Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (61)
- Part of a Book (37)
- Contribution to a Periodical (23)
- Case Study (16)
- Working Paper (6)
- Editorship book (5)
- Book (1)
Keywords
- Social entrepreneurship (13)
- Social Entrepreneurship (7)
- Innovation (5)
- Entrepreneurs (3)
- Entrepreneurship (3)
- India (3)
- Social Innovation (3)
- Social responsibility (3)
- Underdevelopment (3)
- - (2)
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.
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.
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.
Editorial notes in leading management journals have urged scholars to address Grand Challenges (GC) as an opportunity for producing knowledge that matters for society. This review explores whether current conceptualizations of GC support a productive path for management and organizational scholarship by guiding empirical inquiry, facilitating cumulative theory development, and informing practice. We systematically examine scholarly articles, calls for papers, and editorial notes published in management journals for consistency in how researchers use and define the concept of GC and the scope of associated phenomena and attributes. We find three prominent conceptual architectures in use: discursive, family resemblance, and phenomenon driven. The variety and incoherence of current uses of the GC concept and the lack of efforts to improve its analytical competence lead us to suggest its retirement. Instead, we propose building on the enthusiasm around GC research and using GC as a term to define research principles that collectively help align research efforts and improve theoretical development and practice. The principles we propose capture a genuine origin story for management research on GC.
Forging a Local Social Economy: On the Institutional Work of Local Governments in South Korea
(2023)
This study investigates the strategies local governments can employ to stimulate the growth of the local social economy sector—a sector associated with improving residents’ subjective well-being. Acknowledging the under-explored but potentially pivotal role of local government as a catalyst, our research uses an institutionalist lens—focusing on institutional work, support, and public-sector entrepreneurship—to examine how local governments can encourage the establishment of social economy organizations. We adopt a Partial Least Squares Model-Structural Equation Modeling approach to analyze data from 69 South Korean urban metropolitan local governments between 2018 and 2020. Our findings reveal a significant positive relationship between the regulatory, administrative, and intermediary support mechanisms implemented by local governments and the scale of the local social economy. By integrating public-sector entrepreneurship with institutional perspectives, our findings enrich existing literature and provide insight into the strategic initiatives local governments can adopt to foster social entrepreneurship.
Companies increasingly seek to strategically integrate social objectives in commercial activities to address societal challenges, yet little is known about how companies can sustain such a commitment over time. To address this question, we conduct a case-based, abductive study of two pharmaceutical companies widely considered industry leaders in facilitating access to medicine over a 20-year period (2000–2019). We identify product and operation-level integration as distinct types of integration efforts enacted by these companies. Tracing the intraorganizational dynamics associated with these efforts, we theorize that sustained integration is contingent on companies’ ability to respond to and address the challenges specific to product and operation-level integration. The theoretical framework we develop contributes to an emerging debate on the potential of companies to make progress on societal challenges by strategically integrating social objectives, including but not limited to those related to global health.
Within the entrepreneurship literature, there is a growing interest in understanding collective entrepreneurial approaches to tackling societal challenges. In this study, we examine the orchestration of collective action in an open social innovation project bringing together public administrations, citizens and organized civil society to collaboratively address several societal challenges. Analyzing data generated in-situ and in real-time over the entire duration of the project we show how social impact orchestration can generate impact through four pathways: lead user focus, solution focus, problem focus, and ecosystem focus. For each pathway, we show how orchestration enhanced the impact potential of stakeholders involved by enabling learning and scaling. Our study contributes to the literature on impact entrepreneurship and advances knowledge on orchestrating innovation for social impact.
Open Social Innovation (OSI) involves the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to generate ideas, and develop and scale solutions to make progress on societal challenges. In an OSI project, stakeholders share data and information, utilize it to better understand a problem, and combine data with digital technologies to create digitally-enabled solutions. Consequently, data governance is essential for orchestrating an OSI project to facilitate the coordination of innovation. Because OSI brings multiple stakeholders together, and each stakeholder participates voluntarily, data governance in OSI has a distributed nature. In this essay we put forward a framework consisting of three dimensions allowing an inquiry into the effectiveness of such distributed data governance: (1) openness (i.e., freely sharing data and information), (2) accountability (i.e., willingness to be held responsible and provide justifications for one's conduct) and (3) power (i.e., resourceful actors' ability to impact other stakeholder's actions). We apply this framework to reflect on the OSI project #WirVsVirus (“We versus virus” in English), to illustrate the challenges in organizing effective distributed data governance, and derive implications for research and practice.
Although diversity initiatives are considered prominent vessels for addressing inequality and despite massive investments in them, inequality inside organizations persists. Assessments of diversity initiatives often center on economic inequality and view organizations as closed systems to explain why they fail. Building on a 19-month field-level ethnography of the diversity field in Israel targeting Palestinian employment, we examine political inequality and show how it is perpetuated even as economic inequality is dealt with. Our findings reveal that the field is complicit in creating a chasm between the economic and political spheres by positioning diversity initiatives as a means to tackle economic inequality. The field’s infrastructure and dominant discourse reinforce this chasm and thereby make political inequality invisible, generating false consciousness. Our study challenges the preoccupation of diversity scholarship with universal best practices, suggests avenues for assessing and managing diversity initiatives while taking stock of political inequality, and directs future research to delve into the relationship between the economic and the political in organizations and our societies.