Stakeholder Governance for Responsible Innovation: A Theory of Value Creation,Appropriation, and Distribution

In the face of intractable societal grand challenges, organizations increasingly resort to responsible innovation – that is, they pledge to create value for multiple stakeholders through developing new products or services that avoid doing harm and improve conditions for people and the planet. While the link between responsible innovation and societal improvements has been established, organizations pursuing responsible innovation lack governance mechanisms to guide the allocation of the value created – both economic and social – among heterogeneous stakeholders, in line with their responsible intent. We combine the value-based strategy and stakeholder perspectives and infuse a deliberative process to design a three-stage model of value allocation that rests on three key organizational decisions: i) what value to create and for whom, ii) how to appropriate the value created vis-à-vis unintended value appropriators, and iii) how to distribute the value appropriated among intended stakeholders. We propose a framework of stakeholder governance comprised of four novel mechanisms by which organizations can allocate value among their multiple principal stakeholders as part of participative processes. Our study contributes to responsible innovation and corporate governance research by unpacking how new value is managed to solve societal grand challenges.     

Grand Societal Challenges and Responsible Innovation

Grand societal challenges (GSCs) represent complex, multi-level, multi-dimensional problems that require concerted efforts by various actors – public, private, and non-profit – to be successfully addressed. Businesses – alone or in conjunction with governmental and non-profit organizations – are relevant actors in this regard, as they represent a source of innovation. Responsible innovation (RI) is a framework that allows for the governance and evaluation of innovations with regard to their potential harmful consequences and positive contributions to societal challenges. Moreover, it stipulates that this evaluation process should be facilitated by appropriate governance structures at various levels. The aim of this article is to expand theorizing on GSCs and RI and to encourage research that explores their links. We outline pertinent characteristics of GSCs that make current conceptualizations of corporate social responsibility and social innovation limited in addressing GSCs. We explicate the reflexive and participative capacities of RI governance as a complementary and promising way forward. Finally, we introduce the contributions to this Special Issue as illustrations of relevant theoretical and empirical groundwork around GSCs and RI, and outline the agenda for future research.     

The blind spots of collaborative innovation

In discussing some of the core claims of collaborative innovation, this article uses the notion of ‘blind spots’ in a double meaning. On the one hand, it points at some blind spots in the debate on collaborative innovation, i.e. potential weaknesses, risks, and unintended effects of public sector innovation strategies resting on principles of collaborative innovation. Second, the paper considers collaborative innovation as a counter-strategy against blind spots and attention biases of public organizations. Drawing on this perspective helps to critically discuss some of the key assumptions supporting the promise of collaborative innovation to deliver benefits critical for public governance.     

Data governance and digital innovation: A translational account of practitioner issues for IS research

There is widespread agreement in research and practice that data governance is an instrumental element to help organizations leverage and protect data. IS research has observed that our practical and our scientific knowledge of data governance remains limited, and the increasing ability for organizations to generate, acquire, store, transform, process and analyze data calls for us to further identify and address issues on the topic. Striving to contribute to answer this pressing need, we argue that understanding the nature and the implications of governance mechanisms is of high importance as it is these mechanisms that effectively instantiate data governance in an organization. Building on our experience preparing and teaching workshops to 102 executives on the topic, we adopt a position of engaged scholarship and provide a translational account of our pedagogical experience on data governance, highlighting four outstanding themes for IS research. We argue that these four themes—(1) embracing data governance without compromising digital innovation; (2) enacting data governance through repertoires of mechanisms; (3) moving away from data governance toward governing data; and (4) moving away from a view of data at rest to adopt a service-based perspective on data governance—are highly relevant for practice and research. In our view, studying these themes will contribute to inform practitioners who often struggle with the implementation of comprehensive data governance programs and frameworks. At the same time, the ability to leverage theory to study these themes can help research generate novel theoretical contributions on data governance, helping future research on the topic.     

Building Responsible Innovation in International Organizations through Intrapreneurship

Responsible innovation to address grand societal challenges has become the raison d’être of international organizations, such as the United Nations. Although these entities are established to act responsibly, they struggle to innovate. Acknowledging the tensions of this unique context, this study applies an inductive research methodology drawing on eight case studies of intrapreneurial initiatives in socially oriented organizations. The initiatives originated in country offices and scaled either organically (country-by-country) or strategically (via headquarters). This distinguishes two ways how the initiatives mitigate different responsible innovation tensions to foster competence development, structural alignment, and mission stretch. The findings add to the literatures on responsible innovation and intrapreneurship in large, complex organizations by uncovering the boundary conditions of non-profit intrapreneurship, its tensions, and its scaling processes. This study builds theory that intrapreneurial initiatives can foster digital transformation and contribute to the development of an organizational capability for responsible innovation via organizational imprinting.     

