The transportation sector is undergoing a significant shift towards electrification, driven by sustainability challenges and battery electric vehicle (BEV) technology advancements. This transition also leads to a convergence of transport and energy industries, introducing new dynamics and creating new business opportunities in these sectors. Such changes have extensive implications not only for single firms but for entire ecosystems as these adapt to new technologies, activities, and business models. This study introduces the concept of Industry-Converging Ecosystems, where traditional industrial boundaries become less distinct, requiring collaboration among unfamiliar participants across various industries. This paper investigates the tensions between value creation and value capture and control in such ecosystems through a case study of an innovative electric charging system for buses in V & auml;ster & aring;s, Sweden. The findings advance ecosystem research by (1) introducing the industry-converging ecosystem concept, (2) revealing two sources for business model tensions stemming from monetisation uncertainties and resource competition, and (3) demonstrating the lack of clarity in ecosystem control caused by limited influence over business models and diminished legitimacy due to their newness.

Despite substantial contextual differences between the West and China, systems approaches have been recognized as essential for addressing complex and dynamic management challenges, particularly within the field of innovation. However, most previous studies are rooted in traditional cybernetics within the framework of first-order science, which is characterized by linear processes and stable elements. To tackle complex and dynamic challenges in innovation management, a shift of systems approaches towards second-order science is required in both the Western and Chinese contexts. This shift would pave the way for new research areas and potentially new disciplines, where complexity and dynamics are embraced rather than avoided. In the Western context, a related topic is system of systems (SoS), whereas in China, the corresponding Chinese term is TiXi. Given that second-order science has the potential to foster novelty and innovation, this study aims to explore the systems approach to innovation management through the lens of second-order science in both the West and China, with a particular focus on SoS and TiXi, and address three important questions: (1) What are the key common and different attributes of SoS in the West and TiXi in China? (2) What are the paradigms of innovation management in the West and China that reflect the attributes of the SoS and TiXi? (3) What are the theoretical implications of SoS and TiXi for future research on innovation management?

Transitions of transport systems are necessary to meet climate targets and reach sustainable development goals. Sustainable transport needs to be equitable, efficient, safe, and green. Transport systems need to become less resource-intensive, whereby sharing and utilising resources more efficiently can be a route forward. However, for well-functioning sharing, the involved stakeholders need to collaborate. Thus, sharing resources can mean sharing material and physical resources, such as vehicles and places, but it can also mean sharing immaterial and intangible resources, such as time and responsibilities. Through an interview study exploring shared resources in goods deliveries at off-peak hours in Stockholm-based trials, opportunities for organising transport system innovations have been investigated. Interviews were carried out with thirteen respondents involved in, or related to, off-peak logistics, and trigger materials were used to deepen the conversation when discussing the logistics service systems. Off-peak trials can be seen as innovation processes affected by several conditions. Innovation processes are collaborative, and collaborative innovation involves decision-making coordination across organisational boundaries. The concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving are used to analyse the studied collaborative innovation processes. However, stakeholders engaged in innovating sustainable transport systems must find new ways to collaborate, as ambiguity and uncertainty are more extensive than in their day-to-day business development or the incremental development of new services. This study shows that conditions for such collaborative innovation processes vary between different types of collaborative settings, as innovation depends on the transformative capacity to alter types of stakeholder agreements and roles and agree on how to share resources and design such sharing. Designing for resource sharing requires understanding how to design tangible and intangible buffers, and for the involved stakeholders to make sense of such new designs.

Overview: Organizations can implement an innovation management system in order to address the multidimensional challenges they often have in their practical innovation work. Until the ISO 56002 standard was released in 2019, there was no international standard for the design of innovation management systems. The standard provides support as a framework and highlights important systems elements. We studied two early adopters that have used this international standard to design their innovation management systems. Based on the study findings, we devised a practical approach for framing the design of an innovation management system. The approach includes a set of steps and critical considerations that include understanding a company’s innovation ambitions and direction, analyzing the systemic dimensions of the system (the elements and how they interconnect), and introducing a balanced set of control mechanisms.

