused on the role of entrepreneurial action in alleviating poverty. However, there is a gap between individuals’ short-term outcomes from entrepreneurship overcoming immediate resource concerns and the large-scale impact of entrepreneurship on institutional and system change. Therefore, in this study, we explore entrepreneurs’ beliefs about how entrepreneurial action can alleviate poverty. To do so, we conducted a qualitative study of entrepreneurs of businesses located in Indian slums and identified the impact of expectations, role models, and the subjective value of their children’s education in attempts to alleviate poverty.

Next, this chapter—“Refugee Entrepreneurs Building and Displaying Resilience”—examines how refugees can harness entrepreneurial action to find a positive identity and better life under difficult circumstances. Against a theoretical backdrop comprising resilience, positive psychology, and positive organizational scholarship, we explore the important role entrepreneurial action plays in generating positive outcomes by investigating long-term refugee entrepreneurs (in refugee camps and not in camps) over 15 months. In particular, we describe the motivation underlying entrepreneurial action in highly constrained environments (in which the constraints go beyond a lack of financial resources) and explain the causes and consequences of entrepreneurs’ resilience in the face of severe constraints that create significant and ongoing adversity. Overall, this chapter shows that entrepreneurial action can help individuals achieve resilient outcomes in the face of adversity without addressing the underlying source of that adversity. We also hope this chapter changes the way people think about refugees starting and running illegal businesses.

In this chapter—“An Entrepreneurial Process for Exploiting Vulnerable People’s Labor”—we take an even bigger step toward the dark side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity. In this chapter, we take the perspective of victims to explore a destructive entrepreneurial process that involves multiple actors—namely, that of exploiting vulnerable women and girls for human trafficking. We focus on the destructive entrepreneurial practices used to exploit vulnerable individuals for their labor to explain how entrepreneurs (as actors within the human-trafficking system) methodically target impoverished women and girls and transform their autonomous objections into unquestioned compliance. We show that through the entrepreneurial practices of (1) deceptive recruiting of the vulnerable, (2) entrapping through isolation, (3) extinguishing alternatives by building barriers, and (4) converting the exploited into exploiters, these entrepreneurs diminish and eventually eliminate vulnerable workers’ autonomy. In doing so, we shed light on the illegal entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable individuals’ labor and ruining their lives by eliminating their free will.

The Smart city is important for sustainability. Governments engaged in developing urban mobility in the smart city need to invest their limited financial resources wisely to realize sustainability goals. A key area for such sustainability investment is how to implement and invest in emerging technologies for urban mobility solutions. However, current frameworks on how to understand the impact of emerging technologies aligned with long-term sustainability strategies are understudied. This article develops a simulation-based comparison between different cities and autonomous vehicle (AV) adoption scenarios to understand which aspects of cities lead to positive AV implementation outcomes. As urban mobility and cities will become smart, the analysis represents a first attempt to explore the impact of AVs on a large scale across different cities around the world. Archetypes are formed and account for most, if not all, world cities. For three of our archetypes (car-centric giants, prosperous innovation centers, and high-density megacities), promoting AV-shuttle use would deliver the greatest advantage as measured by improvements in the model's KPIs. To develop urban powerhouses, however, micromobility would deliver greater benefits. For highly compact middleweights, a shift from private cars to other non-AV modes of transportation would be the smartest choice.

As AI and ML technologies are increasingly incorporated into products, there is a need to understand the role of these incorporations in enhancing performance. This study uses new types of methodology related to textual data analysis to explore the question of whether there is a difference between market sentiments—and consequently marketing and business performance—when it comes to communicating either AI or ML. We test and confirm the hypothesis that AI rather than ML attracts more positive sentiments in the marketplace. Additionally, we find that AI is mostly used when the discussion centers on innovativeness, and that discussions concerning collaboration in these technologies attract more positive sentiments. We further contribute methodologically by leveraging textual data available online on the titles of web-page contents and the results of the Vader sentiment analysis to test our hypothesis. We conclude that, to enhance business performance, firms should communicate using AI-related vocabulary especially when the topic is innovativeness and collaboration.

