Corporate use of competitive intelligence persists despite its high risks

Firms face high costs, stigma and unproven benefits, argue Patrick Reinmoeller and Shaz Ansar

Radical Innovation, Paradigm Shift and Incumbent’s Dilemma The Case of the Auto Industry

Radical innovations often upend the incumbents firms and even render them obsolete (Ansari & Krop, 2012; Benner, 2010), as these firms often have great difficulties in addressing the challenge posed by these innovations due to inertia (Ghemawat, 1991), tendencies to exploit existing competences (Levinthal & March, 1993; O’Reilly & Tushman, 2008), organizational rigidity (Beonard-Barton, 1992), complacency and internal culture (Tellis, 2006), problems in the incentive system and resource allocation process (Christensen, 1997), and gap in the organizational capabilities required for embracing the new technology (Henderson, 2006; Tushman & Anderson, 1986). However, as radical innovations become increasingly frequent across industries, responding to this serious threat has become a strategic priority for many incumbent firms.Research shows that incumbents survive or even prosper in the face of radical innovations by forging effective partnerships with challenger firms (Ansari & Krop, 2012), establishing a separate entity to fend off the threat (Christensen, 1997; Christensen, Raynor & McDonald, 2015), better evaluation and investment approach (Hill & Rothaermel, 2003), appropriately configuring organizational form and structure (Ansari & Krop, 2012), coupling their basic research function with applied research functions (Hill & Rothaermel, 2003), possessing downstream complementary assets critical for the commercialization of the new technology (Ansari & Krop, 2012; Hill & Rothaermel, 2003), and more importantly by possessing a high willingness to cannibalize their core business (Chandy and Tellis, 1998). Incumbents can also thrive or overcome the so-called incumbent’s curse by pioneering radical innovations by themselves (Chandy and Tellis, 2000).Previous studies on radical innovations focus primarily on a single product (e.g., Chandy and Tellis, 1998, 2000), technological or business model innovation (Ansari & Krop, 2012; Christensen, 1997; Hill & Rothaermel, 2003). These innovations may have the potential to shrink the incumbents’ marketspace, e.g., Gemesis’ synthetic diamonds challenging the natural diamonds (McAdams and Reavis, 2008), EasyJet challenging mainstream airlines such as BA, Netflix challenging the traditional movie rental business (Leonhartdt, 2006), or displace the incumbent market leader, e.g., IBM PC and its clones destroyed minicomputer makers such as DEC, Wang, Apollo and so on. Yet, they do not often disrupt the entire industry. But in recent years, more industry-wide disruptions have occurs due to emerge of not a single radical innovation but an array of them simultaneously from within or outside of a particular industry. In this process, it is not just the incumbent market leader or a few incumbent firms but the entire value chain, ecosystem or industry get displaced, the so-called paradigm shift, e.g., GPS device by software companies such as Google and Waze, desktop computing by mobile devices, and the traditional auto industry centered around the internal combustion engine by peer-to-peer service provider (e.g., Uber), consumer electronics (e.g., Apple), battery-driven vehicle (e.g., Tesla), and software companies (e.g., Google, Amazon). When this happens, incumbents are not fighting against a particular firm or a few firms that have introduced radical innovations based on similar technologies, but an army of very diverse entrants that are disrupting the entire industries from various directions, some of which are from remote industries with vastly different organizational capabilities, mindset and business model. How incumbents of the existing ecosystem should best cope with the massive and dramatic industry-level disruption induced by multiple radical innovations along a number of fronts or paradigm shift has largely remained unexamined. In the face of paradigm shift, can the above mentioned strategies or tactics for incumbents to combat single radical innovation or firm be adequate to deal with the fundamental existential threat? If not, what should be the appropriate strategies for them to survive or even thrive in the advent of a paradigm shift? In this paper, we attempt to sketch out a research framework to investigate this important issue

From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market

Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos. But this process can be particularly challenging for movements that are explicitly opposed to using a market mechanism as a means of scaling up. Our analysis of yoga between 1975 and 2016 reveals how a countercultural movement fundamentally opposed to a capitalist market economy but seeking to grow can paradoxically become syncretic with or infiltrated by concepts and beliefs that are core to the market system but incompatible with the movement’s original ethos. We show how, before such a movement can be commodified, it must be de-essentialized, a process that requires stripping away key aspects of its history, context, and religious commitments and transforming collective goals into individual ones. This process involves not only external entrepreneurs looking to mine the movement but also movement leaders seeking wider enrollment of resource-rich actors to scale the movement up. We show how codes borrowed from parallel movements and templates borrowed from markets can be instrumental in driving such a movement’s transformation. Through this extreme case of the yoga movement, we advance understandings of how movements can become syncretic with values and practices they fundamentally oppose

Fiddling while the ice melts? How organizational scholars can take a more active role in the climate change debate

