Review of 'Girls Like Me' by Teri Louise Kelly.

Review of 'Girls Like Me', a poetry collection by Teri Louise Kelly

The Enemy

A poem by Deb Matthews-Zott

Designing your future business model: An activity system perspective

Building on the received literature, we conceptualize a firm's business model as a system of interdependent activities that transcends the focal firm and spans its boundaries. The activity system enables the firm to create value in concert with its partners but also to appropriate a share of the value created. Anchored on theoretical and empirical research, we suggest two sets of parameters that activity systems designers need to consider: design elements - content, structure and governance - that describe the architecture of an activity system; and design themes - novelty, lock-in, complementarities and efficiency - that describe the sources of the activity system's value creation.Business model; activity system; design;

Business model innovation: Creating value in times of change

We highlight business model innovation as a way for general managers and entrepreneurs to create and appropriate value, especially in times of economic change. Business model innovation, which involves designing a modified or new activity system, relies on recombining the existing resources of a firm and its partners, and it does not require significant investments in R&D. We offer managers and researchers a conceptual primer on business model innovation emphasizing the importance of system-level thinking.Business model; innovation; activity system; design; value creation;

Emotional assuring, trust Building, and resource mobilization in start-up organizations

Based on a five-year field study of six new ventures, we investigate whether and how organization foun-ders use affective influence, a form of emotion management, with diverse stakeholders, namely investors, board members, customers, and employees. We found wide differences in founders' propensity to use affective influence actions and that not all affective influence actions were effective in mobilizing re-sources for the new firm. We identified a particular form of beneficial affective influence we call "emo-tional assuring," which refers to affective influence actions that seek to build three different dimensions of trust in regard to the new firm: (1) the firm's integrity, (2) the founder's competence as an entrepreneur, and (3) the founder's benevolent character. Although firms that practiced little emotional assuring could mobilize adequate resources as well as firms that did it in munificent environments, the latter gained an upper hand and were more resilient under tough economic conditions. We also identified the moderating conditions and limitations of emotional assuring.Affective influence; emotional assuring; emotion; entrepreneurship; organization creation; resource mobilization; trust;

The affective roots of resource heterogeneity: How founders' emotion regulation helps create social resources in startups

Where do firms' heterogeneous resources come from? Our qualitative, inductive study of nascent firms over seven years revealed that founders' differential use of emotion regula-tion behaviors can explain differential creation of social resources at the firm level. We found that founders' emotion regulation behaviors cluster around three themes: (1) the founder's temporal perspective (short-term versus long-term); (2) the nature of founder benefits (economic versus emotional rewards); and (3) the target of founder attention (self versus others). We theorize that founders' emotion regulation behaviors according to these themes influence the incentives of founders and stakeholders and thereby enable the creation of valuable and difficult-to-imitate social resources for their ventures. Social re-sources include discretionary support provided by founders and stakeholders, as well as founder persistence and stakeholder willingness-to-help. Our study contributes to the strategy literature by showing empirically the link between specific emotion regulation behaviors and the emergence of resource heterogeneity at the firm level. It specifically contributes to resource-based theory by separating the theory's main assumptions and outcomes, reducing concerns about potential tautology.Resource heterogeneity; resource-based view; emotion regulation; entrepreneurship;