As e-commerce has increasingly gained traction in the retail market, many traditional “brick-and-mortar” retailers are innovating their business models and making the transition towards digital business models. While scholars have started to examine the influence of digitalization on various business model elements, they have so far paid little attention to its implications on the external relationships in which firms engage for value creation. Building on a qualitative analysis of seventeen interviews, this study develops a two-stage framework for the transition to digital business models. In Stage 1, retailers collaborate with specialized service providers to implement a digital business model. As firms from the retail ecosystem collaborate with firms from the digital-service ecosystem to create a value proposition for end-customers, a meta-ecosystem emerges. In Stage 2, firms (retailers) seek to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the meta-ecosystem. Physical interactions with the digital service providers, the product suppliers, and the customers are a primary means towards this end. Thus, digitalization does not make physical interactions and close personal ties obsolete. Our study has substantial implications for the academic literature and management practice.

This chapter—“Making Do with the Resources at Hand to Improve One’s Life and Others’ Lives”—highlights the bright side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity. In this chapter, we discuss how most prior research has emphasized the importance of slack resources to explain creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. However, scholars have tended to under-emphasize the role of necessity in generating innovations and to over-emphasize the firm level of analysis when investigating value creation and capture. To add more balance to this discussion, in this chapter, we detail a study on problem solvers in an extremely resource-poor environment in rural India and the creative process they engage in to overcome their chronic adversity. This creative problem-solving process, known locally as jugaad, relies on individuals’ assertive defiance to engage in trial-and-error experiential learning so they can recombine at-hand resources for new purposes to devise frugal quick-fix solutions. By exploring this creative problem-solving process in a resource-poor environment, we provide new insights into the entrepreneurial responses of those confronting chronic adversity. Moreover, we describe why these entrepreneurial responses are unlikely to be sources of competitive advantage for firms but instead serve as sources of inclusive growth in the form of enhanced well-being for the respective entrepreneurs and their communities.

This chapter—“Personal Adversity and Justifying Illegal and Costly Entrepreneurial Action”—shifts even more to the dark side of entrepreneurial action in the face of chronic adversity. Specifically, in this chapter, we explore bunkerers—oil thieves—to provide a richer understanding of how individual entrepreneurs interpret their contexts and engage in entrepreneurial action that creates significant negative outcomes. We outline a personal adversity model to explain the entrepreneurial process whereby bunkerers engage in, justify, and persist with entrepreneurial action that causes substantial damage to the local environment, communities, and entrepreneurs’ health. We show how entrepreneurs claim both high and low levels of control to justify the same action and how entrepreneurs entangle themselves and others when justifying their harmful entrepreneurial action and the resulting destruction.

Open innovation and innovation performance have been widely studied in the literature. However, few studies have examined the impact of openness to different types of external knowledge on start-ups’ innovation performance. Moreover, previous literature could be further complemented by additional investigation into how the coworking spaces provided by accelerator programs may engender informal sources of knowledge that enhance the innovation performance of accelerated start-ups. To address this research gap, we investigate whether start-ups participating in accelerator programs can enhance their innovation performance through information transfer from informal networks provided by business accelerator programs. In order to do so, we draw two-stage data collection data from 113 start-ups accelerated by Italian accelerators from 2013 to 2016 and the response data collected in 2018. Our results reveal that coopetitors, educators, and investors are beneficial for different innovation outcomes of accelerated start-ups. These findings contribute to the innovation management literature, the small business management literature, the literature on accelerators and the coworking spaces literature.

This chapter—“Women Entrepreneurs Flourishing or Languishing at the Bottom of the Pyramid”—highlights not only the bright side of entrepreneurship (consistent with the previous chapters) but also the potential dark side of entrepreneurship training and venture creation. In particular, this chapter focuses on women entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid. In this context, entrepreneurship can be a means for families to escape poverty and a route for countries to foster economic development. However, we show that despite successful venture creation, some women entrepreneurs flourish while others languish. Women entrepreneurs who flourish tend to set realistic expectations for their entrepreneurial endeavors and modify them throughout the entrepreneurial journey. Moreover, flourishing women entrepreneurs often benefit from their prior work experience and family support. On the other hand, women entrepreneurs who languish tend to lack prior work experience outside the home and set more unrealistic expectations for their work and lives. They also generally lack family support and thus have little psychological capital for entrepreneurship training and venture creation. Thus, this chapter offers new insights into some limitations of entrepreneurship programs (training and venture creation) for some women entrepreneurs in patriarchal societies at the base of the pyramid.

