Majbritt Rostgaard Evald

What is in it for me?: Firms strategizing for public-private innovation innovation

Purpose Public-private innovation (PPI) is often claimed to contribute to societal welfare, to bring positive effects to the public sector and to open new markets to private firms. Engaging in public-private relationships for innovation is, however, also recognised as challenging and problematic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the managerial and strategic challenges faced by private firms when engaging in public-private relationships for innovation. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study presents ten firms’ engagement in public-private relationships. Half of them are experienced in innovation in public-private relationship, the other half are engaging in public-private relationships for the first time. Cross-case analysis brings insight into how these different types of firms strategize for handling relationships with public partners. Findings Contrary to non-experienced firms, experienced firms deliberately build a long-term strategy for engaging in PPI in expectation of outcome from more than a single project. They not only engage in building an understanding of the public using setting, but also seek to bridge with the public developing and producing setting to a greater extent than less experienced firms. The experienced firms utilise relationships with actors in the wider public network as a device and an asset for overcoming challenges and for reaping benefits from their engagement. Originality/value The study outlines the characteristics of strategizing among the most experienced firms and their special ability to embrace the complexity of the public sector network while working simultaneously on developing innovation for specific public counterparts.

Interviewing Like a Researcher: The Powers of Paradigms

The purpose of this chapter is to show the transformation that takes place when a ‘neutral’ research method is turned into a ‘paradigm-embedded’ research method. Because a paradigm consists of some ultimate presumptions (understood as philosophical hypothesis or normative theses), paradigms influence the way in which researchers understand problems and how researchers look at existing and available sets of research methods and knowledge in general. The powers of paradigms thus are substantial and should be noted by researchers to provide context for their reflections. The paradigms we depart from are inspired by the Arbnor and Bjerke (Methodology for creating business knowledge, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2009) distinction between an analytical view (similar to positivism), a system view (similar to critical realism) and an actor view (similar to interpretism). To illustrate the transformation that neutral research methods go through, we consider an often-used method in business research, which researchers often become familiar with or have opinions about, which is the personal interview. The illustration of how the personal interview can be influenced by three different paradigms lays the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of how research methods in general can be used very differently depending on the paradigm researcher’s departure.

The Palette of Literature Reviews Available for Critical Realists

The chapter gives scholars insight into how different types of literature reviews can be conducted if you do research from a critical realist stance. Some researchers, because of their paradigmatic stances, have predetermined ideas about conducting a literature review. This makes sense if the researcher belongs to the positivist paradigm, where a researcher favours a meta-analysis review (systematically and empirically reviewing quantitative studies), whereas a researcher belonging to the interpretivist paradigm will prefer to conduct meta-synthesis reviews (reviewing qualitative studies and their interpretations). For a critical realist, more approaches are available, with the main proviso that the reviews undertaken are done in a systematic and transparent way. This chapter focuses on the critical realist options and provides researchers with an overview of different types of reviews to choose from. The chapter does not give an exhaustive account of all the reviews existing; rather, it gives scholars insight into the different review varieties that exist and thus prepares the scholar to take an active choice of what review to conduct in connection to its purpose and objectives.

Building relationships between a market logic and multiple logics in complex institutional settings

Research in institutional logics tends to neglect to emphasize how logics relate to one another when enacted by interacting actors. We explore how variants of a market logic enacted by private firms relate to an array of public sector logics when the firms aim to commercialize innovative welfare solutions in healthcare. Two findings are obtained: First, conflicting or convergent logics relationships are continuously built between a market logic and different public sector logics. Second, the logics relationships influence the firms’ space for actions: Where some firms focus on commercializing in their home market other firms shift focus to international markets depending on whether their market logic has a convergent or conflicting relationship with public sector logics in their home market. The findings contribute to institutional logics theory by refining our understanding of how different relationships between logics develop continuously and enable actors to take different forms of actions.