Research on digital transformation focuses on business models and technological innovation but it often lacks a detailed exploration of how firms develop, execute, and evaluate related and unrelated digital diversification strategies. To address this gap, this study employs a multiple case study approach to uncover the varied processes and outcomes of implementing digital diversification programs in established firms. The findings reveal that established firms frequently refine and adjust their digital diversification strategies to achieve desired results. Specifically, related digital diversification strategies benefit from well-defined market segments, clear technological focus, and robust senior management support. In contrast, unrelated digital diversification strategies thrive through extensive exploration and experimentation with novel digital technologies and markets, reduced senior managerial intervention and increased middle- and lower-level management involvement. Semi-related digital diversification strategies, which incorporate elements of both related and unrelated approaches, often encounter tensions owing to conflicting traditional and new program execution methods, posing significant realization challenges. Key factors identified as instrumental in the success of digital diversification strategies include technology, markets, management & organization, and program execution. The study concludes by discussing the managerial and academic implications and offers recommendations for future research in this domain.

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.

For industrial incumbents seeking business opportunities in line with sustainable development needs, the concept of Circular Economy (CE) has gained significant traction. However, getting from a strategic ambition toward actions and innovations entails many challenges for organizations. In particular, one frequently overlooked issue relates to the use of management controls in relation to the CE strategy. Using data collected through a participatory action research collaboration spanning five years, this paper aims to give a detailed and empirically based description and analysis of how a frontrunner company has approached innovation goals and measurements in light of its CE strategy deployment. By analyzing the development in the case organization, key purposes behind CE metrics are discussed and analyzed together with challenges expressed by interviewees. In particular, our findings advocate the need for experimentation, ideation, and learning, rather than highly specific and restricting control measures.

While several existing firms have begun making changes to meet a circular economy transition, it is clear that they meet with several managerial challenges. Management control systems can help managers make the radical changes and facilitate the innovation processes that is required to meet circular economy. However, little is known about how management controls are applied in the context of a circular economy transformation, and whether traditional management controls are compatible with a circular logic. This paper aims to provide detailed and empirically based insight on these issues.

This study examined three large industrial incumbent firms to see how they utilize action-, result-, and cultural controls to implement circular economy principles, and what tensions they have experienced. We used semi-structured interviews (n=38) to collect data, and thematic analysis for the analysis.

The analysis suggests that while circular economy principles are not integrated in all parts of the management control system, there are still several factors that can both enable and impede a circular transformation. Furthermore, imbalances and inconsistencies were found concerning different types of managerial controls used. Alarmingly, circular economy initiatives are at risk of being reduced to minor incremental improvements if the radical changes needed are not better understood, and changes made to the management control system to facilitate these.

This research provides rich qualitative insights bridging the new phenomenon of circular economy adoption in incumbent firms with research on innovation management and management controls.  

Creativity and Innovation Management has grown substantially over the last couple of years, both quantitatively and qualitatively. From 2016 to 2021, the number of submissions has grown from 287 to 395. Most of the growth was realized in Asia: The number of submissions from that continent increased from 72 in 2016 to 193 in 2021. The rest of the world remained (close to) stable: 215 in 2016 and 203 in 2021. Equally important, the Thomson ISI Impact Factor increased from 1.423 in 2015 to 3.051 in 2021 and further to 3.644 in 2022. This is not where our ambitions end, though. We want to be the ever-better outlet for authors researching, and practitioners working in, the fields we cover. Editing a journal with the ambition to continuously increase its quality while dealing with a substantial growth requires teamwork—teamwork among the editors and the editorial office, teamwork between the editors and their reviewers and, as surprising as this may sound, teamwork between the authors and their reviewers in a top-quality reviewing process. The purpose of this piece is to present and discuss some reviewing standards. In particular, we aim to share with our reviewers what we think is an excellent reviewing process. Furthermore, we formulate our ideas about what it is that makes a review an excellent one. The title of this piece is deliberately ambiguous. It denotes that Creativity and Innovation Management strives for reviewing excellence—as in an excellent reviewing process. It also denotes that we reach for the stars and hope to one day receive and, hence, review only excellent submissions.