In this chapter—“Entrepreneurs Alleviating Poverty Through Educating Their Children”—we examine the bright-side motivation underlying entrepreneurial action in chronic-adversity contexts. We explore entrepreneurs living in the slums of India, demonstrating that their main motivation for entrepreneurial action is educating their children. In doing so, we offer four important insights. First, these entrepreneurs believe that their children can escape poverty via a sequential process. Namely, they believe that education will enable their children to earn higher income. This higher income will, in turn, enable their children to move to a “better” neighborhood with improved living conditions. Second, working and living in slums can bring benefits to entrepreneurs as these areas can facilitate (rather than hinder) the formation of strong, caring communities that aid in entrepreneurship. Third, slum entrepreneurs often face a paradox in that their reasons (e.g., poor health) for wanting their families to leave their slum neighborhoods are the very thing keeping them there. Thus, their plans for escaping poverty often bump up against the reality of their adverse conditions. Finally, slum entrepreneurs tend to serve as “counterfactual” role models for their children as they became entrepreneurs to provide their children with lives that they neither had nor wanted themselves. Entrepreneurship is thus a means for these parents to help their children but is not the desired destiny they want for their children.

In this study, we develop a definition and a framework for ecosystem transformation. We suggest a circular model of four main mechanisms to provide an alternative explanation of ecosystem evolvement. Interview data are used to develop a model that integrates value creation logics at its core with evolutionary mechanisms. An emphasis on firm-specific technology development sets in motion strategic and technological engagement by other firms in the ecosystem. This comes about through firms that take responsibility for change and actors that adopt new ecosystem roles to drive the whole ecosystem towards transformation around new value propositions. This signifies that disruptive innovation and technological advancement in response to market needs drive ecosystem transformation through new value creation. Our comprehensive framework offers an outline for further research in the domain of ecosystem transformation. Innovation av affärsmodeller i detaljhandelns ecosystem genom framsteg i teknik och digitalisering DISRE - Data Driven Innovation in Specialized Retail Ecosystems

The circular economy (CE) has the potential to capitalise upon emerging digital technologies, such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and the Internet of things (IoT), amongst others. These digital technologies combined with business model innovation are deemed to provide solutions to myriad problems in the world, including those related to circular economy transformation. Given the societal and practical importance of CE and digitalisation, last decade has witnessed a significant increase in academic publication on these topics. Therefore, this study aims to capture the essence of the scholarly work at the intersection of the CE and digital technologies. A detailed analysis of the literature based on emerging themes was conducted with a focus on illuminating the path of CE implementation. The results reveal that IoT and AI play a key role in the transition towards the CE. A multitude of studies focus on barriers to digitalisation-led CE transition and highlight policy-related issues, the lack of predictability, psychological issues and information vulnerability as some important barriers. In addition, product-service system (PSS) has been acknowledged as an important business model innovation for achieving the digitalisation enabled CE. Through a detailed assessment of the existing literature, a viable systems-based framework for digitalisation enabled CE has been developed which show the literature linkages amongst the emerging research streams and provide novel insights regarding the realisation of CE benefits.

The digital age we live in offers companies many opportunities to jointly advance sustainability and competitiveness. New digital technologies can, in fact, support the incorporation of circular economy principles into businesses, enabling new business models and facilitating the redesign of products and value chains. Despite this considerable potential, the convergence between the circular economy and these technologies is still underinvestigated. By reviewing the literature, this paper aims to provide a definition and a conceptual framework, which systematize the smart circular economy paradigm as an industrial system that uses digital technologies during the product life-cycle phases to implement circular strategies and practices aimed at value creation. Following this conceptualization, the classical, underlying circular economy principle, ‘waste equals food’, is reshaped into an equation more fitting for the digital age—that is to say, ‘waste + data = resource’. Lastly, this paper provides promising research directions to further develop this field. To advance knowledge on the smart circular economy paradigm, researchers and practitioners are advised to: (i) develop research from exploratory and descriptive to confirmatory and prescriptive purposes, relying on a wide spectrum of research methodologies; (ii) move the focus from single organizations to the entire ecosystem and value chain of stakeholders; (iii) combine different enabling digital technologies to leverage their synergistic potential; and (iv) assess the environmental impact of digital technologies to prevent potential rebound effects.

