Martin Sköld

Digital innovation work is typically driven by short, rapid, and iterative development cycles involving flexible recombination of digital assets. While digital innovation often involves drawing on external assets, the literature is surprisingly silent on the role of sourcing relationships in this context. Interestingly, the IT outsourcing (ITO) literature, including recent work on strategic innovation and sourcing, predominantly understands sourcing relationships as evolving from transaction-based towards collaborative and innovation-oriented, with long-term relationship development a prerequisite for collaborative innovation between providers and their customers. This apparent temporality mismatch leads to the question of whether and how firms pursuing digital innovation through flexibility, speed, and scaling can innovatively leverage more dynamic sourcing relationships. We pursue this topic through an in-depth case study of an incumbent firm integrating dynamic and flexible sourcing practices into its digital innovation work. We identify a set of dynamic sourcing activities that allow onboarding sourcing partners directly into collaborative innovation work and then transitioning the collaboration to efficiency-focused deployment and contract-based scaling. Our study thus articulates the role of dynamic sourcing in digital innovation and disconfirms core assumptions about ITO relationship evolution.

Firms developing smart and connected products and service systems face challenges related to coordination and integration of multiple design, technical and organizational arrangements. Specifically, the co-existence of and coordination between several different design paradigms become salient when embedded software, sensors, and connectivity are employed to connect the firm’s products, services and operations with databases, application platforms and the firm’s product cloud. This study aims to explore and theorize integration and coordination of design, development, and production paradigms in response to organizational tensions arising in this context. We do so through a case study of a large global incumbent firm developing complex mechanical products engaged in creating integrated product and service systems enabled by digital innovation processes. Specifically, we identify the change of work practices relating to IT and digital services resulting in the emergence of new forms of organizational and technical arrangements that diverge from established firm-wide organizational structures and technical design principles. This divergence is counteracted by bridging the gap between bounded product arrangements and new emerging unbounded digital services in the pursuit to form new organizing logics of smart and connected products and service systems.

When an industry is disrupted, the predominant view is that new entrants benefit at the expense of incumbents, who are pictured as slow-moving, inert, and incapable to change. Based on a longitudinal multiple case study with data over a 15-year period, we challenge this view. By studying the action responses of three incumbent firms and three new entrants to a major regulatory change in the life insurance industry, we find that both incumbents and new entrants can succeed if complementary assets are correctly managed. In particular, firms need to acquire and refine certain key assets needed for exploiting new business opportunities and, subsequently, need to enhance the value of their complementary assets by transforming them from generic to specialized and on to co-specialized stages. These findings have theoretical implications for the literature on strategy and innovation management. In addition, we outline important managerial implications to transform complementary assets to stages with higher value.

Firms in various industries experience how smart products that are based on digital technologies are changing the basis for competition and competitiveness. Particular challenges arise when established mechanical technologies are integrated with digital technologies to create new offerings. As firms increasingly embrace the challenge of smart product development, this particular challenge materializes as not only a product design and integration problem but also a technology-sourcing problem. To investigate a situation in which managers face challenges in leading smart product development, we conducted a case study of four global enterprises, drawing on internal and external documents, as well as in-depth interviews with managers and senior professionals in different positions. We found that established management models that are characterized by vertical relationships within industries need to be supplemented with a horizontal perspective. Based on these findings, we suggest that two established models for sourcing and integration of mechanical technologies need to be supplemented with two others for the integration and sourcing of digital technologies. Thus, management needs to handle four parallel models to succeed with smart product development. The article concludes with identified challenges and suggestions for how managers combine the two models.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify areas and issues for management to consider in balancing specialization and commonalization in large manufacturing corporations with multiple brands from a strategic R&D and manufacturing point of view. Design/methodology/approach: Three global manufacturing corporations from the automotive sector are used as a strategic sample composing three sequential clinical research projects. The data come from complementary data-gathering methods combining documents and interviews and workshops with top executives, project leaders, platform managers and product brand managers, thus enabling triangulation. Findings: The study shows that managing manufacturing corporations with multiple brands is not just on a scale between full specialization and full commonalization but instead has its own logic of categorizations and portfolio formations. In order to develop the value of the brand portfolio, management must simultaneously embrace and address a number of highly integrated corporate values and highly differentiated brand company values. Research limitations/implications: This study contributes primarily by relating economy of scale in relation to the need for differentiation of products and brands that have different values, customers and market positions. A model for balancing commonalization and specialization provides several opportunities for further research and development; however, generalizations are issue and context specific. Practical implications: The critical issues in balancing how to deal with specialization and commonalization in a company with multiple brands are explored and summarized in a framework for the practitioner to use in analyzing a real situation. Originality/value: Previous literature focuses on the maximization of synergies within one brand, missing the specific dynamics of large manufacturing corporations with many entities, such as individual products and brands. This paper adds knowledge regarding how to balance synergies from commonalization with important objectives to preserve the specialization and distinctiveness of each product brand.

Open innovation can involve more or less information and knowledge from few or many areas and few or many actors. The communication can also be more or less intense and frequent. These are considered here to be aspects of openness. Patterns of open innovation are often identified primarily in a vertical dimension in relation to various types of suppliers. Vertical 'open' innovation might however also have 'closed' signatures, especially in relations with suppliers owning scarce and specified technology and/or in relations with large suppliers prescribing technological content. Patterns of more or less closed innovation are mainly identified in a horizontal dimension. This type of innovation has closed signatures since the underlying technology being more or less general or specifically applicable is not traded on an open market, but developed for specific purposes between cooperating parties. In summary, attention should be paid to the openness in both vertical and horizontal perspectives.

Purpose
It is argued in this article that too little is known about product platforms and how to deal with them from a manager's point of view. Specifically, little information exists regarding when old established platforms are replaced by new generations in R&D and production environments. To shed light on this unexplored and growing managerial concern, the purpose of this explorative study is to identify operational challenges to management when product platforms are replaced.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a longitudinal field‐study approach. Two companies, Gamma and Omega, fulfilled important sampling criteria and were selected as strategic samples for the study. The two companies were studied for 42 and eight months, respectively, and were chosen for their long and rigorous experiences of platform development. Together with managers from Gamma and Omega, one major platform replacement was chosen in each company.
Findings
The study shows that platform replacements primarily challenge managers' existing knowledge about platform architectures. A distinction can be made between “width” and “height” in platform replacements, and it is crucial that managers observe this in order to challenge their existing knowledge about platform architectures. Issues on technologies, architectures, components and processes as well as on segments, applications and functions are identified.
Practical implications
Practical implications are summarized and discussed in relation to a framework distinguishing between platform replacement “height” and “width”. Seven groups of managerial measures for dealing with the issues are recommended.
Originality/value
The study aims to contribute to the existing literature by taking a managers' perspective of product platform development. Its specific originality and value is achieved by focusing on product platform replacements believed to represent a growing management challenge.

Numerous companies apply product platforms in order to improve their competitiveness due to increasingly challenging market conditions. Product platforms are often motivated by financial goals and a desire to increase commonality in order to achieve economies of scale and scope. However, while a great deal of the previous research describes the benefits of product platforms, the potential drawbacks and disadvantages of commonality are only sporadically covered. The underlying motive for this study is to elaborate on existing knowledge in order to identify areas which deserve particular attention when an organisation is striving for commonality, specifically with regard to components. From an in-depth explorative case study of a major global truck manufacturer, drawbacks are identified and categorised into:
strategic
technical
organisational drawbacks.
Furthermore, this study investigates the ways in which different parts of the organisation are affected by component commonality. Finally, it discusses ways in which the identified drawbacks can be counteracted.