Orchestrating distributed data governance in open social innovation

Open Social Innovation (OSI) involves the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to generate ideas, and develop and scale solutions to make progress on societal challenges. In an OSI project, stakeholders share data and information, utilize it to better understand a problem, and combine data with digital technologies to create digitally-enabled solutions. Consequently, data governance is essential for orchestrating an OSI project to facilitate the coordination of innovation. Because OSI brings multiple stakeholders together, and each stakeholder participates voluntarily, data governance in OSI has a distributed nature. In this essay we put forward a framework consisting of three dimensions allowing an inquiry into the effectiveness of such distributed data governance: (1) openness (i.e., freely sharing data and information), (2) accountability (i.e., willingness to be held responsible and provide justifications for one's conduct) and (3) power (i.e., resourceful actors' ability to impact other stakeholder's actions). We apply this framework to reflect on the OSI project #WirVsVirus (“We versus virus” in English), to illustrate the challenges in organizing effective distributed data governance, and derive implications for research and practice.     

社区治理中的政府定位——以杭州市为例

社区治理必须树立现代治理理念.政府与社区组织之间存在着相互依赖关系,必须彼此交换资源、合作互动、持续协调才能顺利实现各自目标.目前政府与社区组织在社区治理中的关系尚未理顺,政府职能转变进程的滞缓和主导性强势行为直接影响了社区治理的效果.要改变现状,政府必须正确定位,摆脱自身社会管理的重负,采取积极有效措施加快培育发展社区自治组织,使之有能力以主体姿态参与社区治理,实现社会管理社会化.     

Fostering green product innovation through green entrepreneurial orientation: The roles of employee green creativity,green role identity,and organizational transactive memory system

Developing new green products is critical to an organization's achievement of sustainable goals as well as competitive advantage. This study aims to unravel the mechanisms through which organizations with green entrepreneurial orientation (green EO) can foster green product innovation. The dataset for testing these mechanisms was garnered from employees and managers who worked in manufacturing firms based in an Asia-Pacific market. Through a multilevel analysis of the data, the study revealed the positive nexus between organizational green EO and green product innovation. The results of the study further lent credence to employee green creativity as a mediation path for such a relationship. Furthermore, employee green role identity and organizational transactive memory system were found to fortify the linkage between green EO and employee green creativity. These results suggest to organizations how to optimally translate their green entrepreneurial strategy into new green products that met customer preferences and societal expectations.     

The e-integration dilemma: The linkages between Internet technology application, trading partner relationships and structural change

The evidence from an empirical study involving 281 Australian organizations suggests that the availability, open nature, and (comparative) ease of implementation of Internet technologies for integration with trading partners, whilst on the one hand providing the means by which organizations can integrate processes and systems in a cost effective way, can amplify the need for both structural change and closer collaboration with trading partners. The relationships proposed and tested in the model are justified and explained based on a number of theoretical perspectives. These include Transaction Cost Economics, Socio-technical Systems, Resource Dependency, Knowledge Based View, Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Learning. The implications of the findings for Transaction Cost Theory are noteworthy firstly because they support the appropriateness of the inter-organizational governance structure in the context of this study, and secondly because although application of these technologies may reduce information search and related costs, whether this necessarily leads to reduced coordination costs is problematic. The potential benefits from improved coordination may be constrained by the perceived costs, and risks, of transition to new structural forms. The implication for practice is that increased use of Internet technologies creates substantial pressure to invest in organizational change. The attractiveness of investing in technologies that place managers in a position where they need to promote organizational change in order to extract adequate returns creates a significant dilemma. On the one hand Internet technologies enable extensive sharing and integration of data among trading partners, but at the same time they create conditions requiring managers to embrace fundamental organizational change in order to leverage the potential of such integration.     