While innovations and new technologies are often pivotal to the long-term prosperity of firms, such firm-level outcomes emerge from the actions and interactions of organizational members who develop innovations and use new technologies. The “microfoundations movement” seeks to understand how micro-level (e.g., individual) actions and interactions lead to macro-level (e.g., organizational) outcomes and mediate relations between macro-level variables. Although the movement has grown tremendously over the last decade, it has yet to deeply pervade the domain of strategic technology and innovation management. Due to its tremendous growth, it is quite fragmented and dispersed, which impedes the identification of the most promising opportunities for future research. To overcome this problematic situation, we conduct a systematic literature review of existing research on microfoundations in the strategic management of technology and innovation, synthesize it into an integrative framework, and chart promising paths for future research. Specifically, we apply a multi-coder, multi-step approach, identify 87 relevant articles published in 23 leading academic journals over the period from 2003 to 2022, and propose a research agenda comprising more than 20 promising avenues for future research based on the resulting insights. These findings have important implications for the academic literature and management practice.

Servitization is a rising trend across manufacturing companies, but it is not achievable without the corresponding transition of the manufacturers’ service network. Despite the key role of service ...

The research on servitization has gained enormous traction in the past two decades, with over 700 scholarly articles and a large pool of cumulative citations across several academic disciplines. The need for a holistic Handbook in Servitization to further demonstrate the richness of the field and to consolidate different research streams has never been greater. With this editorial, we intend to advance our understanding of the topic, discuss key theoretical grounds that have shaped the servitization research today, and provide an agenda for future research.

Firms are under constant pressure from various governmental and nongovernmental agencies to switch from conventional environmentally polluting products to green product innovations (GPIs). However, the relevant research pertaining to GPI has been published in a diverse set of journals that vary in their scope and readership and, therefore, the scholarly contribution to the topic remains largely fragmented. This study has utilised a systematic literature review approach to examine the literary corpus on GPI to paint a holistic picture of its different aspects. The content and thematic analysis of 85 studies resulted in the extraction of seven key research themes: organisational capabilities, organisational learning, institutional pressures, barriers, structural changes, benefits of GPI, and methodological choices. This study's findings further highlight the various gaps in the GPI literature and raise some research questions that warrant scholarly investigation in the future. Likewise, our study has important implications for practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of GPI. Similarly, policymakers can use this study's findings to introduce policy interventions, especially in countries where GPI adoption is low.

This paper explores how government venture capitalists approve or reject financing applications. Based on longitudinal observations, complemented by interviews, documentation, and secondary data, the findings show the limited influence of the regulative and normative logics (e.g., formal guidelines and accepted behavior) on government venture capitalists’ decisions. Instead, individual decisions are observed to be largely overshadowed by cognitions and heuristics, which dominate formal regulations and socially constructed group-level norms. Although official decision communications state that regulations have been followed, the evidence suggests that the cognitive logic dominates the funding decision-making process through a set of overshadowing forces that restrict the influence of the normative and regulative logics on funding decisions. This research has implications for venture financing and highlights the importance of cognitions in shaping venture capital decisions.

Making the transition to a circular economy is an important goal for society and individual companies, particularly in resource-intensive manufacturing industries. Yet the complexity and interdependencies of such an undertaking mean that no single company can achieve it alone and ecosystem-wide orchestration is necessary. Based on a qualitative study of six large manufacturing companies (ecosystem orchestrators) and their ecosystem partners, we develop a process model that describes the scarcely understood process of ecosystem transformation toward a circular economy paradigm. We provide evidence that ecosystem orchestrators achieve the transition toward a circular economy in two stages: 1) ecosystem readiness assessment and 2) ecosystem transformation. In each stage, specific and complementary mechanisms are deployed. The article elaborates on ecosystem transformation mechanisms and their purpose, use, and interdependencies in moving toward a circular economy paradigm.

We investigate the influence of entrepreneurs' temporal preferences on the alertness–effectuation association in the early opportunity creation process. Although temporal cognitions of planning and flexible pacing are generally beneficial in organizational settings, we ask whether they constrain effectuation efforts when there is increasing alertness. Using survey data from 92 entrepreneurs running Swedish ventures, we find that entrepreneurial alertness has a positive association with effectual decision making during opportunity creation. We find support for our predictions that temporal planning (the consideration of the temporal flow of task activities) and flexible pacing behavior (the adaptation of one's pace within social interactions) weaken the positive association between alertness and effectuation. We discuss the implications of our research for the literature on entrepreneurial alertness and effectuation and for the emerging literature on entrepreneurs' temporal preferences.

