Understanding Emergent Processes within New Product Development Teams

A firm’s development of innovation in products and services are critical for sustaining a competitive advantage but new product development failure rate in various industries still remains relatively high. New processes emerge during product development due to the uncertainty of the requirements and the diversity of the product development team. Unstructured processes emerge through the social processes of the team. We propose a theoretical conceptualization of social processes within a New Product Development (NPD) virtual team which interact with existing decision processes and the organizational structure to influence the formation of emergent processes. Our paper can help firms develop policies that can better support product development teams. This can help reduce the failure rate of product development which in turn will help the firm sustain a competitive advantage

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed

Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions, representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective, multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences, sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions. When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics. We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our different research fields that include information studies, computability, human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor

Developing a dominant logic of strategic innovation

Purpose: This paper aims to lay the foundations to develop a dominant logic and a common thematic framework of strategic innovation (SI) and to encourage consensus over the field’s core foundation of main themes. Design/methodology/approach: The paper explores the intersection between the constituent fields of strategic management and innovation management through a concept mapping process. The paper categorizes the main themes and search for common ground in order to develop the core thematic framework of SI. The paper looks at the sub-themes of SI in published research and develops a more detailed framework. The conceptual categories derived from the process are then placed in a logical sequence according to how they occur in practice or in the order of how the concepts develop from one other. Findings: The results yield seven main themes that form the main taxonomy of SI: types of SI, environmental analysis of SI, SI planning, enabling SI, collaborative networks, managing knowledge, and strategic outcomes. Research limitations/implications: The new thematic framework the paper is proposing for SI remains preliminary in nature and would need to be tried and tested by researchers and practitioners in order to gain acceptability. Academic rigor and methodological structure are not sufficient to determine whether our conceptual framework will become widely diffused in academia and industry. It would have to pass through an emergent, evolutionary process of selection, adoption and an inevitable degree of change and adaptation, just like any other innovation. Practical implications: The practical implications concern the production of instructive material and the application of strategic management initiatives in industry. The proposed themes and sub-themes can serve as a logical framework to develop and update publications, which have been instrumental in their own right to shape the field. The paper also provides a checklist of potential research projects in SI, which will improve and strengthen the field. The new framework provides a comprehensive checklist of strategic management initiatives that will help industry to initiate, plan and execute effective innovation strategies. Originality/value: The concept mapping of the themes of SI yields a new dominant logic, which will influence the evolution of the field and its relevance to both academia and industry

Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics

Complexity models in design

Complexity is a widely used term; it has many formal and informal meanings. Several formal models of complexity can be applied to designs and design processes. The aim of the paper is to examine the relation between complexity and design. This argument runs in two ways. First designing provides insights into how to respond to complex systems – how to manage, plan and control them. Second, the overwhelming complexity of many design projects lead us to examine how better understanding of complexity science can lead to improved designs and processes. This is the focus of this paper. We start with an outline of some observations on where complexity arises in design, followed by a brief discussion of the development of scientific and formal conceptions of complexity. We indicate how these can help in understanding design processes and improving designs

Sensemaking Practices in the Everyday Work of AI/ML Software Engineering

This paper considers sensemaking as it relates to everyday software engineering (SE) work practices and draws on a multi-year ethnographic study of SE projects at a large, global technology company building digital services infused with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Our findings highlight the breadth of sensemaking practices in AI/ML projects, noting developers' efforts to make sense of AI/ML environments (e.g., algorithms/methods and libraries), of AI/ML model ecosystems (e.g., pre-trained models and "upstream"models), and of business-AI relations (e.g., how the AI/ML service relates to the domain context and business problem at hand). This paper builds on recent scholarship drawing attention to the integral role of sensemaking in everyday SE practices by empirically investigating how and in what ways AI/ML projects present software teams with emergent sensemaking requirements and opportunities

The emergent roles of a designer in the development of an e learning service

This paper presents reflections from a service design case study and uses it to investigate the emerging roles of a designer. Skills, methodologies and values are drawn through the case study and used to communicate how this contributes to the continuing expansion of the profession today. Seven roles are discussed in this paper: designer as a facilitator, communicator, capability builder, strategist, researcher, entrepreneur and co-creator. The analysis of the activities of the designer in this particular case study has indicated a presence of all of these roles in various degrees. This brings up three key questions for discussion: 1. How can the design profession communicate the value of this role shift to external audiences? 2. How will design education address the requirements of these emerging roles? and more relevant to this workshop, 3. How will businesses utilise these additional skills of a designer