Research on corporate unbundling: A synthesis

Unbundling operations, understood as the parent company's disposal and sale of assets, facilities, product lines, subsidiaries, divisions and business units, are emerging as a central topic of research in several areas. Yet a synthesis is still lacking, and differences in the terminology have created confusion. This paper stimulates and facilitates future research by unpacking the nature of unbundling operations. We suggest that outcomes of unbundling may be mediated by variables, such as factors at process and management level, which have been greatly neglected in existing research. The paper builds a framework on antecedents, process and outcomes of unbundling by integrating empirical findings and theoretical contributions. Furthermore, it identifies gaps in the existing literature and offers suggestions for future research on unbundling.Corporate strategy; restructuring; divestiture; divestment;

Impact Investing: a primer for family offices

The goal of this report is to help family offices ask the right questions as they contemplate their path into impact investing. It is important to recognize that impact investing may not suit all investors. There will be family offices which conclude impact investing is not appropriate at this stage for them. While we are passionate about the potential of impact investing, we acknowledge the best future for the sector is where each investor can make informed choices about their own best interest. Each investor and investment institution needs to evaluate if impact investing fits with its needs, interests and unique context. It is with that in mind that we offer this report as a resource and tool that family offices can use to begin the conversations internally, to craft and design their own engagement strategy on impact investing with family members, advisers and potential investees, as well as to ensure that not only is their wealth growing in value, but also that their wealth can reflect their values

IT CHALLENGES IN M&A TRANSACTIONS – THE IT CARVE-OUT VIEW ON DIVESTMENTS

Carve-outs belong to the most disruptive events companies – especially IT departments – are subject to. Yet the impact of these events on the IT alignment of the involved business units is largely unknown. This paper utilizes an alignment model to analyze specific IT-related challenges of divesting a strategic business unit (SBU). Hereby it focuses on the functional alignment between business strategy and IT at SBU level as well as on the organizational alignment between corporate and SBU. Based on five in-depth case studies of carve-outs taken place between 2004 and 2008, IT related challenges could be identified due to interdependent SBU information systems, a lack of IT governance, changing strategic scopes and the inability to preserve competencies. Dynamic capabilities were discovered as possible determinants for carve-out success. Carve-out management teams can utilize the analytical framework to make a SBU carveout ready, to guide IT due diligence and to prioritize IT issues

Employer Involvement in Office of Disability Employment (ODEP) Demonstration Programs

[Excerpt] As part of the independent evaluation of ODEP’s demonstration program being conducted by Westat, the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) asked Westat to provide in-depth analysis of three issues that were identified at site visits and in Quarterly Reports during Phase II of the evaluation. This report provides in-depth analysis on the first issue—employer involvement in adult demonstration programs

A Dual View on IT Challenges in Corporate Divestments and Acquisitions

Acquisitions of new businesses and divestments of existing ones are frequently components of large organizations’ corporate strategies. In both acquisitions and divestments, corporate IT infrastructure plays a critical role for realizing business objectives. In this paper, we take a dual view of the IT-related challenges in divestment and acquisition strategies, studying them as a single integrated transaction between a buyer and a seller and investigating how the IT carve-out and IT integration strategies influence each other. The extant literature on the interaction between carve-outs and integration strategies is an empty set. Here, we begin to shed light to the limitations of the carve-out contract, the processes of carving out a business unit from one and integrating it into another multi-business organization, asymmetries in both parties’ preferences for an IT transaction process and its influence on arising challenges and organization performance

Managing Information Technology under Extreme Organizational Disequilibrium: the Case of Corporate Spinoffs

This paper studies the strategic management of information technology in periods of extreme organizational disequilibrium. In such periods, critical business parameters such as industry positioning, competitive strategies, organizational structures, leadership, and business processes change significantly and simultaneously, thus disrupting the very fundamental bases for strategic IT decisions. Corporate spinoffs represent such an extreme case for spun-off businesses that have to adjust most critical business parameters in a compressed timeframe and under severe resource constraints. Based on in-depth case studies on five spun-off businesses, we found that strategic IT management in the period of extreme disequilibrium largely reflected the priority of stabilizing business operations to ensure business survival. However, when organizations take shortcuts and make inadequate anticipatory IT investments, they compromise their long-term prosperity after new equilibrium emerges. A theoretical model of strategic IT management is proposed in the context of corporate spinoffs when concluding the study

Motivational Social Visualizations for Personalized E-Learning

A large number of educational resources is now available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produces at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources, and how to engage them into using these resources and benefiting from them. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential methods for addressing these problems. Our work presented in this paper attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning. We introduce Progressor + , an innovative Web-based interface that helps students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of self-assessment questions and programming examples. We also present the results of a classroom study of the Progressor +  in an undergraduate class. The data revealed the motivational impact of the personalized social guidance provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more educational resources and motivated them to do some work ahead of the course schedule. The increase in diversity of explored content resulted in improving students’ problem solving success. A deeper analysis of the social guidance mechanism revealed that it is based on the leading behavior of the strong students, who discovered the most relevant resources and created trails for weaker students to follow. The study results also demonstrate that students were more engaged with the system: they spent more time in working with self-assessment questions and annotated examples, attempted more questions, and achieved higher success rates in answering them

Mosaic: Designing Online Creative Communities for Sharing Works-in-Progress

Online creative communities allow creators to share their work with a large audience, maximizing opportunities to showcase their work and connect with fans and peers. However, sharing in-progress work can be technically and socially challenging in environments designed for sharing completed pieces. We propose an online creative community where sharing process, rather than showcasing outcomes, is the main method of sharing creative work. Based on this, we present Mosaic---an online community where illustrators share work-in-progress snapshots showing how an artwork was completed from start to finish. In an online deployment and observational study, artists used Mosaic as a vehicle for reflecting on how they can improve their own creative process, developed a social norm of detailed feedback, and became less apprehensive of sharing early versions of artwork. Through Mosaic, we argue that communities oriented around sharing creative process can create a collaborative environment that is beneficial for creative growth