Based on a sample of 148 Swedish firms, this study investigates the complementary relationships between internal and external coordination and external intelligence quality to explain product innovation performance. The results show that, with increasing manufacturing-marketing coordination, higher market intelligence quality or higher supply chain intelligence quality are positively associated with product innovation performance. The complementary roles of internal and external coordination and intelligence quality have theoretical and practical implications.

The present study aims to advance the understanding of the complex and context-dependent relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm sales growth by investigating the linearity assumption and assessing the moderating role of financial slack resources and absorptive capacity in the mature industry context. Departing from some recent EO studies, the analysis based on a dataset of 86 companies operating in the food manufacturing industry suggests that EO has a nonlinear relationship with sales growth. Moreover, the results suggest that in companies with high levels of slack resources, an increase in EO from low to moderate levels accelerates sales growth; however, to capitalize on the sales growth potential of high EO, a high absorptive capacity is also required. Thus, the present study demonstrates a nonlinear effect of EO on sales growth, and particularly from moderate to high levels of EO, the positive moderating effects of absorptive capacity and slack resources.

This article reviews and discusses how to compete with sustainability by reviewing the literature about sustainability, business models, innovation, and networks. It is an introduction to the speci ...

The Circular Economy has been pointed out by scholars and policymakers as a promising approach to decouple economic growth from resource consumption and waste generation [1,2]. Companies fully embracing a Circular Economy can potentially advance sustainability without compromising the competitiveness of value chains. Unfortunately, several challenges arise in this transformation [3]. Nevertheless, the digital age we live in offers companies many opportunities for overcoming such challenges [4] since digital technologies can support the implementation of Circular Economy strategies into businesses by enabling the redesign of products, business models, consumption patterns, and value chains [5].To advance the discussion on these aspects, the Special Issue ‘Circular Economy in the Digital Age’ called for a more critical discussion on the emerging Smart Circular Economy paradigm [6]. In response, eight articles were received and published, with original contributions to both theory and practice. These papers are briefly illustrated in this Editorial in a sequence that starts from the theoretical basis (e.g., literature reviews and conceptual development) to practical implementation aspects of the Smart Circular Economy paradigm (practices, drivers, and barriers).

Based on the results of a multiple case study of seven manufacturing firms, a contingency framework for harnessing fuzziness in the front end of innovation is proposed by delineating two discrete capability paths through which new product ideas are developed into corroborated product definitions. The study illustrates that ideas characterized by high levels of fuzziness benefit from following an exploratory path, where the creative potential of fuzziness is embraced by deploying problem-formulation and problem-solving capabilities. In contrast, ideas at low levels of fuzziness benefit from following an exploitative path, where fuzziness is tolerated by drawing upon idea-refinement and process-management capabilities. When the fuzziness level of the idea and the set of capabilities to develop the idea are poorly aligned, the idea-development process is either inefficient or runs the risk of stalling. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for the front end of innovation and new product idea development. © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Funding: CAPES, VINNOVA, and the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation

Scholars have recently argued that startups and incumbents play differential roles in the disruptive transformations of industries toward sustainability and that the transformations are only likely to succeed if both startups and incumbents contribute. To understand their respective contributions and, thus, to understand how industries make the transition toward sustainability, comparative studies of incumbents versus startups during this transformation have been identified as a central pursuit, but yet they are mostly lacking. Since business models have become a principal way of characterizing firms, the present study takes a business model perspective and derives business model archetypes in the electrical power sector from an analysis of 280 startups and incumbents in three different countries. The selected countries (USA, UK, and India) represent three different energy profiles and leading instances of disruption in the energy sector. The article, then, undertakes a comparative analysis of startups and incumbents based on the empirically distilled business model archetypes and develops propositions on startups, incumbents, and business models in industry transformations. This analysis produces several important insights. First, incumbents do not seem to engage in less business model experimentation than startups. Second, incumbents have adopted several new business models that are not pursued by startups. Third, startups have espoused some business models that are not pursued by incumbents. Fourth, foreign firms can also affect the ‘green’ transformation of an industry in a focal country. Finally, the identified business model archetypes are likely to be of interest to scholars and practitioners who are seeking an improved understanding of business models in the electrical power industry and the industry's competitive landscape.

