Towards understanding startup product development as effectual entrepreneurial behaviors

Software startups face with multiple technical and business challenges, which could make the startup journey longer, or even become a failure. Little is known about entrepreneurial decision making as a direct force to startup development outcome. In this study, we attempted to apply a behaviour theory of entrepreneurial firms to understand the root-cause of some software startup s challenges. Six common challenges related to prototyping and product development in twenty software startups were identified. We found the behaviour theory as a useful theoretical lens to explain the technical challenges. Software startups search for local optimal solutions, emphasise on short-run feedback rather than long-run strategies, which results in vague prototype planning, paradox of demonstration and evolving throw-away prototypes. The finding implies that effectual entrepreneurial processes might require a more suitable product development approach than the current state-of-practice.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69191-6_15, 8th ICSOB 2017, Essen, German

Two Cheers For Diversity: An Experimental Study Of Micro-level Heterogeneity In Problemistic Search

In this paper, we argue for an expanded view of problemistic search. Recent behavioral theory research suggests that individual search preferences influence problemistic search. We draw on this to challenge the view of problemistic search as a centrally directed organizational process that proceeds sequentially from local to distant search. We argue that search activities in organizations are heterogeneous – some individuals will first engage in local search while others may move directly to distant search. We propose that problemistic search at the macroorganizational level is therefore the result of a mix of local and distant search activities at the micro-level that shifts towards distant search in response to negative performance evaluation. We test this idea in a laboratory experiment using a repetitive task and performance feedback

Revisiting James March (1991): Whither Exploration and Exploitation

We revisit March’s seminal 1991 article, “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning”, and analyze the impact it has had on scholarly thinking, providing a comprehensive and structured review of the extensive and diverse research inspired by this publication. We show that although this influence has changed significantly over the years, there are still unexplored opportunities left by this seminal work. Our approach enables us to identify promising directions for future research that reinforce the themes anchored in March’s article. In particular, we call for reconnecting current research to the behavioral roots of this article and uncovering the microfoundations of exploration and exploitation. Our analysis further identifies opportunities for integrating this framework with resource-based theories and considering how exploration and exploitation can be sourced and integrated within and across organizational boundaries. Finally, our analysis reveals prospects for extending the notions of exploration and exploitation to new domains, but we caution that such domains should be clearly delineated. We conclude with a call for further research on the antecedents of exploration and exploitation and for studying their underexplored dimensions

Organizational learning and emotion: constructing collective meaning in support of strategic themes

Missing in the organizational learning literature is an integrative framework that reflects the emotional as well as the cognitive dynamics involved. Here, we take a step in this direction by focusing in depth over time (five years) on a selected organization which manufactures electronic equipment for the office industry. Drawing on personal construct theory, we define organizational learning as the collective re-construal of meaning in the direction of strategically significant themes. We suggest that emotions arise as members reflect on progress or lack of progress in achieving organizational learning. Our evidence suggests that invalidation – where organizational learning fails to correspond with expectations – gives rise to anxiety and frustration, while validation – where organizational learning is aligned with or exceeds expectations – evokes comfort or excitement. Our work aims to capture the key emotions involved as organizational learning proceeds

Institutional logics and interorganizational learning in technological arenas: Evidence from standard-setting organizations in the mobile handset industry

© 2015, INFORMS. Conceptualizing standard-setting organizations (SSOs) as technological arenas within which firms from different countries interact and learn, we offer insights into the interplay between firms' institutional logics and their interorganizational learning outcomes. We suggest that firms' interorganizational learning is embedded in their macrolevel country contexts, characterized by more corporatist versus less corporatist (pluralist) institutional logics. Whereas corporatism spurs coordinated approaches, pluralism engenders competitive interactions that affect the extent to which firms span organizational and technological boundaries and learn from each other. We test our theory using longitudinal analysis of 181 dyads involving 26 firms participating in 17 SSOs in the global mobile handset industry. We find that interorganizational learning, as measured by patent citations, involving corporatist firm dyads significantly increases when the dominant logic within the arena is also corporatist. By making cooperative schemas more accessible, a dominant corporatist logic also enhances interorganizational learning across technologically distant dyads. When a pluralist logic dominates the arena, corporatist dyads learn less because firms in the dyad activate a contradictory logic that decouples them from their natural processes for interorganizational learning. These findings highlight the implications of institutional logics for interorganizational learning outcomes and provide insights into how firms attend to institutional contradictions in arenas that provide opportunities for interorganizational learning

Governors and directors: Competing models of corporate governance

Why do we use the term ‘corporate governance’ rather than ‘corporate direction’? Early British joint stock companies were normally managed by a single ‘governor’. The ‘court of governors’ or ‘board of directors’ emerged slowly as the ruling body for companies. By the nineteenth century, however, companies were typically run by directors while not-for-profit entities such as hospitals, schools and charitable bodies had governors. The nineteenth century saw steady refinement of the roles of company directors, often in response to corporate scandals, with a gradual change from the notion of the director as a ‘representative shareholder’ to the directors being seen collectively as ‘representatives of the shareholders’. Governors in not-for-profit entities, however, were regarded as having broader responsibilities. The term ‘governance’ itself suggests that corporate boards should be studied as ‘political’ entities rather than merely through economic lenses such as agency theory

Networked buffering: a basic mechanism for distributed robustness in complex adaptive systems

A generic mechanism - networked buffering - is proposed for the generation of robust traits in complex systems. It requires two basic conditions to be satisfied: 1) agents are versatile enough to perform more than one single functional role within a system and 2) agents are degenerate, i.e. there exists partial overlap in the functional capabilities of agents. Given these prerequisites, degenerate systems can readily produce a distributed systemic response to local perturbations. Reciprocally, excess resources related to a single function can indirectly support multiple unrelated functions within a degenerate system. In models of genome:proteome mappings for which localized decision-making and modularity of genetic functions are assumed, we verify that such distributed compensatory effects cause enhanced robustness of system traits. The conditions needed for networked buffering to occur are neither demanding nor rare, supporting the conjecture that degeneracy may fundamentally underpin distributed robustness within several biotic and abiotic systems. For instance, networked buffering offers new insights into systems engineering and planning activities that occur under high uncertainty. It may also help explain recent developments in understanding the origins of resilience within complex ecosystems. \ud \u