Human capital,social capital,and innovation: a multi-country study

The authors examine the effects of two forms of capital, i.e. human capital and social capital, on innovation at the country level. We use secondary data from the World Development Report on a country's overall human development to test for a relationship between human capital and innovation. We also use previous conceptualizations of social capital as comprising trust, associational activity, and norms of civic behaviour to test for relationships between these indicators of social capital and innovation using data from the World Values Survey. Unlike most previous studies that examined human and social capital within a given country, we develop and empirically test a theoretically grounded model that relates human and social capital to innovation at the societal level across 59 different countries, thus providing a more global view of the role of these two forms of capital in generating value. We find strong support for the positive relationship between human capital and innovation and partial support for the positive effect of trust and associational activity on innovation. However, contrary to our prediction, we find a negative relationship between norms of civic behaviour and one of our innovation measures.     

Voice,exit and local capture in public provision of private goods

We developed a simple model on publicly provided private goods, such as health or education that highlights a vicious cycle faced by many developing countries. When public services are not of high quality due to mismanagement or corruption, the wealthy may switch to private alternatives. Their exit weakens the influence of citizen voice over politicians, since that leaves the poor as the only constituent with a stake in good governance. As the civic control over local governments weakens, government’s concern for social welfare declines even further, leading to more corruption and more corrosion in the quality of public services. Our model shows that establishing institutions (such as local taxation) that spread the costs and benefits of governance across the whole society is crucial for the success of local governments. Empirical results from the Philippines support this hypothesis.     

Corporate governance and lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender‐supportive human resource policies from corporate social responsibility,resource‐based,and agency perspectives

Corporate boards are responsible for ensuring that managers enact policies that are in shareholders' best interests, and managers are responsible for implementing strategies that are not only profitable but also responsive to changing legal and societal demands and the resource needs of the firm. In this paper, we use the theoretical lenses of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the resource‐based view, and agency theory to investigate the relationship between corporate governance structure and the implementation of supportive lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) policies. We analyze 10,233 firm‐year observations and 1,594 unique firms, and our results demonstrate that LGBT‐supportive policies are positively associated with firm performance. We also offer new insight into why not all firms adopt such policies. We exploit the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act as an exogenous shock that increased board independence, and our difference‐in‐difference estimation shows that firms forced to raise board independence in 2002 were less likely to invest in LGBT‐supportive policies. Results suggest that human resource management (HRM) policies can be guided by CSR and resource‐based views in the pursuit of wealth maximization, but agency conflict may also be a concern for external majority boards. We discuss implications for HRM research practice and corporate governance regarding LGBT policies in organizations.     

Public spending,public governance and economic growth at the Vietnamese provincial level: A disaggregate analysis

This study examines the role of economic governance in the relationship between public spending, private investment, and economic growth in Vietnam at the provincial level. The study data consist of sixty-two Vietnamese provinces for the period 2006–2015. Some notable results are attained by applying a sequential (two-stage) estimation. First, the marginal benefits to economic growth of increased Vietnamese provincial government expenditures may be constrained because of the inefficiency of expenditures on education, business services, and public administration. Second, public spending and private investment are found to be substitutes at the provincial level. Third, based on the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) ranking, used as a proxy for provincial public governance in Vietnam, the significance of public governance can be observed. The study concludes that good governance, characterized by different attributes, such as lower informal charges, greater transparency, and unbiased policy, plays a critical role in improving the impact of government expenditure on economic growth in Vietnamese provinces, particularly through its interactions with private sector investment.     

Is It Only Good? The Dark Side of Leadership for Creativity and Innovation

It is assumed that leaders are essential in shaping and facilitating successful innovation and creativity in organizations. Both through direct leadership behaviors (e.g., by vision formulation) and through more indirect leadership behaviors (e.g., by role modeling). While these leadership behaviors seem both positive and productive, they may also hold risks of unintended, adverse results. In the current article, two ways are proposed in which this may occur: through contradictory leadership behaviors and a too‐much‐of‐a‐good‐thing effect. Future research in and awareness of the potential dark sides to leadership for creativity and innovation are warranted.     

Self-Governance As a Mode of Societal Governance

This article explores the concept of self-governance. Self-governance refers to the capacity of social entities to govern themselves autonomously and, as such, is an important mode of societal governance in modern society. However, the nature of'self-governance'and its actual and potential contribution to societal governance in modern society are not (yet) fully understood. Therefore, two perspectives on self-governance as a mode of societal governance are dis-cussed: a system-oriented perspective thatfocuses on the operational closure of systems; and an actor-oriented perspective that stresses the situational dependency of the actual possibilities for making use of self-governance. A third, interactional, approach is added that stresses the need to understand societal interactions in their full complexity, dynamics and diversity, in which self-governing capacities are tapped.     

