Matti Kaulio

Initial Conditions or Process of Development? Critical Incidents in the Early Stages of New Ventures

Past research on new venture creation has focused on initial conditions of start-ups or on the process of evolution. However, few studies have investigated the transitory stage when initial conditions changeover to a process of evolution. The aim of this paper is to investigate critical incidents infant new ventures face in this transitory stage. The paper covers two areas. First, a review of selected process models of new venture creation is conducted. Results from this review conclude that existing models as described in the literature are associated with several weaknesses: they oversimplify the phenomenon studied as they most often focus on one aspect only and they do not deal with how entrepreneurs adapt to specific situational conditions. Furthermore, the review indicates that the starting-point of a process often is hard to specify and characterize. Second, an empirical study based on the critical incident technique is reported on. On the basis of interviews with founders and entrepreneurial service providers related to the companies, 65 critical incidents were identified. This equals an average of 8.1 incidents per company during a period of 6-18 months. Financing and recruiting were the most frequent and most important activities to manage. Then follows reference/first customer in third place. A common pattern of occurring incidents was identified among the ventures. However, in relation to the first round of venture capital financing a strategic choice was made. Either the companies followed a growth strategy and recruitment and organizational development were key goals, or the company focussed on building a patent portfolio. A tentative model is suggested that describes this process in detail.

Supply-side resilience as practice bundles: a critical incident study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a typology of supply-side resilience capabilities and empirically validates these capabilities and their constituent bundles of practices. Design/methodology/approach – The study is primarily qualitative, employing the critical incident technique to collect data across 22 firms and seeking to validate how and why practice bundles form and relate to operations performance. It contains a frequency of occurrence analysis for the purpose of triangulation, a minor statistical part to provide some additional evidence of bundle formation and correlation between adoption of bundles of practices and recovered operations performance after upstream supply chain disruptions. Findings – Four supply-side resilience capabilities are conceptualized along two dichotomous dimensions – “proactive/reactive” and “internal/external” – in a 2×2 matrix as proactive-internal, proactive-external, reactive-internal and reactive-external resilience capabilities. Empirical suppo...

Disentangling core functions of operational resilience: a critical review of extant literature

This study identifies and systematically reviews the literature on resilience in management research in order to characterise operational resilience. We argue that operational resilience provides an integrative view on different resilience perspectives in business (supply chain, business continuity, infrastructure, organisational, strategic). Using the resource-based view and particularly dynamic capabilities perspective as theoretical lenses, operational resilience is discussed in relation to the core business processes of an enterprise. Five core functions (sense, build, reconfigure, re-enhance, sustain) are identified from literature and discussed taking into account desired and undesired consequences of uncertainties. Moreover, operational resilience is operationalised using routines pertaining to the identified core functions. The proposed operational resilience core functions are further scrutinised using two case examples. Future research is suggested to validate the identified core functions and to use them for empirical analysis, including investigation of relationships with operations management paradigms such as lean thinking.

Project leadership in regional development coalitions : Horizontal and vertical challenges of trustkeeping

Endogenous growth policy and partnership collaboration have become increasingly prevalent in the search for value creation and innovation in regional development. Little attention is, however, paid to the dynamic role of project leadership in promoting such broad partnership-based collaboration. Drawing on experiences and data from a partnership-based Regional Development Coalition in Norway (2007–2010), this inquiry seeks to fill this gap. It explores, from a project leadership viewpoint, key challenges in orchestrating and facilitating bottom-up learning processes along the horizontal dimension, and the upholding of national mandates and political visions along the vertical dimension. Based on the empirical findings, a model is developed which sheds light on the complex role of project leadership in partnership-based collaborations.

State-of-the-Art Review on Operational Resilience: Concept, Scope and Gaps

This state-of-the-art review analyses literature on resilience paradigm perspectives and conceptualizations in business and management. Attempts have been made to produce a definition that reflects on and attempts to resolve inconsistencies and pursue with the conception of operational resilience. Future research directions are indicated by arguing on the possible relationships among operational resilience and modern operations management paradigms like lean thinking in view of operational performance.

Sustaining performance under operational turbulence: The role of Lean in engineer-to-order operations

Purpose: Many studies have found out that lean practices provide better performance in a stable business environment. However, there is limited information on how lean practices influence performan ...

A Psychological Contract Perspective on Project Networks

A current challenge for project network scholars is to explain “how history matters”; in other words, how past experiences of collaboration between actors in a project network are transformed into an (informal) organizational format that is replicable in future collaborations. How are project networks formed in the first place? By examining a collaboration under formation between two organizations, this article proposes that project networks can be conceptualized as psychological contracts. In this formation process, critical incidents play a key role as they define “items” in the psychological contract; in project network terms, these items define routines for collaboration.