Manufacturing companies are increasingly focused on digitalization and service-led growth to gain new revenue streams and achieve sustainable competitive advantages. In this regard, offering product-service systems (PSS) is proposed as an attractive solution for manufacturing companies to achieve economic, environmental, and social benefits. More specifically, digital technology is used to offer services that integrate provider and customer operations, which increases efficiency, because each party focuses on its core competencies, and operations are optimized. Business model innovation represents a crucial component that may differentiate successful and unsuccessful PSS companies. Implementing digital business models for PSS provisions is a process with numerous challenges that constitutes a major reason why manufacturing companies struggle to increase the service and digitalization degree of their offerings. This chapter suggests that evaluating and understanding tactics, risk management, service network adjustment, and most importantly, alignment of activities are necessary for successful implementation of digital business model innovation for PSS. This chapter contributes to the PSS literature by proposing a four-phase digital business model innovation framework.

In the era of digitalization, manufacturing firms find it difficult to assess what is “the right” digital business model. To avoid common digitalization traps, company leaders and managers need to carefully assess each business model opportunity before committing to implementation and commercialization. We present insights from our case study about the diverse and complex issues related to digital business models. We highlight three digitalization traps and provide a three-phase framework companies can use to evaluate digital business model opportunities and make an informed decision on the commercial prospects for each model vetted. Validerad;2021;Nivå 2;2021-01-15 (alebob)

Firms are faced with increased dynamism due to rapid technological development, digitalization, and sustainability requirements, creating novel opportunities for ecosystem innovation. This is particularly prevalent in smart city contexts where initiatives concerning, for example, energy efficient buildings and smart energy grids drive new kinds of ecosystem formation. Orchestrating emerging innovation ecosystems can offer a path to sustained competitive advantage for ecosystem leaders. Yet, it calls for the development of new capabilities to sense, seize, and reconfigure digitalization opportunities in a highly dynamic ecosystem environment. Yet, prior research lacks insights into the dynamic capabilities and routines required for ecosystem innovation. Therefore, this study investigates how firms can develop dynamic capabilities to orchestrate ecosystem innovation and, thus, gain from it. Through a multiple case study of smart city initiatives, we offer insights into the specific micro-foundations or sub-routines underlying the ecosystem leader's sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities, which are necessary to orchestrate ecosystem innovation. We develop a capability-based framework demonstrating three orchestration mechanisms – namely, configuring ecosystem partnerships, value proposition deployment, and governing ecosystem alignment. Our findings carry implications for the literature on innovation ecosystems and dynamic capabilities, as well as for managers. Validerad;2021;Nivå 2;2021-02-01 (alebob)

To benefit from digitalization, providers and customers are moving away from transactional product-centric models to relational service-oriented engagement. This trend is referred to as digital servitization, and requires providers and customers to transform their relationship to co-create value and maximize benefits. This chapter integrates insights from literature on digitalization and servitization with the theoretical perspective of the relational view, and presents a relational transformation framework for digital servitization. The framework highlights four relational components (complementary digitalization capabilities, relation-specific digital assets, digitally enabled knowledge-sharing routines, and partnership governance) which evolve across three phases of provider–customer relationships (foundational, intermediate, advanced). By providing relational insights into the interdependence of activities throughout the transformation phases, we contribute to the emerging literature on digital servitization, and offer guidance for managers involved in digital servitization initiatives.

Recent decades have witnessed increased number of studies focusing on digitalization and related capabilities. Across disciplines digitalization capability is viewed as a sources of sustained competiveness. Nonetheless, several issues related to conceptualizing digitalization capabilities remain ambivalent. The present study, uses co-citation analysis to clarify concept of digitalization capability and identify three underlining capabilities, namely digital integration capabilities, digital platform capabilities, and digital innovation capabilities, that represents micro-foundation of digitalization capabilities. Further, a capability-based model is developed which includes antecedents and consequences of digitalization capabilities in an integrated conceptual model. Suggestions for future research, theoretical contributions and managerial contributions are also presented.

