Charlotta Windahl

Manufacturing firms and integrated solutions: characteristics and implications

For an increasing number of firms in the capital goods industry, combinations of products and services, so called integrated solutions, are becoming part of their future growth strategies. By analysing three case studies, the article highlights the variety of such solutions and some important implications for the involved companies. The analysis suggests that companies need an extended set of competences to succeed in providing integrated solutions, amounting to a balance of technical and integration competence with market/business, consulting and partnering competences. This implies a move from product‐focus to customer‐centric orientation and focus on optimisation of user processes. From a research perspective the paper underlines the importance of integrating studies of product and service innovation, two fields that so far have been studied separately.

Institutional logics matter when coordinating resource integration

Resource integration has become an important concept in marketing literature. However, little is known about the systemic nature of resource integration and the ways the activities of resource integrators are coordinated and adjusted to each other. Therefore, we claim that institutions are the coordinating link that have impact on value cocreation efforts and are the reference base for customers’ value assessment. When conceptualizing the systemic nature of resource integration, we include the regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions and institutional logics. This article provides a framework and a structure for identifying and analyzing the influence of institutional logics on resource integration in service systems.

Understanding solutions as technology-driven business innovations

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the innovation challenges firms face when developing and commercialising solutions in the capital goods sector; challenges related to the interdependencies between the supplier/innovator and the customers, as well as the solution’s impact on their competencies and activities. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws upon the emerging body of literature on solutions and established frameworks within innovation management literature. It explores a real-time longitudinal case study of “Alpha” (an international specialist in centrifugal separation, heat exchange and fluid handling), including an R&D project, the project’s transformation into an internal corporate venture and the years of the venture up until its integration into the corporate. Findings – This paper characterises solutions as involving product and business innovation. By clarifying the differences between how the solution affects the customers and the suppliers, the use of th...

Market sense-making in design practice: exploring curiosity, creativity and courage

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the three interrelated design catalysts of curiosity, creativity and courage, and explores how they actuate market sense-making activities in design practice. Drawing on the interplay between action and meaning dimensions in design practice and service-marketing theory, it specifically investigates when desirability, rather than feasibility or viability, is the locus of innovation activities. Thus, the following three aspects of market sense-making in design practice are identified: (a) curiosity catalyses empathy and the deep understanding of markets, which are seen as socially constructed of individual (value-in-use) and connected (value-in-context) experiences; (b) creativity catalyses ‘logical leaps’ with regard to understanding the opportunities for creating future markets; and (c) courage catalyses learning through iterations, which reduce cognitive bias with regard to market assumptions, thereby reducing cognitive bias in both curiosity- and creativity-driven activities.

Engaging or avoiding) change through reflexive practices

In this article, we explore the ways in which individuals deploy reflexive practices in order to avoid or engage with a call to change either oneself or the social context. We begin by developing a categorization of the modes of reflexive practice associated with avoidance or engagement. We go on to develop—through a relationally reflexive research process—three contributions that build on this. First, we build an understanding of what a repertoire of reflexive practices may include, and “what is going on” in such reflexive practices. Second, we explain how reflexive practices can be mobilizing, thereby enabling shifts between avoidance and engagement modes, or fix action within a single mode. Third, we develop an understanding of the ways in which emotions and relationships influence how reflexive practices of either kind are deployed.