24 February 2021 15:00 at 16:30Entrepreneurship for Innovation – Innovation for EntrepreneurshipOnline event

Learn more

Event Details

Digital Rising Career Seminar

During the seminar, that will be held from 5 pm to 6.30 pm, two papers will be presented: the first one by one of the researchers of the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, the second one by a guest researcher, invited for a discussion on the topic. At the end of the presentation, there will be an open discussion with the participants.
Please click here to register.

Building more entrepreneurial organizations through innovation contests

Angelo Cavallo, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at the School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His main research areas include Strategic Management, Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation.

Firms increasingly adopt innovation contests to receive ideas for new products and services from external parties, but many firms may not be entrepreneurial enough to benefit from those ideas. Using an inductive longitudinal case study of three financial services firms, we explore the value of innovation contests in less entrepreneurial firms. Our findings show that firms indeed struggle with benefiting from ideas generated through innovation contests. Instead, through participating in an innovation contest, they adopt four mechanisms: (i) infusion of entrepreneurial skills, (ii) engaging with startups in their ecosystem, (iii) more lean and experimental innovation processes; and (iv) organizational restructuring. Based on our findings, we generate propositions and an emerging framework that provides insights into how innovation contests promote more entrepreneurial-oriented organizations.

How the design of entrepreneurial initiative teams influences their ability to come up with novel business model innovations?

Wouter Stam is Professor of Entrepreneurship at the School of Business and Economics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Business model innovation as a phenomenon lies at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship. Faced with the threat of nimble new entrants with powerful new business models, managers of established firms need to find ways to renew their own business models whilst their existing business models are still in place. However, how can they achieve this? In particular, how should they organize to ensure a high degree of novelty in the new business model? This question is of high practical as well as theoretical relevance. Drawing on theories of corporate entrepreneurship, in particular ambidexterity theory, we develop and test a model that explains how the degree of novelty in the resulting new business model depends on the alignment among an initiative’s differentiation from the core business, its social integration with the core business, and relevant governance mechanisms at the initiative level. We test our novel model using data from a unique hand-collected set of 141 business model innovation initiatives in large established firms. Our study thus represents one of the rare large-scale empirical research efforts on business model innovation in established firms. Its main theoretical contribution is to explain how governance choices at the initiative level can serve as a crucial mechanism to unlock the power of combining differentiation with social integration – two seemingly opposing forces – in business model innovation initiatives.

Wouter Stam is Professor of Entrepreneurship at the School of Business and Economics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Prior to this, he was a faculty member at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and visiting scholar at the Wharton School and Bocconi University. He now serves on the editorial boards of several top tier journals and is editor at Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. Prof. Stam’s research interests include strategic entrepreneurship, networks and social capital, and the emergence of new organizational forms and fields. He has published on these and other topics in leading journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Long Range Planning, Organization Studies, and Research Policy. He has also received several research and teaching awards, including the Karen Legge Prize from the Journal of Management Studies, the Emerald Citations of Excellence Award, and Outstanding Reviewer Awards from Academy of Management Journal and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice.

 

Time

24 February 2021
15:00 at 16:30

Location

Online event

Organizer

Politecnico di Milano

X