How to Deal With and Repair Broken Trust in an R&D Partnership

This article offers an actionable framework for dealing with trust violations in R&D partnerships: it explains how to turn around a conflicted R&D partnership, repair trust, and learn from the experience. As innovation becomes more open, firms increasingly find themselves involved in R&D collaborations with suppliers, customers or even competitors. Trust plays a fundamental role in such partnerships to work. Yet, trust cannot be taken for granted. In fact, trust in R&D partnerships is often violated – and without executive intervention, trust violations can soon turn even the most promising partnership into a value-destroying predicament. Although much has been written about trust formation in R&D partnerships, this article focuses instead on what to do when trust has been broken. The analysis is based on a review of academic research and is illustrated with real-life examples of trust repair processes

A longitudinal project of new venture teamwork and outcomes

This chapter present a research project dedicated to better understand how new venture teams work together to achieve desired outcomes. Teams, as opposed to an individual, start a majority of all innovative new ventures. Yet, little research or theory exists in new venture settings about how members interact with each other over time—teamwork—to produce innovative technologies, products, and services. We believe a systematic study of social and psychological processes that underlie new venture teamwork and venture outcomes is timely and important. Unique features of our research project include: (1) a team level focus on social and psychological processes, to assess relations to proximal (e.g., innovation, first sales and team satisfaction), and distal value creation outcomes (e.g., sales growth, raised capital and profits). (2) Combined qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to provide both theory building and theory testing for the relations of interest. (3) A time-sequential design with data collection every three months over one year to allow us to investigate the relations of interest for new ventures

Cultural ideals in the entrepreneurship industry

As both public and private organizations are spending resources on fostering entrepreneurship, we have witnessed the emergence of an entrepreneurship industry. Using the entrepreneurship industry in Sweden as a case and example, this chapter provides an explorative analysis the emergence, manifestations and consequences of cultural ideals within this industry. The analysis reveals how the entrepreneurship industry is not only a producer of goods and services for opportunity discovery and development; but also, a producer of entrepreneurship culture. Moreover, how the production and consumption of entrepreneurship culture can lead to problems of inefficiency and discrimination, problems which ultimately hampers the entrepreneurial output that the industry is supposed to produce

Voice and punctuation : A process model of conflict enactment in new venture teams

This paper presents an emergent process model of conflict enactment in new venture teams. The analysis is based on the inductive study of conflict process in three new venture teams over six months, leveraging a unique combination of interviews, video recorded observations and analysis of online chat conversations among team members. The analysis advances team conflict research by offering a novel conceptualization of team conflict, one that complements the prevalent focus on conflict content. Moreover, by introducing the concept of team voice as a regulatory mechanism underlying productive conflict process, the analysis challenges some fundamental assumptions of how conflicts are productively solved. The essence of this idea being that it is not conflict, argument, or negative affect that destroys a team, but rather the absence of positive conversations

Task Re-allocation in New Venture Teams : A Team Conflict Perspective

This study contributes a novel perspective on how new venture teams navigate task re-allocation during the new venture development phase. It highlights the relevance of task re-allocation conflict, shows how “negative affect expectations” shape the unfolding of such conflicts, and demonstrates why acting out conflict and its associated negative affect can enable team members to make substantial task re-allocations instead of symbolic ones. The analysis has implications for two bodies of research, which have previously not been considered in tandem: (1) research on task (re-)allocation, professionalization, and structural imprinting in new ventures, and (2) research on team conflict

Faktorer som bidrar till moralisk stress hos intensivvårdssjuksköterskor

Intensivvårdens komplexa natur innebär att det dagligen uppstår situationer som skapar moralisk stress hos sjuksköterskan och det finns i hennes profession, en vilja i att göra rätt och göra gott. Syftet var att belysa faktorer som intensivvårdssjuksköterskan upplever frambringa moralisk stress vid omvårdnad av svårt sjuka patienter. Metoden som användes var en litteraturstudie, där 10 artiklar inkluderades efter kvalitetsgranskning. Traditionell innehållsanalys användes för att få fram koder ur materialet. Resultatet som framkom var tre huvudkategorier som belyste de faktorer som påverkade sjuksköterskans upplevelse av moralisk stress. Huvudkategorierna var; Brister i organisationen och arbetsledningen, Vård till varje pris samt Svårigheter i kommunikation. Att moralisk stress kommer av brister i organisationen blev tydligt i resultatet. Sjuksköterskorna kände en avsaknad av stöd från organisationen, att arbetsbelastningen var orimligt hög och en brist på resurser. Vård till varje pris inbegrep tveksamhet i beslut gällande fortsatt behandling eller avslutande av vård, som i slutändan innebar förlängt lidande för patienten. Svårigheter i kommunikationen omfattades av kontakten mellan läkare, sjuksköterskor och anhöriga. Sjuksköterskorna upplevde att de inte fick vara delaktiga i beslut, inte fick den information som krävdes och som kunde leda till svåra samtal med anhöriga. Att belysa de faktorer som påverkar upplevelsen av moralisk stress hos sjuksköterskan, ger en möjlighet till bearbetning av dem och en möjlighet att förutse samt förhindra att de uppkommer. Det leder i sin tur till att en diskussion kan ske gällande problemområden inom organisationen som försvårar sjuksköterskans arbete och att en ökad förståelse för varandra uppstår inom teamet