Large battery production facilities, often referred to as Gigafactories, are a complex design task that involves a lot of working disciplines. This requires good capabilities for communication and planning to be able to integrate the building, machines, and operators in the factory. This project is made within the Factory Layout and Modelling team in Blueprint at Northvolt, which is responsible for designing and scaling up the next generation of battery Gigafactories. The purpose of this thesis is to increase knowledge and further enhance a standardized workflow for how to manage machine interfaces. The empirical findings from the study are based on a qualitative study where 16 interviews were held with people working as Factory Layout Engineers, Utility Engineers, Automation Engineers, and Design Leaders. The empirical findings confirm there is a need for having a standardized way of marking up interfaces early in the design phase to mitigate the risk of design errors to occur in later stages. Based on the empirical findings the most important interfaces are the utility interfaces, material flow interfaces, the human-machine interfaces, and the civil, structural, and architectural interfaces. It is also important to mark up the operator’s movement around the machine and the areas where repair and maintenance is needed. This creates an understanding of the machine’s effective footprint area and shows the total workspace area needed around the machine. In this project, specific design guidelines and a new drawing template have been proposed to facilitate the visualization and handling of machine interfaces. Interface management is an emerging topic for production companies. During the last decade, this area has been developed as a management discipline within some large companies. In conclusion, the usage of interface management is necessary to increase communication of system boundaries and to decrease the cost when building new factories.

Frugal innovation is a strategy for organizations that provides products with cost advantages compared with the existing solutions. Frugal innovation can be applied to both products and services across industries. We provide lessons for managers and organizations based on a scientific review of frugal innovation as an innovation strategy. Using published studies, four distinct frugal innovation strategies are introduced. Frugal innovation can be operationalized across different industrial contexts. It also interplays with other firm innovation strategies. We also identify concerns and barriers associated with frugal innovation approaches. 

As digital tools and technologies, such as AR, VR, Digital Twin, IoT and other interactive visualization technologies are being developed, new opportunities arise to use these to optimize the efficiency of operations, not least in the area of maintenance. One industry where maintenance is of utmost importance is the railway industry, where the goal of having a punctual, reliable and cost-effective railway traffic is dependent on the availability of maintained railway vehicles. The maintenance procedures of the vehicles are performed by technicians, working in depots to fix faults and service the vehicles. However, a lack of resources, poor coordination and information handling, and complex vehicles make the work and procedures of technicians cumbersome. The purpose of this thesis project was to investigate and give recommendations on how digital tools and technologies can facilitate the maintenance of railway vehicles. To do so, a qualitative study has been performed consisting of 12 interviews with technicians and depot staff. The purpose of the study was to understand their main challenges and time-consuming activities. Moreover, the potential use of digital tools and technologies to facilitate the identified challenges has been analyzed to establish recommendations on what tools and technologies can be used and how they should be used to aid technicians. The main challenges and time-consuming activities found include finding and accessing relevant information quickly and easily, understanding the information available, and collaborating with actors for support and expertise. The digital tools and technologies recommended consist of tablets to access information quick and easy, AR to visualize instructions and create an environment for remote support, AI to quickly search and filter information to enhance troubleshooting procedures, Digital Model to visualize vehicle configuration and link and structure information, and lastly, real-time data transfer utilizing eMaintenance technologies to faster receive information about the vehicle and its faults. The results of this thesis project can give direction for future research and the development and integration of digital tools and technologies to facilitate technicians in the maintenance of railway vehicles.

The purpose of this project is to examine how a car controlled by hand gestures wirelessly can be constructed. The hand gestures are measured with a gyro sensor. This project examines how the time delay can be reduced with focus on data transmissions protocols and code structure. Furthermore, the steering is examined so the car can turn while driving. The choice of transmitter was made regarding the latency where nRF24L01 had the lowest latency. To reduce the time delay, the blocking function delay() was avoided which pauses the entire program and instead the millis() function was used, which instead is used to specify how often a code block should run without blocking the rest of the program. Therefore, the Arduino program does not pause, and new gyro signals can be received continually. The time delay was 2.64 ms. The steering is controlled with a servo which is connected to a four-bar linkage inspired by Ackerman’s steering principle. To examine the steering the angles of the servo and the front wheels were measured at different angles of the hand.

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.

