Spin-in and spin-out for growth – On the acquisition and divestiture of high-tech firms
Öberg, C. (2021). Spin-in and spin-out for growth – On the acquisition and divestiture of high-tech firms. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 34(3).
Öberg, C. (2021). Spin-in and spin-out for growth – On the acquisition and divestiture of high-tech firms. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 34(3).
Purpose: This paper describes and discusses company spin-ins and spin-outs as a means to understand company growth in a dynamic context. The following question is asked: How can growth be understood in spin-ins and spin-outs of innovative firms? The paper suggests return on capabilities as a measure to understand growth in an open innovation context.
Design/methodology/approach: The empirical part of the paper consists of a single case study. Data was captured through interviews and secondary data sources.
Findings: The paper points to that resources alone do not explain strategic decisions by a company and how spin-ins and spin-outs result from the need for capabilities, changes in business foci and temporary solutions to deal with overcapacities or lack of alternatives.
Originality/value: The paper contributes to research by discussing contemporary issues in strategy and innovation and relating them to the resource-based view and the growth of the firm. Spin-outs, and acquisitions and divestitures as interlinked events have rarely been focused on in the literature, while they remain frequent phenomena in practice.
2023
Journal of Product Innovation. Management.
Grand challenges vary across industries and call for firms to craft a responsible innovation response to effectively address them. However, key questions concerning why firms embrace responsible innovation and the process by which they respond to grand challenges have yet to be fully answered. We integrate an issue-selling theoretical lens and the customer role from an innovation perspective to theorize about the different influencing motives that customers exert on their corresponding supplying firm to craft a more responsible innovation response to grand challenges. Based on qualitative data collected in almost a 10-year period from multiple respondents across eight customer firms and two supplying firms, we identify three core motives—regulatory, business opportunity, and socio-environmental motives—that propel customers to influence supplying firms to craft different forms of responsible innovation responses. Our research also reveals three vital socio-human capital pathways—human capital, socio-behavioral, and relationship—which, in turn, foster a co-active engagement in addressing grand challenges innovatively and responsibly. In so doing, this research advances novel theorizing on co-active engagement in responsible innovation where the customer acts as the primary champion and the supplier as the implementer. We discuss the important implications for customers and other stakeholders.
2023
Technovation, 123, 102722.
The development of the sharing economy has resulted in a plethora of sharing economy business models. This paper takes its motivation from the increased variety of sharing economy business models to develop a typology of sharing economy business model transformations. It does so through creating a timeline of the sharing economy development, capturing business model configurations as activity systems along that development, and tracing mechanisms affecting sharing economy business model transformations. The paper thereby interlinks the sharing economy development on the phenomenon level with transformations of its business models. The paper contributes to past research by presenting a systematic account of the development of the sharing economy and its resulting business model configurations and by developing a typology focusing on the types of changes that have transformed the sharing economy business models and resulted in the plethora of business models.
The article can be accessed here.
2023
Technovation, 123, 102712.
New trends in innovation management may require new research methods. Social media analytics (SMA)—a method for capturing and analyzing data from user-generated content published on online platforms—has emerged as a complement or even alternative to more traditional research methods. This article systematically reviews and assesses the use of SMA and its potential for innovation management research. Our results show that use of SMA is still in an emergent phase, although it has become increasingly popular over the past decade. Our literature review illustrates that SMA provides new opportunities for innovation management scholars to enhance customer-, market-, technology-, and society-focused innovation research in several ways. In this paper we develop a research agenda and suggest areas for future research using SMA in innovation management.
The article can be accessed here.