Refine
Document Type
- Article (11)
- Conference Proceeding (3)
Language
- English (14)
Keywords
Institute
This study investigates how sharing ventures address the paradox of doing good versus doing harm in their strategic decision-making. The doing good versus doing harm paradox refers to the difficulty of sharing ventures to balance the aim to benefit society and the environment while minimizing potential adverse effects. Understanding and addressing this paradox is crucial for promoting sustainable and responsible decision-making. Our thematic content analysis of 38 in-depth interviews with founders and senior managers of sharing ventures in four European countries finds that these ventures align along three distinct value focus types in their decisionmaking and use five mechanisms to conceal paradoxes related to balancing social/environmental and economic contradictions. By surfacing the importance of sharing ventures' value focus and resultant mechanisms to deparadoxify, our findings provide insights into organisational paradox and the sharing economy, specifically the purposeful concealment of paradox as a counterintuitive choice for remaining actionable in decision contexts.
The cognitive perspective in entrepreneurship research has predominantly evolved around the static conceptions of cognition at the level of individual reasoning. Recently, the emerging stream of situated entrepreneurial cognition asserts that the eironment substantially influences the inherent knowledge structures of entrepreneurial reasoning. It claims that the context indoctrinates the perceptions and beliefs underlying decision making, thus authoring entrepreneurial cognition to derive from the recursive interaction between the mind and the respective eironment. Drawing on this perspective, this article follows a narrative approach iestigating the unfolding dynamics between the entrepreneurial cognition and contextual factors in a business model design. Using textual accounts from 34 episodic interviews with entrepreneurs from corporate entrepreneurship initiatives, we applied a constant comparative method identifying main themes in the data. Our findings show that entrepreneurial cognition is embedded, grounded, and distributed. We provide evidence that the situated entrepreneurial cognition results from the recursive interplay of material objects, bodily interactions, and agents spanning a social system. Our findings suggest that the unilateral consideration of authored cognitive systems falls short in capturing the holistic nature of entrepreneurial cognition. Thus, our findings further empirically ground situated entrepreneurial cognition by placing the entrepreneur at the nexus of individual and context. Finally, this article reveals the business model as a central boundary object connecting and focalizing a variety of influences on the situated entrepreneurial cognition in its social context.
Digitalization has been heavily transforming Real Estate (RE) around the world in the last decade. Many old processes and practices are the center of aim for change, innovation, new way of operation, more efficient use of resources and alternative ways of solving the same and also new problems. RE has just started to interact and cooperate with startups for these purposes. The startups offering technology-based products and services specialized in Real Estate are called PropTech. This category as an ecosystem is new and in consolidation, which means that the stakeholders are still developing their business models, value propositions and they are struggling in their maturity process. To identify the barriers faced by Real Estate, we interviewed 15 companies (asset owners, asset managers, service providers, etc.) about the challenges and experiences in working with Proptech startups. We identified three aggregate dimensions: barriers at provider’s side, internal organizational barriers and external ecosystem barriers. With these findings, we add a contribution to technology adoption and innovation diffusion in the new ecosystem of PropTech. This paper completes at identifying further research areas.
This paper seeks to expand our understanding of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems by investigating the interrelation between contextual factors and sustainable entrepreneurial activities of sharing ventures. While the sharing economy is considered as a potential pathway to a more sustainable society,; ambiguous activities of some sharing ventures call the credibility of sharing as a sustainable concept into question. In order to shed light on the underlying cause of the ambiguity, we conducted 37 in-depth interviews with founders and senior managers of sharing ventures. Our comparative analysis identifies two distinct sets of contextual factors, which influence their sustainable activities. The first set of contextual factors enhances sustainable activities by enforcing the adaptation of behavioral rules and by enabling the development of organizational capabilities. The second set of contextual factors restricts sustainable activities by impeding market penetration and by suppressing growth. We contribute to theorizing about sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems by delineating the conjoint effect of contextual factors on sustainable activities. Furthermore, our results add insights into the controversial academic debate about the sustainability dimension in the sharing economy.
Value creation and appropriation of software vendors: A digital innovation model for cloud computing
(2021)
Do software vendors propose, create, and capture value in the era of digital transformation? Drawn on the literature of business models, digital innovation, and firms' capabilities, we examine this cutting-edge research question. We conducted a multiple case research of 10 software vendors operating in Germany and Austria. The thematic analysis yields a conceptual model that explains whether and how software vendors leverage cloud computing-enabled innovation for the digital boost, which is this study's primary contribution to information systems research. Software vendors use a complementary portfolio of information technology and organizational capabilities to innovate in their value proposition, creation, and capture.