This report describes a masters’ thesis in Industrial Design Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, conducted for Venhälsan at Södersjukhuset in Stockholm, in collaboration with Sös Innovation. The purpose of the project was to contribute to improving the psychosocial well-being of people living with hiv, who are monitored by the Infektionsmottagning 2 at Södersjukhuset. The project followed a service design methodology, involving stakeholders at all stages using various human-centered methods. The work began with a literature study, examining previous research on hiv and stigma. This was followed by a pre-study involving researchers, patient organizations, and staff at Venhälsan to create an understanding of the healthcare context and the psychosocial support offered by different actors today. The main study involved people living with hiv and consisted of a series of in-depth interviews, which, after a variety of analysis methods, led to insights that formed the basis for the subsequent concept generation. The concept generation involved a workshop with Venhälsan staff, brainstorming, and feedback sessions with members of the patient group, using trigger materials. The project resulted in the development of an Hiv Handbook that patients receive in connection with their hiv diagnosis. The handbook contains six different themes: About hiv, Venhälsan, Knowledge, Recognition, Disclosure, and Acceptance, and aims to address and mitigate these topics for the patient, thereby helping a patient in a crisis situation. In addition to the handbook, all ideas and insights from the project were compiled and delivered to Venhälsan for potential future work.

Optical scattering measurement devices are used to measure light reflection and light scattering from materials, to obtain data of the surface and bulk properties of materials. The measurement data are often used in research and development projects where material requirements are important, also for quality control in manufacturing processes, in different optical simulations and can be used for photorealistic rendering. In this master thesis project conducted at AFRY, a multifunctional team will develop an optical scattering measurement device that aims to collect data more accurately than current devices on the market. This thesis will focus on the mechanical design of the device which consists of the stability and movement of the components, the environment of the measurements and material selection with a focus on performance and sustainability. The optical model that will act as a basis for the development will be a gonioreflectometer consisting of a material sample, sample holder, light source, detector and an environment in which the measurements are conducted. Some of the physical, cognitive and emotional needs of the intended user are efficient use, low risk of misuse, reliable and high precision. A thorough requirement specification was made as a framework for the concept generation. The selected concept provides the movement of the optical components with an angular step enabling the desired optical scattering measurement. The selected stepper motor and gear ratio provides the flexibility of the movement, making it easy for the user to change angular steps of the optical components, enabling both fine and rough measurements. A separating screen was chosen for both concepts in order to avoid light contamination between measurements and the material sample holder resembles a frame that allows for mounting the material sample outside of the device. The mechanical system has a high stability and the material black anodized aluminum further contributes to the sturdiness of the construction. A physical prototype was created to validate the movement, since the movement of the detector and light source will be similar, only the detector movement was prototyped. The prototype showed that the movement of the detector worked in the desired way, hence the construction of the movement is approved. The scope was delimited in consensus with the project members and supervisors due to the time frame, hence there is future work on the device that should be accounted for. In conclusion, the purpose of the project was fulfilled after delimiting the goals and a conceptual solution was created that fulfilled the requirements of the project.

This master thesis explores the implementation of Collaborative robots into Elekta's mechanical product verification process. Elekta is a pioneer in precision radiation therapy solutions. Ensuring the compliance of Elekta's products with performance, safety, and quality criteria is of great importance. The existing verification process faces challenges regarding resource management, ergonomics, efficiency, and test accuracy.This thesis delves into three main research areas, the study begins with theoretical research investigating Industry 4.0, automation, and human-robot collaboration, focusing on the ABB GoFa Cobot. The following research area analyzes the existing market, regarding the exploration of different robotic grippers. Lastly, the third research area focuses on the user. Including interviews and observations with Elekta testing employees and industry experts from ABB and Atlas Copco.This thesis examines insights from theoretical, market, and user research to identify key factors influencing the development of concepts, prototypes, and models. By this, strengths, weaknesses,and a criteria value matrix were created for various gripper options for Elekta's tests. Furthermore, test parameters were defined to make the test suitable for automated Cobot verification. Lastly, the conclusion from the user research was examined in several parts, including, efficiency, safety, ergonomics, limitations, robotics, and industry. The thesis continued with a creative process that contains the development and iterations of concepts by CAD modeling, 3D printing, and Cobot programming for a specific verification test. The results of this thesis include Cobot implementation guidelines, covering the selection of suitable tests for automation, gripper selection, and finger development. The report then delves into the sustainable regards related to Cobot implementation, studying social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, decisive factors that could influence the project were discussed. In conclusion, this master's thesis successfully addresses Elekta's mechanical product verification challenges through the strategic implementation of Cobots. It is expected to increase efficiency, reduce ergonomic risks, improve resource management, and increase test precision. This research provides a blueprint for Cobot implementation at Elekta and positions the company at the forefront of modern industrial technology, emphasizing the potential for further development in this field.

