Learning and Innovation in Hybrid Organizations

Business ecosystems are an emergent type of organizational form that can be defined as “the alignment structure of the multilateral set of partners that need to interact in order for a focal value proposition to materialize” (Adner in Journal of Management 2017). Gulati, Puranam, and Tushman (Strategic Management Journal 33(6): 571–586, 2012) have identified such ecosystems as a novel type of organizational form, which combines open membership boundaries with a highly stratified and more hierarchical decision making. Such new organizational forms are increasingly important in highly competitive global industries (Ilinitch, D’Aveni, and Lewin in Organization Science 7(3): 211–220, 1996; Volberda in Organization Science 7(4): 359–374, 1996). A key decision for firms managing a business ecosystem is how to design such governance decisions, as they can impact the rate and degree at which innovations arise and value is created. This chapter focuses on how firms manage these interdependencies with other actors that emerge in business ecosystems, and how the strategic management of such interdependencies affects innovation and value creation in business ecosystems.

By taking together time and team as key themes to analyze project-based organizations, this chapter attempts to shed more light on the diversity literature by focusing on the role of past work experience diversity since experience plays a pivotal role in models of work performance and behavior.Specifically, within this chapter, authors investigate the importance of work experience diversity in two project-based creative contexts: music and TV drama series productions.

This contribution is oriented toward understanding collaborative workspaces and their impact on innovation. More in detail, the authors propose a focus on Coworking spaces as recent and disruptive innovation in the workspace template. Far from being just a logistic business solution, Coworking encompasses a complex social phenomenon, which combines work solutions, learning opportunities, and social relations. Thus, the contribution will speculate on Coworking as a hybrid organizational layout. Authors analyze this phenomenon from a theoretical standpoint that combines organizational design with innovation management principles. In particular, the contribution is structured in order to account for opportunities and threats provided by such collaborative spaces.

In a turbulent environment, increased flexibility and efficiency are essential for most firms to survive. Many organizations have responded to the need for greater efficiency and productivity by building more Agile structures and shifting to the implementation of Agile software (SW) methodologies. Although the adoption of Agile methodologies is becoming widespread, robust empirical evidence on their effectiveness is lacking as is evidence of the improvements brought by Agile compared to other methods. This chapter provides empirical evidence on the impact of Agile on organizational product and process innovation and learning. Authors investigate the following research question:  How does use of Agile methods impact on product and process related innovation and learning in teams? While the relationship between the investment in knowledge and innovation output has been studied extensively, little work focuses on the role of Agile in growing the organization’s knowledge base through team learning. The data collected include traditional R&D innovation indicators and also in-depth measures of organizational performance and overall team outcomes, which allow us to study not only the extent to which Agile impacts on the firm’s innovation and learning performance but also the dynamic team learning process.  

This theoretical contribution discusses the role of networks for innovation in project-based organizations. Network serve as loci for innovation in providing timely access to knowledge and resources that are  otherwise unavailable  and stimulating internal expertise and learning capabilities‚ especially in industries in which complex knowledge bases expand rapidly. Moreover, networks may serve as the  alternative access to resources that are not readily available through market exchanges. The aim of this contribution is to address some of the critical issues related to a better understanding of how diverse network structures impact on innovation. The authors build upon social network arguments, drawing on the idea that “optimal” network structure should be understood according to the context in which the network is embedded, the nature of the actors and the content of the relationships.

Drawing upon recent literature, which employs social networks in the field of project management, the aim of this research is to empirically investigate the importance of projects’ social capital for knowledge development in R&D projects. Primary data were collected via sociometric questionnaires on a population of 53 biotech R&D projects located at one of the most important science parks in Sweden. The analysis focused on the distinctive structural configuration of projects’ social capital, among which the roles of network diversity were emphasized. Our results suggest that certain structural configurations of project social capital maximize the level of effectiveness in knowledge development. More specifically, we found an inverted U-shaped relationship between projects’ network diversity and their level of knowledge development, demonstrating that intermediate levels of diversity maximize project knowledge development. Implications for innovation managers and policymakers are discussed.

The advancement of knowledge and the availability of new technologies in health care deeply influence patients’ length and quality of life. Current health care systems have thus re-organized services provided in order to select effective solutions and to the increasing demand of more complex and costly services. Such need frequently implies a re-orientation of health care organizations and providers. Given that the real success of a specific technology is measured by its use in clinical practice, the exploration of those factors affecting the adoption and use of innovations seems to be convenient. Particularly, a number of information is considered in the decision-making process of clinicians: the mindlines, namely, tacit and informal knowledge and the clinical guidelines. This chapter presents and discusses retrospectively these dynamics in the Italian National Health Care Service (I-NHS) with regard of an innovative surgical system, the Da Vinci Robot, which is a minimally invasive surgical system receiving great organizational and managerial interest. The objective of the study is to understand the role of informational determinants, both mindlines and guidelines, in the temporal choice of adoption of the technology by the Italian adopters. A semi-structured questionnaire was built and submitted to surgeons in order to collect information about the usage of the technology, the advice network of professionals, and the sources of information accessed to determine the choice of adoption of the technology. At the end of the administration period, twenty-eight adopters fully answered to the questionnaire. Social network analysis (SNA) techniques were used to analyze the advice inter-physician networks, and pseudo-network measures were used to the identify the degree of similarity/difference between each pair of surgeons involved in the study. Multiple regression quadratic assignment procedures (MR-QAP) were run to test the statistical association among our dependent variable (temporal difference in the adoption of the surgical system) and the different sources of information selected in the study both guidelines and the mindlines. We found a significant and positive effect of the extent to which two individuals used guidelines such as evidence-based medicine (EBM) documents and information to discover for the first time about the technology on their subsequent adoption. In other words, the greater the number of same sources used, the smaller the distance in terms of months in the adoption of the new technology. Overall, we confirm the importance of sharing the same formal sources of information (guidelines) above and beyond individual’s informal network (mindlines) in affecting the similarity in the temporal choice of adoption of the technology. Our study contributes with original evidence to understand the adoption process of a new technology in health care, providing new insights about how beliefs and values about the technology are created and concur to define the temporal choice of adoption. Contrarily to what stated in previous research, we elicit the prominent role of different formal informational sources (EBM) in determining the final judgment toward technological change in health care and in controlling the uncertainty of highly innovative technologies.