A crucial requirement for firms to remain competitive is to consistently and simultaneously engage in exploratory and exploitative activities. The academic literature has broadly accepted that the development of dynamic capabilities (ie firms’ abilities to create, reconfigure and improve resources and capabilities to fit their changing environments) are vital to meeting this competitive requirement. Research has predominately addressed these dynamic capabilities from a management perspective. Little attention has been paid to the influence of the board of directors on these firm capabilities even though boards hold the fiduciary responsibility for the corporation and its long-term viability. Even less has been written on how boards ought to organise themselves and develop their dynamic board capabilities to support and govern corporate renewal and performance effectively. This paper aims to start addressing this gap by using two related aims. First, a process framework for board behaviours is proposed that ensures, and supports, a systematic way of building and developing corporate-level dynamic capabilities. Then, evidence is presented and reviewed from a survey of two board member communities which supports the idea that board capabilities are essential for a firm’s successful renewal and economic performance, and need to be improved in practice. This framework is closely aligned with well-established components identified by the management literature but differs in having the board as the unit of analysis. A crucial question and action agenda is proposed for boards eager to acquire and develop their dynamic capabilities.

Internal crowdsourcing offers new opportunities for ideas to gain legitimacy in idea development as not only managers but also experts are able to provide feedback to improve and subsequently accept ideas for further realisation. Given this far limited knowledge about how ideas gain legitimacy in idea development, this paper focuses on the influence of feedback, a main source of idea legitimacy in internal crowdsourcing. More specifically, this study aims to explore how feedback from different feedback providers (i.e., managers and experts) influences idea selection in internal crowdsourcing idea development. Based on text mining methods including sentiment, topic-model, and expert identification analyses, results reveal that feedback sentiment, feedback diversity and feedback amount play key roles in idea legitimisation. Specifically, these aspects of feedback influence idea acceptance in idea selection through the mediating role of idea revision in idea development and that this relationship is moderated by feedback providers. This study extends previous knowledge about the legitimisation process from the perspective of feedback in idea development by offering both a more comprehensive view, including different feedback aspects, and a more granular measurement of these, through the use of text analysis. Based on insights from the study, practical implications are presented for how to gain legitimacy from feedback for idea selection in internal crowdsourcing.

This chapter presents results from initial studies on personal certifications of innovation management professionals, drawing from a Swedish context. The results capture motivations for, as well as effects from, the certification process. They are discussed from the perspective of how this is relevant for developing and enhancing innovation leadership competencies. Increased knowledge, enhanced professional communication, and strengthened selfconfidence related to innovation management were identified as outcomes for individuals pursuing the certifications. Further, this laid the ground for increased visibility, expanded network, and thus more opportunities to influence innovation work. An overarching theme appearing in the study is how a certification can contribute to strengthening the legitimacy of working with innovation management, and thus serve as an enabler for innovation management practice and subsequently innovation leadership. Effects from the certification that may be beneficial for successful innovation leadership include the opportunity for practitioners to articulate their own experiences and competencies, in addition to improving the impact of their efforts utilising innovation terminology. For organisations, knowledge of personal certification can be used both for recruitment and for development of existing personnel and their innovation leadership. Through a longer perspective, it can also contribute to decreasing the dependence on a few specific individuals and instead strengthen the long-term organisational innovation capabilities.

Despite the evident upsurge of e-commerce (EC) over the past decades, the peak of online demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the huge involvement of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the online businesses to survive, the extant literature has neglected to analyse how MSEs orchestrate their resources between internal and external investments. Past studies, also in the case of SMEs, have tended to adopt a more firm-centric perspective focusing on the organisational conditions that determine firms’ performance after the usage of EC, failing to explore the inter-organisational relations between MSEs and other actors in their ecosystem. Indeed, as MSEs may suffer from liability of smallness and lack of resources, they may rely more than other actors on the nexus of relations that emerge within the digital ecosystem generated through the usage of EC platforms. By relying on 37 interviews with owners or managers of MSEs operating in the food and beverage industry, we investigate the dynamics of resource distribution between MSEs and the other actors in the EC ecosystem. We identified the changes in interdependencies, the information asymmetries, and the power imbalances related to the interplay between MSEs and other actors within the EC ecosystem.