Purpose: The increasing size of the elderly population is emerging as a primary catalyst for the escalation of healthcare expenditure, and a sense of urgency is manifest. However, the complexity of the health- and elderly care systems provides challenges in improving system efficiency. Hence, the system-level understanding of the main obstacles to integration care needs further exploration. In order to better integrate health- and elderly care, the study needs to identify the actual misalignments underpinning the issue. This study provides the theoretical foundations for resource misalignments and provides empirical examples of these. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews with multiple stakeholders on various hierarchical levels were carried out to create a more complete view of the system and resources deployed in health- and elderly care. The application of user-centered design methods and co-creation with employees have also been crucial to the outcomes of the study. Findings: Results show that health- and elderly care is a large-scale complex system. The overlapping and mutually reinforcing misalignments are: (1) regulation and policy differences, (2) stakeholder quantity and variation, (3) external control of health- and elderly care, (3) decreasing collaboration and (4) communication channels and IT development. Originality/value: This qualitative study builds on institutional theory and resource integration theory and contributes with empirical descriptions of misalignments in the health- and elderly care system. These descriptions will serve as points of departure for systems design to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health- and elderly care.

In this chapter, the editorial team looks across the cases and the emerging themes to offer insights about the standard and its implications for the innovation management community and the future of the innovation management discipline. For practitioners, the case is made for a call to action to rally around the benefits of the standard as a foundation for dynamic innovation capability and innovation community building that will stand the test of time. For academic educators and researchers, it is teaching about open, connected innovation models that go beyond internally focused ones and understanding through research the system element interdependencies and how these elements can be adapted in different organisational contexts. For standard developers, a key issue is to ensure that a core innovation management system can handle the variations and complexities of different organisations and types of innovations. For professional associations, it is about continuing to build the identity of the profession and supporting professionals to strengthen the innovation management discipline in organisations. For policymakers, it starts with understanding where the standard could have policy relevance and broadening the range of innovation policy instruments available. Finally, it is about imagining a future where in 10 years innovation management is a well-recognised discipline and profession, with systemic and systematic approaches that accelerate learning to realise value more quickly for a better world.

The ISO Innovation Management System (IMS) Standard (ISO 56002) provides a much needed and well-timed input to the innovation management discipline. While research efforts within the domain of innovation management have vastly increased over the past decades, research has primarily been conducted through specific contributions to distinct areas of innovation management (e.g., top management, culture, processes), lacking a more holistic perspective. Practitioners know that managing innovation is challenging. Bringing in a globally recognised standard that offers a holistic perspective will be key in professionalising the innovation management discipline, much like quality management and project management standards have done in the past.

Sustainability challenges demands that we live smaller and more efficient in terms of re-sources and energy, at the same time, loneliness and mental unhealth are in-creasing among young people and students. One solution to both ecological and social sustain-ability is provided by coliving, where a small group of people share a home. Living in a shared home is an opportunity for friendship and sense of community but is also associated with frictions. This paper describes an interdisciplinary and experimental research project about coliving for students and particularly focuses on the social aspects and new practices of living together. We conclude that a small homelike environment has great potential to create the social belonging young people need as well as spreading sustainable practices, but there has to be a so-cial and practical structures there from the start in order to create a resilient and safe space for living.

Solving many current societal challenges requires collaboration between numerous actors from different disciplines. However, there are several challenges in these interdisciplinary collaborations that have managerial implications, which this article aims to describe. The study is based on observations and fourteen interviews with actors from three innovation ecosystems (IES) that attack the challenges with the help of digitalization and enabling technology. Examples of identified challenges are difficulties for participating competitors to cooperate, that actors may feel threatened by the approaching result from the collaboration, that the actors may have different underlying motives for participating in the IES, and difficulties for actors to understand each other due to different domain knowledge.