Many contemporary organizations must deal with high levels of environmental uncertainty, complexity and equivocality, struggling with not only strong competitive pressures but also increasing uncertainty related to sociopolitical and economic trends within the frame of a risk society. The centrality of resilience in contemporary managerial discourse is mostly related to the social, political, environmental and economic turmoil and jolts, to which organizations have been exposed during the past decades. Organizational survival is therefore increasingly challenged, and to survive and prosper, organizations must transform jolts and shocks into new and resilient solutions. Organizational resilience refers to the ability of an organization to continue to meet its core functions by finding and implementing in a fast and timely manner organizational micro and microstructure able to transform uncertainty into new solutions. While the progressive turbulence of the external environment requires organizations to be more resilient, the design of organizational resilience appears to be still limited to its adaptability to the external environment. Within this context, this chapter draws an original proposal on the design of resilient organizations considering both micro/individual-level and macro/design-level features.

Substantial further research is yet needed on how to design and manage organizations that can respond to the uncertainties and demands of new business. Organizational control—broadly defined as any process by which organizational members direct attention, motivate, and encourage others to act in ways desirable for achieving organizational objectives is commonly recognized as fundamental to the functioning and performance of organizations and their. Nevertheless, there is no theoretical explanation for how controls, in the new organizational context, operate in combination. This chapter provides a theoretical contribution to the arena of organizational controls by reviewing the current understanding on the organizational control underlying the self-regulative learning processes. Indeed, a widespread sense of a gap between the rapid development of the new organizational forms in practice and the capacity of existing perspectives to account for them in theory exists.

This chapter aims to explore Management Control Systems (MCS) resulting from the implementation of agile development methods, relying on an established MCS taxonomy. An abductive approach was adopted, considering the shortage of research evaluating the post-adoption effects of agile methods. Four organizations from an international telecommunication firm that implemented agile methods were involved, and 44 individual semi-structured interviews were performed. In addition, 121 free comments from a global survey to the same organizations were used as secondary data. The paper indicates how Scrum, a widespread agile method, implicitly brings multiple enforcing levers of control to a team’s self-regulatory learning processes.

This chapter discusses agility as an improvised accomplishment conducted by improvisational leaders, i.e., leaders that approach and define rules that guide behavior in normal conditions and that stimulate impromptu adaptations in unpredicted conditions, when the existing rule set failed. We do that by showing how the triad of the leadership process (leaders, followers, and context) enacts the four principles of agile management. The contribution defends these principles are highly aligned with an improvisational understanding of leadership. The authors adopt a deliberately relational and distributed leadership perspective by exploring improvisation as a mutually constructed process of supportive leaders, compelled followers, and a conducive context. The chapter also discuss several obstacles that might limit the ability to enact agile improvisational leadership.

New organization designs emerge continuously in highly dynamic innovation context to improve readiness to change. The adoption of self-managing teams operating cross-functionally on a bulk of products, together with the reduction of vertical layers in the organization, seems to be a common strategy for many organizations aiming to achieve higher level of efficacy and shorter lead times. Authors explore the extent to which new micro-and meso-level organizational forms contribute to the achievement of organizational efficiency, and produce secondary effects on long-term innovation goals.

Lean start-up is an emergent perspective on how entrepreneurs can bring new products and services to the market. This approach challenges the dominant role of lengthy business plans, linear product development processes, and seeking complete overview of the potential of the new products/services before market launch. Instead it suggests that start-ups could benefit from a ‘minimum-viable product’ approach where products and services are launched when they contain critical features. The emphasis in the lean start-up approach is on business models rather than the elaborate business plan. This chapter is based on the in-depth case studies from three established companies that have all sought to employ a minimum-viable product approach to developing and launching new products. The data will consist of rich interview data from the three companies and observations from various events at the companies (strategy meetings, development workshops etc.). The aim is to shed light on the implications for companies that seek to employ lean start-up. These implications will be aimed at aspects like innovation management, organizational structure, customer relations etc.

In the closing chapter, editors synthesize elements theorized across the volume and suggest further avenues for research both for theory and empirics based on the proposal arising from the contributors and form their own reading of each chapter.