Research Summary
Ecosystems represent a key challenge for established firms, shifting their focus from products to system-level collaboration around integrated value propositions. This longitudinal case study of a machine manufacturer reports how an established firm created an ecosystem to enhance its focal product. Drawing on an activity system lens, we develop a model how firms can achieve fit around an integrated value proposition through mutual adaptation of product and ecosystem activities. This strategic transformation is supported by a shift towards collaborative organizational design. We elaborate on how firms can create non-generic complementarities between products and the emerging ecosystem through product adaptations, demonstrate the role of internal and external collaboration in developing ecosystem orchestration capabilities, and highlight data generation and processing as critical factors in realizing complementarities.
Managerial Summary
Digital ecosystems that enable new integrated value propositions pose a challenge for established firms, as these new activities often fundamentally conflict with the existing product business. Our case study of a machine manufacturer shows how a firm can leverage its product-focused activities to establish itself as an ecosystem leader through the mutual adaptation of its product and ecosystem activities. The focal firm modularized its products and enhanced their information-processing capacities while simultaneously embedding them in an integrative platform with open interfaces for partner components. The firm was thus able to realize data-driven complementarities between the platform and its components. Supporting the ecosystem-creation process required a shift of the organizational design toward collaboration, both internally and with partners.
We aim to contribute to improving the management of pandemic crises. Our focus is on federal systems, as these are particularly powerful in dealing with environmental complexity. Through four waves of the pandemic, spanning a year and a half, we studied crisis management based on the case of the Swiss Federation. This research concentrates on three research questions: (1) How is the management of the Covid-19-Crisis organized in Switzerland? (2) How effective is this organization in coping with the dynamics of emergency? (3) What lessons can be learned for the design of a crisis management in the
future? We apply the Viable System Model (VSM) as a framework for our
study, elaborating a diagnosis and a design for the management of epidemic or pandemic crises. The VSM is a conceptual tool that is particularly strong for analysing federal systems. Hence, substantial insights have surfaced to orientate a future crisis management.
Linz, Carsten; Müller-Stewens, Günter & Zimmermann, Alexander : Radical business model transformation : How Leading Organizations Have Successfully Adapted to Disruption. 2nd Edition. London : Kogan Page, 2020, - ISBN 9781789661965.
Today’s economic system and the companies operating within it are strongly oriented toward a linear pattern of value creation in which raw materials are extracted from the earth, products are manufactured, sold to customers, and end up as waste. This economic linearity causes material waste, global warming, and other environmental degradation. There is increasing pressure being put on companies to implement sustainable, material-conserving business models. An economical alternative is a circular economy (CE) in which companies focus on closed material loops implemented with so-called circular business models (CMBs). Although some research has been done in this field, there is still a significant research gap regarding the company-internal driving factors that facilitate the implementation of CBMs. This current study involved conducting interviews with 59 Swiss managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises from three industries: food and beverage, textile, and logistics. Helped by an inductive grounded theory approach, five managerial and five organizational drivers were identified and analyzed first. In the second step, the concept of dynamic capabilities (DCs) was used to explain the possible influence of drivers on the creation of CBMs conceptually and with reference to data. This study shows which company-internal drivers can act as antecedents of CBM innovation in the entrepreneurial context and how they can affect the higher-order DCs of sensing, seizing, and transforming, according to Teece (2007). This current study contributes to the analysis of factors that stimulate economic transformation toward a CE from a company perspective.
It is of interest in China and across the world to predict whether China will catch up with the most economically advanced nations in innovation capacity. To facilitate an ongoing assessment of China’s innovation capacity, the article develops a China Innovation Capacity Growth Index composed of eight separate measures. China’s performance in 2020 is compared to the baseline from 2015, showing that China has progressed in six of the eight measures. This article and the accompanying Technical Appendix explain each of the measures, including the sources for the data, and report the changes in performance over time.
Humility is key to public value, so is courage. For me, this is the message of Prebble’s stimulating article. It comes at a good time, when public value thinking is well-established, theorizing about it differentiates into more or less normative schools of thought and empirical research is on its way—normal science as one could say. I read Mark’s argument as a wake-up call to take public value thinking to a more process-oriented level and reflect about the chances and risks of any intervention in the name of public value. It is a characteristic of good theories to start and apply a development lens.
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