Corporate entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review and future research agenda – a straightforward review of corporate entrepreneurship, exploring its antecedents, dimensions and consequences

Inside-Out, Outside-In, or All-in-One? The Role of Network Sequencing in the Elaboration of Ideas – introduces the concept of inside-out network sequencing wherein individuals elaborate and improve their ideas through feedback from their inner-circle before developing it further with their outer-circle. It’s impressive how they were able to gain access to the performance data of scientists in a multinational company, on top of survey responses.

Digital product innovation management: Balancing stability and fluidity through formalization – explores the relation of the formalization in digital projects with performance and novelty of resulting digital products. The study finds that formalization enhances these two but just with positive marginal returns (better than a U curve). Formalization also benefited older firms more.

Innovation nudging—A novel approach to foster innovation engagement in an incumbent company – always found nudging fascinating to apply in innovation. This study explores how a company introduced nudging for innovation management. They identified four enablers within this company: digital workflow tool, collective foresight radar, topic campaigns and curation.

Multilevel optimal distinctiveness: Examining the impact of within- and between-organization distinctiveness of product design on market performance – an innovative study comparing images of the frontal designs of cars to explore optimal distinctiveness. They find that being too different from the other designs within an organization hurts market performance (measured in sales). In contrast, being distinct from other organizations can help.

Hyperspecialization and Hyperscaling: A Resource-based Theory of the Digital Firm – puts forward a theory of scalability, which describes “how the value derived from a firm’s resource bundle in a focal activity changes as the size of the bundle increases.” A firm’s resource bundle is scalable if its value per unit of output increases as the size of the bundle increases.

When Do Novel Business Models Lead to High Firm Performance? A Configurational Approach to Value Drivers, Competitive Strategy, and Firm Environment – a configurational study exploring when novelty in digital startups actually lead to better performance. They explore four themes of the business models:

• Novelty – introduce new combinations of products and services and new ways to connect customers, and partners
• Efficiency – transact in a scalable manner, removing market imperfections
• Lock-in – create switching costs to retain customers
• Complementarity – add value to the core offering by accompanying with other products and services

Is There Opportunity Without Stakeholders? A Stakeholder Theory Critique and Development of Opportunity-Actualization – when academics talk about opportunities in entrepreneurship, they just cannot avoid debating whether it is discovered or created. Adding to this conversation is the idea that opportunities are actualized, which emphasizes the role of market stakeholders.

Organizing Form, Experimentation, and Performance: Innovation in the Nascent Civilian Drone Industry – the role of communities in innovation has been oversold due to their presumed lower costs, creativity in experimenting, flexibility and ability to solve problems in a modular manner. However, in nascent industries, as this study argues, firms may be better positioned to coordinate towards more directed problem solving.

Phenomenon-Based Theorizing – where do ideas from phenomenon-driven papers come from? The authors mention personal experience, curious observation, data complication, facilitating conversations and uncovering examples.

Achieving Fit and Avoiding Misfit in Qualitative Research – one of the biggest challenges with qualitative research is connecting the different parts into one coherent whole. The research question must fit with the data collection, which then must fit with the analysis which then should fit with the interpretation.

Bridging Art and Science: Phenomenon-Driven Theorizing – insightful model of how art and science work together to make theories. Conceiving the theory requires discovery and prescience, constructing the theory requires imagination and logic and communicating the theory requires storytelling and scripting.

The nuts and bolts of writing a theory paper: A practical guide to getting started – very useful guide on how to write a paper (even beyond theory papers). It gives actual exercises that one can do to frame the paper and guide its further development.

The Quest for Innovation in Information Systems Research: Recognizing, Stimulating, and Promoting Novel and Useful Knowledge – the article shows the different ways that papers can contribute to research.

• filling a literature gap
• filling a problem gap
• bricolage (rearranging extant knowledge in search of new insights)
• distinguishing between subsets of population
• changing levels of analysis or stakeholders
• extending current models
• examining the evolution of technology and its effects
• applying another theory base
• using different methods
• future-oriented studies
• blue ocean transformation by challenging assumptions
• shifting perspectives

Sowing the seeds of failure: Organizational identity dynamics in new venture pivoting – pivoting when you are still establishing an identity can be difficult. This study identifies co-development of business model with the investors, professionalization of recruitment and implementation of routines based on the planned milestones as steps to help stakeholders cope with such pivots.

Organizing Entrepreneurial Teams: A Field Experiment on Autonomy over Choosing Teams and Ideas – Teams that can choose which ideas to work on or which members to work with outperform those that do not have any choice at all. As the article explains, this can be attributed to team members selecting ideas that may interest them or team members selecting according to their prior networks. What’s fascinating is that when teams are free to choose both ideas and members, these benefits disappear.

Evaluating Ambiguous Offerings – it’s difficult to evaluate a novel technology if you don’t have any reference or baseline to compare it to. In this research, they find that higher evaluation is given to ambiguous product if it is primed by goal-based categorization. This is since the perceived utility of these unclear attributes is made clearer through such categories.

Heuristic methods for updating small world representations in strategic situations of Knightian uncertainty – small world representations refer to situations where a decision is simplified to a set of acts that lead to certain consequences. To update this representation in the implementation phase, the authors recommend counterfactual thinking to address confirmation bias, explore imaginable scenarios, and act on black swans.

Building greener motorhomes: How dual-purpose technical and relational capabilities affect component and full product innovation – first time I came across dual-purpose capabilities. These refer to capabilities like product modification, manufacturing, supplier and customer relationship which can not only serve current business needs but also create future business opportunities.