Cooperation and Coordination: The role of trust in inter-organizational relationships

How should we understand the role of trust in inter-organizational relationships? Trust refers to the ‘willingness of one party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectations that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespectively of the ability to monitor or control that other party’ (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995: 712). The prevailing view in inter-organizational trust research is of trust as a mechanism, which entails a mutual willingness to accept vulnerability in the inter-organizational relationship (Mayer et al., 1995). Hence, inter-organizational trust research has suggested that trust makes partners willing to rely on each other, even though the other is potentially opportunistic, goals may be misaligned and the ability to monitor or control the other party is limited (Dyer & Singh, 1998; Zaheer & Venkatraman, 1995). In short, trust has been understood as a mechanism that eases concerns of opportunism and thereby enables cooperation

Customer involved product development -how companies get access to customers´ knowledge

Bakgrund: Ett problem bland många företag är att de utgår ifrån det som teknikerna har utvecklat istället för efter det som marknaden efterfrågar. Nu börjar företag inse vikten av kundernas kunskaper och ett sätt att få tillgång till dessa kunskaper är genom att involvera dem i produktutvecklingen. Syfte: Syftet med denna magisteruppsats är att beskriva hur företag kan få tillgång till kundernas kunskap vid kundinvolverad produktutveckling samt att beskriva vilka förutsättningar som bör råda för att kundinvolveringen ska fungera. Metod: Totalt har elva personer från sex företag intervjuats. Resultat: Kunskapen som företaget vill få från kunden är framförallt kunskaper om kundens behov, vilket fås genom att observera när kunden använder produkten och genom att arbeta ute hos kunden. Förutsättningar som är viktiga är kundens egenskaper, en relation, vinna-vinna situation och kundfokus

Inter-Organizational Relationships as Political Battlefields: How Fragmentation within Organizations Shapes Relational Dynamics between Organizations

Whereas extant theorizing on inter-organizational relational dynamics has highlighted the importance of between-partner differences, we shift attention to within-partner differences. We explore how internal fragmentation – i.e., the existence of multiple coalitions within a partner organization, each with different interests and perspectives – influences the evolution of relational characteristics in inter-organizational relationships. Based on a longitudinal case study of a dyadic strategic alliance, we develop a process model, describing how internal fragmentation within one of the partner organizations can lead to a counterintuitive relational pattern – i.e. dual relational dynamics – where decision makers of both partners continue renewing their formal commitments, while simultaneously experiencing negative trust dynamics. We show that the existence of different belief systems within one partner organization can lead to a politically charged process, where different coalitions within this organization frame and act upon inter-organizational events in different ways. This politically charged process can fuel both hope and disappointment among decision makers of both partner organizations, leading to dual relational dynamics. Our findings contribute by advocating a political perspective on inter-organizational relationships. We also demonstrate the relevance of this political perspective by showing how it challenges the dominant notion of inter-organizational relational dynamics as reinforcing spirals

Berlin is Hotter Than Silicon Valley! How Networking Temperature Shapes Entrepreneurs’ Networking Across Social Contexts

Our study contributes a contextual perspective on entrepreneurs’ networking, shifting focus from individual-level network structure and networking activities toward understanding networking as a multilevel process involving individual and contextual mechanisms. Through a multiple case study of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Berlin, we introduce networking temperature as novel concept that captures context-bound templates for how entrepreneurs should network, ranging from colder to warmer. As core implications, networking temperature enables a contextualized understanding of tie quality, to explain why networking takes different forms in different contexts, and why entrepreneurs gain more cumulative advantage from their existing relationships in warmer than colder contexts