Because research on outcome-based service offerings (OBS) is very case study oriented, we lack empirical knowledge of OBS provider profitability in general. Drawing upon an unbalanced panel dataset (n = 1566, N = 14,756), we found that an average OBS provider manufacturer has a 4.40-percentage-point higher gross margin than an average non-OBS manufacturer. In addition, we found that large OBS providers generate lower profits. Since OBS offerings are complex and highly customized, scaling them is a challenge that requires investments in digital technologies and solution modularity. Thus, we tested the moderating role of R&D investments on the scale-profitability relationship and found that for OBS firms, R&D investments moderate the negative relationship between scale and profitability. For managers, these results highlight the profit potential of OBS but also that large OBS providers in particular must be prepared to invest in digital servitization to ensure profitability.

Manufacturing firms are increasingly adopting a strategy known as 'servitization' to add services to existing product-based offerings to stimulate additional revenue and growth. While the emerging research domain of servitization is mobilizing relevant knowledge across academic establishments, the present study aims to perform a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to organize the prior knowledge in this area, more importantly, highlights areas for future research. This study acknowledges important contributions from authors and organizations, as identified through analyses of citation chains and co-authorship networks. Next, a co-citation analysis of the prior literature is used to identify four main thematic areas relating to capability development, customer involvement, business models, and transformational challenges for servitization. Finally, the dynamic co-citation analysis technique reveals the development of these thematic areas. This study assumes importance in the extant literature by delivering valuable insights from the prior research on servitization and by providing guidance for future avenues of study.

Equipment manufacturers are currently utilizing new digital technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, or Big Data, for new digital offerings. However, these offerings seldom enhance revenue, because companies struggle with business model (BM) dynamics. By analyzing 27 companies through an explorative case-study approach, the authors consider how companies can successfully achieve revenue enhancement through digital offerings. The result is a threefold framework for revenue enhancement through digital offerings. First, this framework distinguishes between three phases of BM dynamics: 1) augmenting products through a “hardware plus” logic, 2) developing a portfolio of multiple logics for creating customer value, 3) integrating this portfolio through platform logic. Second, the framework emphasizes that three barriers, which we refer to as confidence, mixing, and collaboration barrier, limit the progress from Phases 1 to 3. Third, the framework reveals that each phase contains certain modifications of BM components. In the first phase, companies adapt their BM components slightly, so as to advance toward a “hardware plus” logic. In the second phase, companies embrace more radical BM innovations in order to convert services into an outcome-based BM and develop a new software subscription BM. In the third phase, companies modify BM components in order to integrate the BMs internally and to open them up for external collaboration partners.

Western theories on creativity emphasize the importance of access to resources and the generation of innovations as a source of sustainable competitive advantage for firms. However, perhaps the emphasis on slack resources and the firm as the level of analysis may be less appropriate for understanding the benefits of individual creative problem solving in resource‐poor environments of the east; focusing solely on the firm is not sufficiently inclusive and may underestimate the benefits of creative problem solving under resource scarcity. Through an inductive interpretive case study of 12 problem solvers in the highly resource‐poor environment of rural India, we identified the antecedents, dimensions and duality of outcomes for an Indian cultural source of creative problem solving called jugaad. Jugaad relies on assertive defiance, trial‐and‐error experiential learning and the recombination of available resources to improvise a frugal quick‐fix solution. Our inductive framework provides new insights into the dual outcomes of creative problem solving from an eastern perspective; jugaad is unlikely to be a source of competitive advantage for firm growth but represents a source of enhanced wellbeing for inclusive growth. Validerad;2020;Nivå 2;2020-01-13 (johcin) CiiR

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-bas-10.1177_0007650320982609 for Caste-Based Discrimination, Microfinance Credit Scores, and Microfinance Loan Approvals Among Females in India by Pankaj C. Patel, Sambit Lenka and Vinit Parida in Business & Society