The debate over anthropogenic climate change or the idea that human activities are altering the physical climate of the planet continues to rage amid seemingly irreconcilable differences, both within the developed world and between developed and less developed countries. With high uncertainty, rival worldviews, and wide diversity of meaning attached to the expression, climate change has become a key narrative within which local and transnational issues – economic, social, and political – are framed and contested. The field is fraught with controversies regarding causes and consequences, as well as different attitudes toward risks, technologies, and economic and social well-being for different groups. Parties also dispute how to share responsibility for reducing emissions – whether the issue primarily needs market, regulatory, technological, or behavioral solutions. Climate change is many things to many people. Competing interests negotiate over its interpretation and utilize various strategies to promote practices that advance their own understandings regarding climate change and its governance

Constructing a climate change logic: An institutional perspective on the "tragedy of the commons"

Despite increasing interest in transnational fields, transnational commons have received little attention. In contrast to economic models of commons, which argue that commons occur naturally and are prone to collective inaction and tragedy, we introduce a social constructionist account of commons. Specifically, we show that actor-level frame changes can eventually lead to the emergence of an overarching, hybrid "commons logic" at the field level. These frame shifts enable actors with different logics to reach a working consensus and avoid "tragedies of the commons." Using a longitudinal analysis of key actors' logics and frames, we tracked the evolution of the global climate change field over 40 years. We bracketed time periods demarcated by key field-configuring events, documented the different frame shifts in each time period, and identified five mechanisms (collective theorizing, issue linkage, active learning, legitimacy seeking, and catalytic amplification) that underpin how and why actors changed their frames at various points in time-enabling them to move toward greater consensus around a transnational commons logic. In conclusion, the emergence of a commons logic in a transnational field is a nonlinear process and involves satisfying three conditions: (1) key actors view their fates as being interconnected with respect to a problem issue, (2) these actors perceive their own behavior as contributing to the problem, and (3) they take collective action to address the problem. Our findings provide insights for multinational companies, nation-states, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders in both conventional and unconventional commons

From Interactions to Institutions: Microprocesses of Framing and Mechanisms for the Structuring of Institutional Fields

Despite the centrality of meaning to institutionalization, little attention has been paid to how meanings evolve and amplify to become institutionalized cultural conventions. We develop an interactional framing perspective to explain the microprocesses and mechanisms by which this occurs. We identify three amplification processes and three ways frames stack up or laminate that become the building blocks for diffusion and institutionalization of meanings within organizations and fields. Although we focus on “bottom-up” dynamics, we argue that framing occurs in a politicized social context and is inherently bidirectional, in line with structuration, because microlevel interactions instantiate macrostructures. We consider how our approach complements other theories of meaning making, its utility for informing related theoretical streams, and its implications for organizing at the meso and macro levels

What Is a “Fair” Price? Ethics as Sensemaking

Whereas the deliberative democracy approach to ethics seeks to bridge universalist reason and contextual judgment to explain the emergence of intersubjective agreements, it remains unclear how these two are reconciled in practice. We argue that a sensemaking approach is useful for examining how ethical truces emerge in equivocal situations. To understand how actors navigate through ethical complexity, we conducted an ethnographic inquiry into the multistakeholder practices of setting Fairtrade Minimum Prices. We offer three contributions. First, we develop a process model of ethics as sensemaking that explains how actors come to collectively agree on what is ethical in complex situations, even if no complete consensus arises. Second, our findings suggest that moral intuition and affect also motivate ethical judgment alongside moral reasoning. Third, an ethical sensemaking perspective explains some of the pitfalls actors confront in coping with ethical complexities in practice and how they attend to the challenges arising from stark inequalities in extreme contexts

When Times Collide:Temporal Brokerage at the Intersection of Markets and Developments

We study the influence of a pervasive Western organizational mentality - clock-time orientation - in market-based models for human development. While a linear, clock-time orientation optimized for markets is meant to enhance efficiency, coordination and control, it may be unsuitable for managing emergent, complex and indeterminate processes such as development. To examine how the tension between market and development temporalities plays out at the organizational level, we draw on an ethnography of Fairtrade International, an organization connecting markets in the North with low income community development in the South. We examine intra-organizational contestation over different temporal structures needed to entrain to discrepant temporal environments. We explain how contestation, temporal reflexivity, interpretive shifts and mutual appreciation of interdependencies led to the reconstitution of Fairtrade's development model to bridge competing temporal structures. We contribute by 1) elucidating an agentic view of time, where time is used as a cultural resource to regulate attention and render social phenomena amenable to particular types of managerial action; 2) developing the notion of "ambitemporality," where organizations accommodate seemingly contradictory temporal orientations and 3) explaining how deep seated Western organizational mentalities truncate the power of development models and how these models may benefit from embracing processual approaches, associated with Eastern thought