Creating compassion: How volunteering websites encourage prosocial behaviour

Organisations increasingly use websites to promote prosocial behaviour such as volunteering, philanthropy, and activism. However, these websites often fail to encourage prosocial behaviours effectively. To address the lack of relevant research, we develop, then refine, a design model that identifies the user experience factors that create intention to engage in prosocial behaviour on websites. We test an initial model developed from the literature, by interviewing forty participants, each of whom visited and compared six volunteering websites. Our analysis of the participants' user experience reveals eighteen elements that interplay to create intention to engage in prosocial behaviour. Our refined design model comprises ten website features (interaction, factual, anecdata, external recognition, organisational expression, value suggestion, explanatory content, visual media, written media and, website design), seven perceptions (ease of use, aesthetics, information quality, trust, negative affect, positive affect, and argument strength), and one motivation (egoism). These findings provide novel insights into how to design Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to encourage prosocial behaviour.     

Business model innovation in strategic alliances: a multi‐layer perspective

Business model innovation (BMI) has recently become a topic of interest for research as well as corporate practice. However, we lack specific insights into actors, drivers, and different forms of BMI as the concept is by now mainly addressed in a very general way. In this paper, we analyze how BMI takes place in strategic alliances with the focus of enhancing the recent knowledge about BMI by developing a concept that links firm‐level BMI with alliance‐driven innovation of business models. Against the background of an in‐depth explorative qualitative study, we shed light on the basic nature business model innovation alliances (BMIA) and their effects on both, alliance level and firm level. We develop a process model of BMIA that is the first model providing a holistic picture of this particular type of BMI. Our findings allow for deep insights into BMI processes in incumbent companies and uncover in detail the importance of boundary spanning activities in this realm. By providing these insights, we pave the ground for a new stream of BMI research that focuses on the in‐depth understanding of the role of collaboration and network effects in recent BMI processes. In addition, we show practical benefits for partners in BMI alliances. These insights may help to overcome the traditional fear of negative effects that is still very often prevalent in companies when it comes to issues of partnering with firm external players in strategic issues.     

Managerial Political Behavior in Innovation Portfolio Management: A Sensegiving and Sensebreaking Process

By applying formalized innovation portfolio management systems, firms seek to ensure an alignment of their goals and strategy with their employees' different abilities, actions, and outcomes. However, research indicates that nonrational, political behavior also determines formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. Research on political behavior in respect of innovation portfolio management usually conceptualizes political behavior as a set of self‐serving activities, such as negotiation, bargaining, coalition building, and acquiring power, aimed at protecting, maintaining, or promoting an actor's self‐interest and power. Consequently, extant research tends to focus on political behavior's dysfunctional impacts on decision‐making processes and their subsequent outcomes. This paper challenges this negativity bias by exploring a novel, neutral specification of political behavior and its relation to innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. By conducting an automotive industry case study focusing on the innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes, the paper analyzed the data from 43 interviewees. The conceptual model shows that managers' political capabilities determine their ability to behave politically. According to the results, political behavior comprises the activities that prepare the stage and orchestrate others in order to form a political coalition. Furthermore, results show that political behavior functions as a sensegiving and a sensebreaking process, with managers seeking to shape an innovation project's understanding according to their interests and to influence portfolio decisions. The resulting novel specification of political behavior extends the construct's scope and validity by investigating their functional and dysfunctional aspects, and by indicating that a political sensemaking process complements formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes.     

Swedish technology teachers’ views on assessing student understandings of technological systems

Technology education is a new school subject in comparison with other subjects within the Swedish compulsory school system. Research in technology education shows that technology teachers lack experience of and support for assessment in comparison with the long-term experiences that other teachers use in their subjects. This becomes especially apparent when technology teachers assess students’ knowledge in and about technological systems. This study thematically analysed the assessment views of eleven technology teachers in a Swedish context. Through the use of in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews, their elaborated thoughts on assessing knowledge about technological systems within the technology subject (for ages 13–16) were analysed. The aim was to describe the teachers’ assessment views in terms of types of knowledge, and essential knowledge in relation to a progression from basic to advanced understanding of technological systems. The results showed three main themes that the interviewed teachers said they consider when performing their assessment of technological systems; understanding (a) a system’s structure, (b) its relations outside the system boundary and (c) its historical context and technological change. Each theme included several underlying items that the teachers said they use in a progressive manner when they assess their students’ basic, intermediate and advanced level of understanding technological systems. In conclusion, the results suggest that the analysed themes can provide a basis for further discussion about defining a progression for assessing students’ understanding about technological systems. However, the findings also need to be examined critically as the interviewed teachers’ views on required assessment levels showed an imbalance; few students were said to reach beyond the basic level, but at the same time most assessment items lay on the intermediate and advanced levels.     

Salary increases for the marketing executive

This article discusses how marketing executives view their pay raise. A study of 491 marketing executives examined their views on what is a meaningful salary increase and the reasons why their companies give pay raises.     

Business model innovation and decision making: uncovering mechanisms for coping with uncertainty

As a research subject, business model innovation spans the strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship fields. Yet, despite the importance of the concept, prior work has paid little attention to how decision-makers cope with uncertainty and gain understanding about interdependencies in new business model configurations. To address this gap, we combine top-down theorising and evidence-based exploration and seek to unpack some of the coping mechanisms that operate in the evolutionary view of business model innovation. Using in-depth interviewing to collect data, our study reveals five strategies – customer centricity, value co-creation, capability evolution, ecosystem growth, and adaptive pricing – that decision-makers apply to cope with uncertainty in business model innovation. We find that coping mechanisms support decision making during the development of new business models. Furthermore, we find that the five coping strategies delineate decision making for value proposition, value creation, and value capture configurations in more detail than existing literature has described. Our findings have important implications for decision making in business model innovation.     

Contextual Innovation Management Using a Stage‐Gate Platform: The Case of Philips Shaving and Beauty

To improve its innovation process, Philips Shaving and Beauty (S&B) designed a blueprint for its innovation process. Although it has proved to be quite effective, it has experienced a lack of efficiency, in terms of frequent cost and time overruns, in the fuzzy front end of this process. We suggest a contextual innovation management approach to set up a stage‐gate‐based innovation process platform and thus improve the efficiency in the fuzzy front end, which means that, for different contexts, stage‐gate process variants will be designed from which unnecessary activities are removed and important activities are emphasized. The design is based on the identification of relevant contextual factors to develop variations of the common innovation process within Philips S&B. We distinguished different variants of the innovation processes within Philips S&B that can increase the efficiency in the fuzzy front end. Based on interviews within and outside Philips S&B, we identified problems and potential solutions with regard to efficiency in eight recently finished innovation processes. The results indicate that the most important contextual factors are the distinction between incremental and radical innovations, and between market and technology‐based innovations. We used these factors to design three variants on the basic platform of the stage‐gate process.