BACKGROUND: Harnessing mobile health (mHealth) solutions could improve the delivery of mental health services and mitigate their impact in Uganda and similar low-resource settings. However, successful adoption requires that mHealth solutions have good usability. We have previously implemented a telephone service to provide mental health information and advice in English and Luganda, utilizing an automated interactive voice response (IVR) system linked to live agents, including mental health care workers and peer support workers. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess the usage and usability of this mental health telephone service. METHODS: We obtained usage data from the system's call logs over 18 months to study call volumes and trends. We then surveyed callers to gather their characteristics and assess usability using the Telehealth Usability Questionnaire. Additionally, call recordings were evaluated for conversation quality by 3 independent health care professionals, using the Telephone Nursing Dialogue Process, and correlations between quality and usability aspects were investigated. RESULTS: Over 18 months, the system received 2863 meaningful calls (ie, calls that went past the welcome message) from 1125 unique telephone numbers. Of these, 1153 calls (40.27%) stopped at the prerecorded IVR information, while 1710 calls (59.73%) opted to speak to an agent. Among those who chose to speak with an agent, 1292 calls (75.56%) were answered, 393 calls (22.98%) went to voicemail and were returned in the following working days, and 25 calls (1.46%) were not answered. Usage was generally sustained over time, with spikes in call volume corresponding to marketing events. The survey (n=240) revealed that most callers were caregivers of patients with mental health issues (n=144, 60.0%) or members of the general public (n=46, 19.2%), while a few were patients with mental health issues (n=44, 18.3%). Additionally, the majority were male (n=143, 59.6%), spoke English (n=180, 75.0%), had postsecondary education (n=164, 68.3%), lived within 1 hour or less from Butabika Hospital (n=187, 77.9%), and were aged 25-44 years (n=160, 66.7%). The overall usability score for the system was 4.12 on a 5-point scale, significantly higher than the recommended target usability score of 4 (P=.006). The mean scores for usability components ranged from 3.66 for reliability to 4.41 for ease of use, with all components, except reliability, scoring higher than 4 or falling within its CI. Usability scores were higher for Luganda speakers compared with English speakers, but there was no association with other participant characteristics such as sex, distance from the hospital, age, marital status, duration of symptoms, or treatment status. The quality of call conversations (n=50) was rated at 4.35 out of 5 and showed a significant correlation with usability (Pearson r=0.34, P=.02). CONCLUSIONS: We found sustained usage of the mental health telephone service, along with a positive user experience and high satisfaction across various user characteristics. mHealth solutions like this should be embraced and replicated to enhance the delivery of health services in Uganda and similar low-resource settings.

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.

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.

Oki Electric Industry Company, OKI, a Japanese company with more than 140 years' history and proud traditions, decided to introduce Yume Pro, an innovation management system (IMS) directly corresponding to ISO 56002. Motives for this effort were both radical changes in the business context, and an identified need to enhance the entrepreneurial orientation of the employees. OKI works with all elements identified in the IMS. OKI has developed an innovation strategy with a strong emphasis on addressing the Sustainable Developments Goals, as defined by the United Nations, which supports in creating related value propositions. Key activities for building an innovation culture include awareness building, training and support. OKI has also embarked upon an ambitious plan to train many employees within a few years. Further, a strong management commitment is expressed in several ways, such as a clear strategic direction for innovation, reviews of innovation activities, as well as an involvement of the president in innovation promotion activities. OKI has implemented key performance indicators to capture the elements in the system as well as the system itself. The introduction of Yume Pro is led by the company's Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) and the Innovation Promotion Centre (IPC).

In this chapter, we provide a background view and insight into the development of innovation management research, in particular, and discuss the outlook an application of an innovation management system may have, both for organisations and research. The chapter explains how innovation management research is well-developed, but often done so for a single phenomenon; and rarely analysed in research from a systems perspective. This can make the coupling between research and practice difficult (or at least misunderstood) because innovation practice happens in a system. The ISO 56002 brings about an opportunity to systematically discuss innovation research from a systems perspective and can act as a catalyst for better integration of theory and practice in innovation management.

