The sustainability problems with regard to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services increasingly challenge the legitimacy of corporations. The literature distinguishes three strategies that corporations commonly employ to respond to legitimacy problems: adapt to external expectations, manipulate the perception of their stakeholders, or engage in a discourse with those who question their legitimacy. We discuss three approaches to determine the appropriate response strategy: one-best-way approach, contingency approach, and paradox approach. We argue that in the face of heterogeneous environments with conflicting demands, corporations that follow a paradox approach are likely to be more successful in preserving their legitimacy than those that adopt one of the other two approaches. We develop a theoretical framework for the application of different response strategies and explore the management of paradoxes by way of structural, contextual, or reflective means.
Die zweite Veröffentlichung eines Rankings für Betriebswirtschaftler in der Zeitung „Handelsblatt“ hat massive Proteste hervorgerufen und zu einem teilweisen Boykott geführt. Was kritisieren die Autoren des Boykottaufrufs? Wie stehen sie grundsätzlich zu Rankings in der Wissenschaft?
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of inside-out open innovation (as opposed to closed innovation) on firm innovation performance. Inside-out open innovation involves the exploitation of existing internal technologies through innovation and commercialization.
Design/methodology/approach – Hypotheses are tested empirically using survey data collected from stock-listed companies in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The data include the complete responses from 141 R&D managers for the period from 2004 to 2008.
Findings – The results reveal that companies that emphasize inside-out open innovation are more likely to create radical innovations and tend to sell a greater number of new products. Companies pursuing closed innovation are more likely to exhibit a higher incremental product innovation performance.
Research limitations/implications – The cross-sectional data approach and its dependency on the perceptions and experiences of the respondents has its limitations. Future research should extend the focus and concept of this study and explore additional closed and open innovation strategies.
Originality/value – The adoption of open innovation in practice has not been examined in depth. This study provides empirical insights into the open innovation approaches in German-speaking countries and, by drawing important conclusions and implications for managers involved in the R&D processes, fills a gap in the innovation management literature.
Bei der Zuger Firma Rothsinvest sind kürzlich Verwaltungsräte vom Ex-Firmenchef mit dunklen Geschäften hinters Licht geführt worden. Wie gut sind Verwaltungsräte generell informiert?
Coherent risk measures play an important role in building and solving optimization models for decision problems under uncertainty. We consider an extension to multiple time periods, where a risk-adjusted value for a stochastic process is recursively defined over the time steps, which ensures time consistency. A prominent example of a single-period coherent risk measure that is widely used in applications is Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We show that a recursive calculation of CVaR leads to stochastic linear programming formulations. For the special case of the risk-adjusted value of a random variable at the time horizon, a lower bound is given. The possible integration of the risk-adjusted value into multi-stage mean-risk optimization problems is outlined.