Recombination in digital innovation: Challenges,opportunities, and the importance of a theoretical framework

In this article I argue that the quest to establish digital innovation as a research domain is hindered by three challenges. As digital innovation research we are too often: a) reifying the agency of digital innovation actors; b) developing explanations of digital innovation detached from the specifics of digital technology, and c) developing overly specific explanations of digital innovation. I begin by providing a brief overview of the recombination perspective and considering why this perspective holds great appeal in the digital age. I then engage with Henfridsson et al.'s (2018) value spaces framework as a platform for framing value creation and value capture in relation to recombination in digital innovation. Next, I push Henfridsson et al.'s arguments one step further to discuss them in relation to what I consider to be the key challenges for digital innovation research. Illustrating with some of my own recent projects, I suggest that in order to fully address these challenges we need to (1) develop explanations of digital innovation acknowledging the complexity of sociomaterial interaction in digital innovation; (2) develop explanations of digital innovation building on the specifics of digital technology, and (3) develop explanations of digital innovation based on an oscillation between the specific and the general. The article concludes by pointing to future challenges and developments for digital innovation research.     

数字经济背景下金融科技的创新发展与监管转型 ——基于监管沙盒视角

数字经济背景下的金融科技具有创造性破坏的特征，其带来的创新收益和风险成本同时发展、相互转换，为传统金融监管带来严峻挑战，亟需通过监管转型实现激励创新和风险控制的动态平衡。在适应性监管理念逐渐受到认可的背景下，监管沙盒作为适应性监管的实践形式，能够为市场各类主体带来经验密集型的收益：通过真实世界的试验结果降低技术不确定性，基于有效的信息交互减少信息不对称性，有效化解监管者与被监管者、新进入者与后进入者之间的矛盾，在控制风险的基础上最大限度地推动创新。因此，监管沙盒不仅是一项创新工具，更是推动监管转型由理论走向实际的重要依托。     

Achieving voluntary data sharing in cross sector partnerships: Three partnership models

The complex societal problems that we face today require unprecedented collaboration and evidence-based decisions. These collaboration processes are further propelled by the datafication of virtually all spheres of public life. To benefit from this, the data needs to be made available to allow for data analytics. Thus, data sharing becomes a crucial aspect of cross-sector collaborations that aim to create and capture value from information. Compared to collaborations where data sharing is not the main goal, data sharing partnerships face a number of novel challenges, such as mitigating data risks, complying with data protection legislation, and ensuring responsible data use. Navigating these waters and achieving data sharing can be challenging for both governments and businesses, as well as other actors. How do organizations from different sectors manage to achieve data sharing for addressing societal challenges? To address this research question, we apply a framework of three models of cross sector social partnerships developed in the field of organization studies to structure the analysis of six cases. Our analysis suggests that to a certain extent the partnership model determines the types of drivers and challenges to sharing data in a partnership. Leveraging the drivers and anticipating these challenges can help organizations be more aware of key terms of the collaboration and the mechanisms that can be used to succeed in their partnership goals.     

业务外包风险分析及其识别研究

业务外包在当今全球化的背景下发展十分迅猛。各个机构通过确定自己的产业边界将非核心业务外包给服务供应商,以此来达到节约成本,聚集资源,发展核心业务,增加核心竞争力的目的。但各机构在享受外包带来好处的同时也承受着风险。本文在文献调研和自身研究积累的基础上对外包中存在的风险进行了分析和识别,为企业在外包过程中做出正确的决策提供借鉴。     

Social entrepreneurship orientation and performance in non-profit organizations

With the downturn in the global socioeconomic panorama, the social entrepreneurship orientation (SEO) and the social performance of non-profit organizations (NPOs) have become subject to growing levels of attention. The objective of this study is to analyze the influence of SEO on the performance of NPOs. To this end, we deployed a quantitative methodology based on the application of a survey of NPOs, which received a total of 135 valid responses. Our results demonstrate a positive effect for the dimensions of social innovation and social proactivity even while reporting no effect for the acceptance of social risks on performance. These results hold important implications across two different levels: in terms of the NPOs and policy-makers.