Our knowledge of how to design innovation ecosystems that effectively deal with grand challenges or wicked problems is currently insufficient due to a lack of understanding of their joint innovation processes. Through the use of an in-depth case of an innovation ecosystem designed to combat organized crime, this study shows how diverse government authorities manoeuvre innovation and interact to continuously make the challenge amenable and identify and implement provisional and innovative solutions. Drawing on extensive data gathered from observations, documentation, and interviews with multiple stakeholders, we contribute to the innovation ecosystem literature by offering a model of three interdependent and complementary innovation processes: responsive, preventive, and tactical innovation, supporting an ongoing and distributed experimentation among diverse actors. Furthermore, we emphasize the use of a hybrid interorganizational structure that combines hierarchical and horizontal structures, over one that is entirely network-based, and we highlight the crucial role of a focal collective actor as opposed to a single orchestrator of the ecosystem. Finally, the study suggests attention not only to strengths and complementary attributes but also to vulnerabilities and gaps between involved actors, providing unique innovation opportunities. The paper offers valuable guidance to designers and coordinators of innovation ecosystems addressing grand challenges.

Innovation and its management in retail organisations is an emerging field, yet the measurement of innovation in this context remains challenging and under-researched. The study investigates innovation in large Swedish retail companies, focusing on monitoring and measurement of innovation performance. Through a qualitative, multiple case study, our findings reveal that retailers are aiming to become more active innovators. They are exerting a greater control over the innovation process, implementing a range of financial and non-financial indicators that encompass inputs, outputs, and the process itself. Innovation projects serve as vehicles for experimentation and learning about how to improve the structure of innovation efforts. However, challenges still arise when strategic objectives are not aligned with performance measurements across the organisation. Nonetheless, existing performance measurement practices can support innovation capability development in retail, especially in relation to culture and competence development and utilising external knowledge for open innovation. The paper advances theory by offering insights into how retailers gain more control of innovation through measurement, contributing to the growing landscape of strategic innovation management in retail. We propose a model, informed by theoretically built framework and empirical data, to guide retail organisations in defining new measurements that promote a holistic perspective to building innovation capability.

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.

Decision biases reinforce firms’ tendency to develop innovations based on narrow economic motivations. Consequently, sustainability-oriented ideas explicitly targeting social and environmental issues are easily discarded in idea selection when trade-offs between economic and sustainability values are faced. Given the so far limited knowledge about how sustainability-oriented ideas are developed and selected in organizations today, this research aims to explore how managerial biases affect selection of sustainability-oriented ideas in internal crowdsourcing. It does so through an empirical study drawing on data collected from a Swedish multinational company using internal crowdsourcing for different types of innovation ideas. The empirical study explicitly identifies sustainability-oriented ideas based on machine learning and captures managerial biases for ideas based on sentiment analysis. Regression analyses reveal that managerial biases potentially affect the selection of sustainability-oriented ideas through the mediating role of managerial attention in idea development. Furthermore, this mediating relationship is moderated by search pattern in terms of directed search. The study contributes to the literature on both innovation and sustainability, shedding new light on the effects of managerial bias, managerial attention, and innovation search for decision making and provides managerial implications enabling a fruitful adoption of sustainability-oriented innovation ideas.

Driverless trucks have the potential to contribute to a more sustainable freight transport system. However, the role of the human driver is crucial when the truck experiences a fault. This paper explores how a fault-handling system for driverless trucks can be designed to achieve high uptime and how an intelligent decision support system (DSS) can support uptime in this context. The study focuses on hub-to-hub freight transport and on the faults where the driver is presently involved. Service design methods such as field visits, semi-structured interviews, and a workshop were used. Service scenarios were developed to visualize system design considerations, and a conceptual system design is proposed. The study has resulted in an actor-network map for the fault-handling system design, a service scenario to illustrate the fault-handling process for driverless trucks, and five considerations for the proposed system design: 1) fault detection and monitoring, 2) decision-making and action, 3) information exchange, communication, and analysis, 4) information retrieval and diagnosis, 5) experience and learning. The main conclusions of this paper are that the driver’s role and activities need to be taken into account when developing new tools and services for driverless vehicle fault handling; an intelligent DSS can support humans in decision-making in fault-handling situations; a remote control center and an updated system design can help maintain uptime for driverless trucks.

