Paola Cillo

Managing integrators where integration matters: insights from symbolic industries

Recently, companies have been faced with strong need for integration in order to deal with the trade-offs of the current competitive environments – quick response and customization, technical functionality and stylistic appeal, low cost and top quality. This need has led to the introduction of different integrating positions. Although these positions already exist within the firm, in recent years they have become strategic and therefore have to be carefully managed. The relevance and the management of integrators are particularly evident in the symbolic industries, where the need to combine the symbolic and the functional facets of products and services has become increasingly critical for companies to succeed. We provide evidence based on four case studies conducted in the European fashion industry in order to build an original framework for the effectiveness of the integrators and to highlight the relevance of HRM practices in dealing with these positions.

Developing a Brokering Capacity within the Firm: The Enactment of Market Knowledge

Is market knowledge really useful to advance innovation and why are some companies better at using market knowledge to generate innovation than others? This paper addresses this issue conceptually, building on the assumption that it is distribution and usage of market knowledge which make the difference in innovative competition. We build on two different streams of research: market orientation and market knowledge, and knowledge brokering. We show why the emergence of internal market knowledge brokers may enhance the opportunity of innovation for organizations. We distinguish four different types of internal brokers. This distinction is related to the typology of knowledge to be transferred between two internal parties and the cognitive distance between these parties. Conclusions and implications are drawn on how companies should manage these figures of internal brokers in order to favour the distribution and the usage of market knowledge on the edge of innovation.

The Effect of Budget Constraints on Creativity

This article analyzes the effects of financial constraints and of their interaction with individual novelty-seeking traits on the outcome of different types of creative tasks such as product ideation and product repair. Three experimental studies examine the effect of financial constraints on creativity of the outcome of a product ideation task, compare the effect of financial constraints with the effect of another type of constraint (i.e., input restriction) on creativity of products ideated, on the amount of resources invested in the development of the creative solution, and on the type of creative process adopted, and following re¬cent recommendations on the adoption of an interactionist perspective for the study of creativity, analyze the effect of financial constraints in interaction with an individual difference such as novelty-seeking, which embraces more remote determinants of creative performance, on the creativity of the outcomes to a product ideation task. The results suggest that constrained financial resources may be beneficial to creativity. Specifically, results suggest that financial constraints lead to the ideation of more creative products, even though these products make use of fewer inputs and of a lower budget. Furthermore, while yielding outcomes as creative as the ones generated under input constraints, financial constraints induce the use of fewer resources and activate a top down rather than a bottom up processing strategy in the solution of the problem solving task. In addition, the results show that the effect of financial constraints is stronger for individuals with inherent tendencies toward novelty-seeking, because their stock of experiences and perspectives to put them under stress when facing an unconstrained problem space.