Mattias Axelson

Contemporary disruptions often last months or years, not days or weeks, requiring bureaucratic organizations that provide consistency and continuity. However, bureaucracies are typically rigid and inferior to temporary organizations in terms of flexibility in dealing with disruptions. Conversely, temporary organizations lack the continuity needed during prolonged disruptions. We learned about this poorly understood puzzle during our case study of Sweden’s defense administration’s military response to the greyzone between peace and war following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Longitudinal data reveal how managerial hierarchies select internal trustees based on the trustees knowledge of local contexts and how the trustees reactivate former employees, chosen for their professional expertise, as external trustees to mobilize local resources. These trustees collectively engage in a liminal process of strategizing through familiarity that makes a bureaucracy flexible during prolonged disruptions, blending transparency with secrecy. This discovery challenges extant research that underestimates the ability of bureaucracies to become flexible during disruptions. As a basis for further theory development, we propose a “liminal strategizing through familiarity” model that is socio-culturally rooted among internal and external trustees. Our pre-theory reintroduces flexible bureaucracy, assigning familiarity with a new strategic role for continuity during prolonged disruptions.

How firms address pressing societal needs during crises is not well understood. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted societies worldwide, and many firms quickly developed new product innovations in personal protective equipment – an area outside of their core businesses and with uncertain profitability but demanded by stakeholders. We conducted inductive case studies of eight firms to understand why firms pivot from shareholder- to stakeholder-oriented innovation of product categories new to the firm and how they satisfy new stakeholder needs during crises. The findings suggest a three-stage process model that explains how firms (1) internalize information signalling a lack of product supply that leads to urgent innovation needs, which in turn triggers a shift, (2) how the firm’s extant resources are understood and (3) thus how the capability assembly of new product innovation is initiated. We theorize that the increase in responsiveness to societal crises is a sensitization process. This process explains how for-profit product innovation prior to the pandemic led to the crisis-driven innovation of products new to the firm by temporarily suspending a profit orientation to respond quickly to calls for help. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. © 2022 The Authors. R&D Management published by RADMA and John WileyXX1Sons Ltd.

This paper assesses how societal disruptions lead to collective action that addresses institutional voids. Examining field data from Sweden’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak, we track institutional voids related to four product market categories. We construct a process model and elaborate on what we conceptualize as entrepreneurial constellations, which consist of collaborating business firms, public organizations, and the government. These entrepreneurial constellations facilitate the functioning of markets or forming of new ones to deal with a disruption. Through collective action, constellations coordinate problems and self-interest to overcome regulatory obstacles. Findings point to institutional voids that relate to surges during the need to scale up existing critical product markets, creating and innovating new critical product markets. Recognizing such institutional voids helps constellations coordinate expertise that collectively enacts regulatory changes and innovation in coordinative functions. While emerging, they accomplish ongoing evaluative reflections that permit them to autocorrect. This new conceptual understanding of the surprising presence and consequences of institutional voids in market economies, where they are not expected to develop and cause insufficiencies and suffering, explains how entrepreneurial constellations improvise solutions to societal disruptions.

Overview: The view of time that dominates conventional management thinking, including the Lean Startup movement’s “fail fast and pivot” approach, often leads to failure in the business model evolution of new ventures spinning off from established firms. Timing is critical for spinoffs because it is a key element of the balance between minimizing risk and maximizing opportunity. In the literature on business model evolution and lean startups, however, the issue of timing is given limited consideration. To address this issue, we present and analyze the role of timing in the business model evolution of C3 Technologies, a spinoff from Saab. The results offer insight regarding the use of managed timing to allow evolutionary processes to let the right moment present itself—and enable the organization to move quickly to seize the moment. This approach allows managers to control the evolutionary process despite the high uncertainty associated with exploring new business models.

Through an inductive case study over three years of two product development collaborations, we identified how four organizational interfaces play out over time and how they are related to each other. This study therefore contributes to our understanding of how organizational interfaces evolve and their mutual dependencies in shaping conditions for knowledge integration. Our study extends previous work on organizational interfaces that have either focused on interfaces within the organization or focused on one or two organizational interfaces and their link to knowledge integration without considering the enabling conditions. Our longitudinal approach helps to understand how organizational interfaces play out over time and how they interact and influence each other. Our research helps managers to ask the right questions about how they can design preconditions for knowledge integration in product development collaborations. © 2017 John WileyXX1Sons Ltd

Research on knowledge transfer has predominantly focused on how to transfer source knowledge successfully to a recipient. However, there is a lack of studies on product development (PD) collaborations where the parties involved in the knowledge transfer must all jointly contribute to the knowledge transfer process when no clear sender-receiver relationship exists. Our paper concerns these relationships and is guided by the following research question: What are the mechanisms used in order to create operational level conditions for knowledge transfer in collaborative PD projects? Through a three-year longitudinal inductive case study on knowledge transfer between two companies, covering both operational and managerial levels, five key mechanisms for enabling knowledge transfer were identified: (1) co-locate a team; (2) access to existing technology; (3) establish a common vocabulary; (4) shared work processes; and (5) having joint work tasks. Our results show these five mechanisms have a mutual influence on each other, thus further facilitating the transfer of knowledge. Understanding the mechanisms and their interplay can help companies succeed in their attempts at reaping the benefits of PD collaborations.