Seeing what other miss: A competition network lens on product innovation

How a firm views its competitors affects its performance. We extend the networks literature to examine how a firm’s positioning in competition networks—networks of perceived competitive relations between firms—relates to a significant organizational outcome, namely, product innovation. We find that when firms position themselves in ways that allow them to see differently than rivals, new product ideas emerge. Simply put, firms with an unusual view of competition are more innovative. We situate our analysis in the U.S. enterprise infrastructure software industry, examining the relationship between the firm’s position in competition networks and its innovation over the period of 1995–2012. Using both archival and in-depth field data, we find that two factors—the focal firm’s spanning of structural holes in the network and the perception of peripheral firms as competitors—are positively associated with its product innovation. At the same time, turnover in firms perceived as competitors has an unexpected negative association with innovation. Overall, the findings suggest that firms benefit when they see the competitive landscape differently than their competitors. The findings also show that what we know about innovation-enhancing positioning in collaboration networks does not necessarily hold in competition networks

Appreciative Intelligence for Innovation in Indian Industry 1

Abstract Based upon the author's original research and recent discoveries in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this article explores the promise of Appreciative Intelligence for Indian businesses and public sector agencies. Through an understanding of Appreciative Intelligence, corporate and public sector leaders can enhance their own levels of Appreciative Intelligence and potentially use it for the benefit of their organizations

Enablers of a Circular Economy : A Strength-Based Stakeholder Engagement Approach

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Is There a Doctor in the House? Expert Product Users, Organizational Roles, and Innovation

We explore the impact on innovation that professional end-users of a product have as inventors, executives, and board members in a young organization. In contrast to prior literature, which has emphasized technology roles, we put the spotlight on executive and governance roles that many professional users take in young firms. Using an extensive custom-collected dataset of 231 surgical instrument ventures over a 25-year period combined with qualitative fieldwork, we find that professional physician-users (surgeons) strengthen innovation in some roles but block it in others. Surgeons are related with the increase in a firm’s innovation when they take a technology role as inventors, and particularly when they take a governance role on the young firm’s board. However, despite their frequent involvement in executive roles, surgeon-executives are less likely to be helpful, and especially likely to block innovation as chief executives. Our results emphasize professional users as a critical external dependency for a young firm’s innovation, but show that a mismatch with a particular organizational role may have unanticipated negative effects on innovation. A key finding is that users are more helpful in suggesting a broad variety of solutions to the firm’s innovation problems but less helpful in selecting the best ones for the organization to pursue. Our findings have implications for research on evolutionary perspective on user innovation, organizational roles in young firms, and entrepreneurial policy

Reflexive conversations:Constructing hermeneutic designs for qualitative management research

Responding to calls to widen the range of qualitative approaches within management research, this paper addresses perceived difficulties in applying hermeneutic approaches to interview-based research and discusses how researchers can develop appropriate research designs. It reviews how tools from the hermeneutic tradition have been used, demonstrating how a sub-branch, critical hermeneutics, is particularly suited to the complexities of management research, offering a flexible means of exploring complex research relationships between ‘texts’, contexts and the researcher. The paper details the inception and implementation of a hermeneutic research project and demonstrates the application of a four-stage hermeneutic analytical framework for use with interview transcripts. In showing how interviews are co-created through a hermeneutic process between the research participants and the researcher, the paper suggests ways of acknowledging the implications of this relationship and thus of increasing researcher reflexivity within the research process. The benefits and limitations of implementing such hermeneutic research designs are then discussed

Building Capabilities for Change through Laboratory Simulations

In this paper the authors describe the learning from a project at the Organizational Learning Laboratory at George Mason University as an attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Using social constructionist perspectives, a recasting of reverse simulations is shown as an alternative to the traditional focus in simulations, which is to portray reality outside as faithfully as possible in the laboratory environment Utilizing appreciative inquiry as the overarching conversational forum, participants in the project created a product in record time by making the best use of the diverse talents of their team members dispersed across organizational hierarchies