Strategy books

Technology-based industries have come to account for ever-greater shares of economic activity during the last 30 years. Recently, rapid, digitally-enabled technological change has generated new opportunities for value creation, enabled new ways of capturing value, and stimulated the emergence of new organizational forms such as platforms and ecosystems. Together with the development of supporting institutions, including incubators, accelerators, and increasingly creative ways of funding new ventures, this has led to an explosion of interest in entrepreneurial activity across industries and sectors. Scholars, policymakers and practitioners recognize the importance of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for competitive advantage, comparative advantage, and society’s economic well-being. There is tremendous academic and practical interest not only in how new ventures assemble resources necessary to deliver value, but also on how incumbent organizations may adapt to harness technological innovation, and on how industries evolve in the face of this pervasive technological change. Despite recent advances in our understanding of how innovation and entrepreneurship impact the creation and appropriation of value, numerous questions remain unanswered. This volume draws together scholars working at the forefront of entrepreneurship-, strategy-, and innovation-related domains to explore these questions. The volume makes particular contributions to the entrepreneurship, innovation, and platform literatures.

The influence of the global South is increasing in the conduct and governance of multinationals, in the growing interest in the 'bottom of the pyramid', in the debates over the environment, trade and international law. There are questions aplenty. Complexities and tensions, differing ethical interpretations. The volume includes works by authors from the global South and contributions about ethical issues in the global South, including the responses to famine in East Africa, India and Indonesia, and the applicability of international guidelines and ethical frameworks in South Africa. Other contributions examine the roles of beliefs and philosophies in the establishment of ethical traditions.

Acclaimed entrepreneurship and innovation scholar Piero Formica, along with a strong and diverse cast of international contributors, explore the world of Open Innovation in this volume. Tackling new developments in the field, the authors examine altruism and the role of openness to unorthodox and unconventional experimentation as the newest arena to create modern knowledge resources and entrepreneurial ventures.

Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that limited firms’ geographic scope, and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities to create value globally. Globalization presents managers with an environment to create value that is more complex, risky, and also more promising than ever before. Despite recent advances in our understanding of how locations impact the creation and appropriation of value by firms, the speed of these changes has often surpassed the speed of research on the connections between geography and firms. This volume draws together researchers working at the forefront of this area in a variety of disciplines—economics, geography, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and strategy—in order to explore the many ways that locations matter for firms. In 11 varied papers, the authors draw on newly available data, recently developed theory, and diverse methodology to understand the relationships between firm boundaries, firm activities, and geographic borders.

Contemporary markets are increasingly complex and dynamic. Diverse business contexts have become closer, and are increasingly influenced by socio-economic and technological factors. Firms nowadays build alliances even with competing players to ensure entrepreneurial survival and growth. This publication aims to investigate, compare, and contrast the theoretical and practical elements of business concepts and models that are acclimated to the dynamic changes of our modern era. Furthermore, it describes and analyzes the current cooperative interactions among firms, and evaluates the contribution of knowledge dynamics in coopetition. Organizational performance is one of the major elements required in contemporary markets, and the necessity to promote initiatives for innovation in new technological investments creates the foundations for growth, enabling businesses to explore opportunities in the global context. This book aims to explore and utilize the existing academic knowledge, and to contribute to the topic of coopetition within and across firms for entrepreneurial growth. It is a culmination of recent global circumstances and credible academic theories, focusing on analyzing, evaluating and interpreting the modern status-quo in the international business environment.

Failure informs more generously and reliably than success. Failure is the best indicator of what’s working and what’s not in any complex system or enterprise. All failures will inevitably reveal latent defects and/or failure modes that are invariably buried within the people, processes, materials, design, manufacturing, and management that comprise the complex system. In this new framework from former NASA aerospace professionals, Newman and Wander employ a unique system failure case study (SFCS) paradigm, originally developed to stimulate systems thinking and lessons learning at NASA, that combines storytelling and systems engineering designed to enhance organizational learning. The authors employ the SFCS approach to explore a vast array of failure events in multiple sectors of transportation, industry, aerospace, construction, and critical infrastructure. They provide an Integrated Analysis seeking trends, patterns, and universally applicable insights that readers can use to recognize areas of potential vulnerability within their own activities. The authors then identify specific actions within the span of control of enterprise leaders, project managers, process owners and operators which can be implemented to manage risk in high consequence, high risk activities.

Contains an Open Access chapter. Recent estimates suggest that millions of people across the world are involved in some form of social venture creation. After over a decade of thoughtful scholarship on social entrepreneurship, researchers have now begun to examine individuals and organizations that purposefully combine social and economic outcomes. In Hybrid Ventures, leading researchers examine individuals and organizations that simultaneously attempt to pursue such bended value outcomes. Various perspectives on hybrid ventures are explored in this volume, including: the costs to all when some entrepreneurs do not pursue hybrid approaches, whether hybrid ventures are – or should be – the new norm, and whether the social, environmental, and economic value are distinct and should be separated from each other. This volume contains both theoretical and empirical approaches to hybrid venturing from an international group of researchers. Specific topics include: the emergence of Certified B Corporations, different hybrid business models, the role of impact investing, indigenous entrepreneurship, hybrid ventures as “agents of change,” and more. For nearly two decades, the Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth series has provided an annual examination of the major current research, efforts in the field of entrepreneurship and Hybrid Ventures: Perspectives & Approaches to Blended Value Entrepreneurship continue in that tradition. This volume provides state-of-the-art research that helps set the foundation for inquiries into important research for the next decade and beyond.

Inside Knowledge provides practical guidance for women working in professional service firms who aspire to achieve their full potential in what have traditionally been male working environments. It explores what women can do to achieve careers in professional service firms commensurate with their knowledge, skills, experience and talent. The book draws on the knowledge accumulated during the author’s thirty years of experience working in and for such firms, supplemented by what she has learned from her work with hundreds of professional women and men that she has coached in accountancy, law and consulting firms as well as in award-winning women’s leadership programmes. The practical exercises that appear within the book have been extensively tested and finely honed over time and are designed to build on one another, thereby allowing readers to manage their careers efficiently and effectively. They help the reader to articulate what she wants from her career and what she can offer a professional service firm, ensuring that others understand her ambitions, hopes and dreams as well as her knowledge, skills and expertise. The exercises build to provide guidance for managing office politics, developing business and ultimately obtaining the desired results from appraisals and promotion opportunities.

Drawing upon a model developed over 25 years of experience and successfully taught for many years at his company Wilson Learning Andina y Rio de la Plata, Alberto Pérez La Rotta presents a comprehensive and replicable approach to integrated business transformation that synchronizes natural human behavior with the needs of leadership, sales, customers, and teams. Here Pérez provides a roadmap to his method as well as case studies from across Latin America and across the financial services, chemical, pharmaceutical, industrial equipment, and consumer products industries, and he demonstrates how to clarify the challenges facing an organization, define a new value proposition, and connect strategy to key capabilities rooted in an organization’s leadership, culture, sales potential, customer focus, and value chain. This allows organizations to develop and implement solutions that generate transformation and growth and measure the impact of the transformation on the organization and systems. Pérez clearly connects theory to practice in each of its real-world business cases, making Integrated Business Transformation of interest to researches, students, and practitioners.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.