Advocating sustainability in entrepreneurial ecosystems: Micro-level practices of sharing ventures
(2021)
While extant research on entrepreneurial ecosystems has focused on macro-level factors influencing the ecosystem's development, the role and impact of entrepreneurial practices have been neglected. The objective of this study is to address this research gap and to shed light on the micro-level practices of entrepreneurs who support sustainability transitions in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Our inductive study looks at these micro-level practices from the perspective of sustainable ventures situated in the sharing economy. We conducted 31 in-depth interviews with the founders and senior managers of sustainable ventures to investigate how they advocate the sustainability cause in their ecosystem. Our findings show that sustainable entrepreneurs rely on three distinct sets of micro-level practices: building a supportive environment, disrupting normative standards, and reframing the sustainability paradigm. Also, sustainable entrepreneurs engage in political work to strengthen their position and credibility in the sharing economy, which is being increasingly dominated by profit-oriented players and business practices. By substantiating the central role and micro-level practices that sustainable entrepreneurs enact to advocate sustainability, our study contributes to theorizing the sharing economy. Furthermore, our resultant framework provides a detailed overview of the distinct micro-level practices that help ventures to support the sustainability transition in entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Labels as moral markers
(2020)
How to build a coherent narrative of organizational identity in a socially contested field? Through an inductive study of the sharing economy, we analyzed how managers deal with conflicting collective identities and develop coherent organizational identity narratives through label work. Our findings reveal that managers responded to the social contestation of the field by using the label as a malleable moral marker. The process of embracing, fixing, un-fixing, and re-fixing the label´s principles helped managers to, on the one hand, provide coherence to their identity narrative while, on the other hand, working on the consolidation of their preferred principles of the field label. By exploring the identity formation through label work in socially contested fields, we offer a new perspective on the importance of label work for identity formation and its malleability potential.
Despite the importance of managerial reasoning in designing business models to handle exogenous change, little is known about its cognitive foundations. We address this gap with a comparative analysis of how managers rethink business model configurations to provide value in the emerging collaborative consumption economy. As customer behaviors shift from owning to sharing possessions, they challenge firms’ established business model logics. Using data from in‐depth interviews with managers from 22 sharing ventures, we find six cognitive processes to influence reasoning in new business model design. Furthermore, we find that these processes fall into distinctive dimensions of dominant and emerging logics. Ultimately, they combine into a design logic that explains how managerial reasoning results in conceptually different value creation and value capture configurations. Overall, our findings provide insights for theorizing business model design, and they enhance understanding of the foundations of managerial cognition in innovation contexts.
Entrepreneurs designing novel business model configurations face cognitive biases that derive from limited mental capacity to deal with complex and uncertain decision contexts. Building on the notion of the business model as an idiosyncratic mental representation that organizes managerial understanding of value creating and value capture, we iestigate how entrepreneurs cope with cognitive biases inherent in business model design. We conducted a total of 35 in‐depth interviews with entrepreneurs situated in 15 corporate entrepreneurship initiatives in Germany. Our study results suggest that entrepreneurs counter cognitive biases by combining intuitive and deliberate reasoning approaches. Specifically, we identify five cognitive mechanisms and two higher level cognitive processes undergirding entrepreneurial reasoning in the design of new business models. Our findings provide empirically grounded insights into the cognitive perspective in business model research and help to theorize managerial reasoning during the process of business model design.
As a research subject, business model innovation spans the strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship fields. Yet, despite the importance of the concept, prior work has paid little attention to how decision‐makers cope with uncertainty and gain understanding about interdependencies in new business model configurations. To address this gap, we combine top‐down theorising and evidence‐based exploration and seek to unpack some of the coping mechanisms that operate in the evolutionary view of business model innovation. Using in‐depth interviewing to collect data, our study reveals five strategies – customer centricity, value co‐creation, capability evolution, ecosystem growth, and adaptive pricing – that decision‐makers apply to cope with uncertainty in business model innovation. We find that coping mechanisms support decision making during the development of new business models. Furthermore, we find that the five coping strategies delineate decision making for value proposition, value creation, and value capture configurations in more detail than existing literature has described. Our findings have important implications for decision making in business model innovation.