Systemic and transformative change is needed to address the sustainability issues of our time, and there is a growing consensus that this requires real-life experimentation involving the people and stakeholders affected by the change. Research infrastructures are increasingly set up to provide places for such experimentation and innovation, known as eg. living labs, transformation labs, urban or real-world laboratories. Several authors have however noted that real-life experimentation mostly takes place in late stages of testing and implementation, and with evaluative purposes. In contrast, this paper introduces a methodology for design-driven or ‘designerly’ living labs specifically used to frame complex sustainability issues in early research stages. By presenting four such designerly living labs, carried out in Stockholm, Sweden, from 2014 to 2022 on an operative level, this methodology is compared to more common approaches. The analysis shows that the methodology has repeatedly produced unexpected research outcomes that challenges the current framing of an issue, and how the learning experiences have enabled both people, private and public actors to innovate in their lives and operations.

The sustainability transitions required to address the climate crisis cannot be achieved by technology alone; radical lifestyle changes are needed. To contribute to meeting this critical challenge, design must move its focus from individual needs, desires, and behaviors to the level of the complex socio-technical systems that shape our society. There have been several calls for research that is action-, future- and learning-oriented, to accelerate sustainability transitions. In a broad sense, my research concerns how design practice can be used and further developed to this end. There is growing consensus that real-life experimentation is required to understand and realize the potentials of sustainability innovations, and an emerging experimental turn can be seen in the proliferation of approaches such as living labs, city labs and transition labs, as well as in policy experiments, pilots, demonstrations, and field trials. There is a broad movement in society to involve users or citizens in learning and experimentation in the complexity of real-life contexts, but as will be discussed in this dissertation, most approaches do not realize these ambitions in practice. This dissertation presents an approach for design-driven, or designerly living labs for the real-life exploration and demonstration of possible sustainable concepts and futures. Living labs are often described as having their roots in design, and this dissertation represents a move to reclaim that term for more open-ended modes of experimentation. By living the change, these designerly labs have provided rich insights into the entangled social-technical nature of sustainable futures, and identified barriers and pathways towards them. The dissertation is based on detailed and operative accounts of seven such designerly living labs carried out by design researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden from 2014 to 2023. A cross-case analysis is presented in order to identify and validate the key characteristics of this emerging approach, and how they connect to design practice. In the analysis I also investigate how these labs relate to other research approaches in fields such as transition studies, user innovation, participatory design, and action research. I position designerly living labs as an alternative and complement to more mainstream approaches to real-life experimentation—specifically for the early-stage framing of sustainability issues and in exploring sustainable future concepts and lifestyles. Main findings include a number of factors that were found to demarcate different modes and understandings of real-life experimentation research. These factors include the involvement of users as co-researchers in exploration rather than as testers or co-creators in innovation, and how this more open-ended aim for learning may conflict with notions of developing, evaluating and scaling up. There is also a discussion on how different understandings of these factors can lead to confusion and conflict in transdisciplinary research and recommendations for organizing new research projects of this sort.

In recent years, advancements in autonomous driving technologies have accelerated the commercialization of highly automated trucks. This shift away from human drivers raises concerns about the loss of critical functions, particularly in post-diagnosis decision-making, which relies on human inputs in the current practice. This paper outlines the current post-diagnosis decision-making process for human-driven trucks, drawing on insights from industry practitioners, and systematically identifies gaps between these practices and the requirements for highly automated trucks. We propose a comprehensive design of an intelligent decision support system (DSS) to address these gaps. The design includes conducting a system impact analysis to identify new stakeholders, proposing a new DSS architecture with review and learning functions, and concretizing various potentially effective decision-making models and information inputs. Using a real-world freight delivery scenario and a risk-based decision-making approach, we present a case study to instantiate the DSS design, including graphical user interface designs and a step-by-step use case scenario. This work aims to adapt post-diagnosis decision-making for automated trucks at both technological and managerial levels, thereby enhancing vehicle reliability and transport efficiency.