Offering product-service systems (PSS) arguably results in economic, environmental and social benefits but also entails significant challenges related to relational dynamics between the provider and the customer. Although prior studies suggest that adverse customer behaviour during PSS provision is likely, they provide a limited theoretical understanding of the conceptualization of such relational problems and, more importantly, offer few possible ways to address these problems. By applying the lens of agency theory, this study examines PSS provider-customer relational problems and solutions. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify agency problems and propose mechanisms to mitigate adverse customer behaviour in PSS provision. Based on a multiple case study approach involving two manufacturing companies, several results are presented. First, we identify and describe two underlying reasons for adverse customer behaviour. These reasons are associated with goal differentiation and monitoring challenges. Second, different agency mechanisms (i.e. sharing, monitoring and trust) are presented as approaches to mitigate the likelihood of adverse customer behaviour. The matching of agency problems with agency mechanisms to mitigate these problems lays the groundwork for developing a framework for agency situation evaluation during the formation and ongoing phases of the PSS agreement. In addition, the choice of agency mechanism is found to be correlated with the maturity and type of customer relationship and can change over time as new customers become known and then become loyal. The proposed framework has major theoretical implications for the PSS literature as well as managerial implications for large manufacturing companies engaged in PSS provision. Validerad;2018;Nivå 2;2018-12-05 (svasva)

Overview: The development of novel digital technologies connected to the Internet of Things, along with advancements in artificial intelligence and automation, is enabling a new wave of manufacturi...

Industrial manufacturers are innovating their business models by shifting from selling products to selling outcome- based services, where the provider (manufacturer) guarantees to deliver the performance outcomes of the products and services. This form of business model innovation requires a profound yet little understood shift in how value is created, delivered, and captured. To address this research gap, our study examines two successful and four unsuc- cessful cases of this shift. We find that effectiveness in business model innovation hinges on the three process phases that unfold in collaboration with the customers: value proposition definition, value provision design, and value-in-use delivery. We also find that that success is determined by the alignment of specific value creation and value capture activities in each phase: identifying value creation opportunities—agreeing on value distribution in value proposi- tion definition, designing the value offering—deciding on the profit formula in the value provision design, and finally refining value creation processes—regulating incentive structures in the value-in-use delivery. Our process model contributes to the literature and practice on business model innovation by providing a thorough understanding of how alignment of value creation and value capture processes is ensured, whilst paying special attention to their interde- pendence and the interactions between provider and customer.

This study explores how the evolution of digital platforms enable the growth of solution value space in manufacturing firms. Greater generativity of digital modules increases the value space and as ...

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) largely depend on proficient idea generation activities to improve their front-end innovation performance, yet the liabilities of newness and smallness of ...

Purpose The dominant-view within servitization literature presupposes a progressive transition from product to service orientation. In reality, however, many manufacturing firms maintain both product and service orientations throughout their servitization journey. Using the theoretical lens of organizational ambivalence, the purpose of this paper is to explore the triggers, manifestation and consequences of these conflicting orientations. Design/methodology/approach A multiple case study method was used to analyze five large manufacturing firms that were engaged in servitization. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 respondents across different functions within these firms. Findings Servitizing firms experience organizational ambivalence during servitization because of co-existing product and service orientations. This paper provides a framework that identifies the triggers of this ambivalence, its multi-level manifestation and its consequences. These provide implications for explaining why firms struggle to implement servitization strategies due to co-existing product and services orientations. Understanding organizational ambivalence, provides opportunity to manage related challenges and can be vital to successful servitization. Originality/value Considering the theoretical concept of ambivalence could advance the understanding of the effects and implications of conflicting orientations during servitization in manufacturing firms.

Both the strategic management and entrepreneurship literatures provide limited guidance on strategic diagnosis in the commercialization stage when the information processing structures of ventures ...

Research shows that effective marketing and R&D interface is pivotal in a company's new product development performance and future competitiveness. The increased popularity of social media promised to enhance interaction, collaboration, and networking between the two functions. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the key activities, infrastructure requirements, and potential benefits of social media in the marketing and R&D interface. This study aims to advance the current understanding of social media engagement strategies, which facilitates improved marketing and R&D interfaces and ultimately NPD performance for manufacturing companies. Based on a multiple-case study in two manufacturing companies, this study first presents the role of social media in facilitating improved marketing and R&D interface within a B2B context. Second, it presents the adoption process of the social media engagement strategy for an evolving marketing and R&D interface. The adoption process is divided into three phases, namely coordination, cooperation, and coproduction, to provide detailed insights regarding full-scale social media engagement. Taken together, the study provides novel insights into industrial marketing management literature by exemplifying the role of social media and proposing a systematic social engagement strategy for improved marketing and R&D interface in the manufacturing industry.