Refine
Year of publication
- 2024 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- no (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for management scholars to address large-scale and complex societal problems and strive for greater practical and policy impact. A brief overview of the most-cited work on COVID-19 reveals that, compared with their counterparts in other disciplines, leading management journals and professional associations lagged in providing a platform for high-impact research on COVID-19. To help management research play a more active role in responding to similar global challenges in the future, we propose an integrative framework that emphasizes a phenomenon’s impact, the conditions that the phenomenon creates at multiple levels, and the responses of actors to such conditions, as well as the dynamic relationships and interactions among these actors. By shifting attention to phenomena and their overall impact, this framework can help scholars better position their work to address large-scale and complex problems and also to assess research for its contribution to generate impact beyond academia.
Developing innovative, eco-friendlier products that gain traction in the mass market remains a persistent challenge for many firms. To bring consumers to choose “greener” alternatives over conventional products, firms need to overcome prevailing product evaluations that favor traditional solutions. Research on valuation entrepreneurship examines the strategies that actors apply to induce changes in established evaluations. Adding to the emerging literature on valuation entrepreneurship, our study analyzes how the car maker Tesla, Inc. used product design—material artifacts' properties of form and function—to advance the public perception of battery electric vehicles (BEVs). When Tesla entered the market, several firms had tried to promote BEVs as a way of making private mobility more environmentally friendly, but with limited success. In contrast, Tesla produced well-received BEVs that generated enormous consumer interest and led to a more favorable assessment of BEVs as a whole. Drawing on 54 interviews and nearly 2000 pages of archival data, our abductive study identifies three product design strategies that increased the appeal of Tesla's initial models: (1) incorporating discontinuous technological solutions; (2) optimizing the products on traditional evaluation criteria (e.g., driving performance, comfort, space, status); and (3) creating an ecosystem of complementary products. Since some design choices came at the expense of a minimal environmental footprint, they risked attracting blame for compromising on the environmental performance of potentially eco-friendly cars and for committing “greenwashing.” To minimize this risk, Tesla complemented its design strategies by employing three strategies of reputational politics to avoid such blame. After Tesla's initial, lavish models had improved the public perception of electric cars, Tesla and other car makers were able to sell less excessive and more sustainable BEVs in much greater quantities than ever before. Our findings contribute to three literature streams and generate valuable insights for management practice.
Open forms of organising innovation bear great potential to address societal challenges, such as the climate crisis. Existing approaches to open social innovation (OSI) draw on a corporate and organisation- centric open innovation model as a blueprint for addressing social and ecological problems. However, such problems are ‘wicked’ and ‘com-plex’ in nature and thus require concerted efforts from a diverse set of stakeholders, including businesses, government agencies, non-profits and communities. Based on a review of the open-, user- and social- innovation literature, this essay traces the evolution from an organisa-tion-centric view (OSI 1.0) to a multi-stakeholder, cross- sectoral perspective (OSI 2.0). More specifically, we understand OSI as a concerted effort undertaken by multiple stakeholders from various sectors throughout the social innovation process, from diagnosing societal challenges, to developing ideas for how to solve problems, creating solutions, effectively scaling solutions and generating impact. We sharpen the terminology for OSI 2.0 and specify design dimensions for the effective orchestration of collaboration and coordination, and outline key areas for future research. Our objective is to foster dialogue between open- and user-innovation and social-innovation research.