Patrick Reinmoeller

Dynamic capabilities in the dock: A case of reification?

In his award-winning So!apbox essay, Donald Hambrick observed that the strategic management field ‘is rapidly being pulled apart by centrifugal forces. Like a supernova that once packed a wallop, our energy is now dissipating and we are quickly growing cold’ (2004: 91), and included dynamic capabilities as one of the constructs that appeared to be most detrimental to the field’s stability. At first sight, as scholars interested in dynamic capabilities, we conceded that Hambrick appeared to be right. Navigating the literature we encountered a plethora of dynamic capability definitions, a countless number of capability types (e.g. R&D, marketing, etc.) labelled as ‘dynamic’ and a variety of formulaic expressions under the generic umbrella of ‘to adapt and change firms need dynamic capabilities’. Yet, after nearly two decades, a rising number of over 100 articles, special issues and conference presentations (Di Stefano et al., 2010) seem to suggest that dynamic capabilities were, instead, one of the centripetal forces that helped keep the field together. So we were faced with a puzzle: were dynamic capabilities the last flash of the dying supernova, or could they rather save strategic management from its anticipated self-destruction? More recently, dynamic capability research appears to have become an academic conversation polarized between equally passionate critics and supporters. Perhaps a paramount example is the exchange between Arend and Bromiley (A&B) and Helfat and Peteraf (H&P) on the future of dynamic capabilities published in Strategic Organization in 2009: whereas A&B suggested that the dynamic capability construct should be abandoned due to its weak theoretical foundations and inconsistencies, H&P called for further developmental efforts given the infancy of the field and its growing relevance. Not surprisingly, this paradigmatic match between advocates of rigour and defendants of relevance (Hirsch and Levin, 19991) has regularly appeared in Strategic Organization’s2 ‘Most-Read’ rankings, together with Hambrick’s (2004) call for the consolidation of strategic management. How to solve this dilemma, then: should we discard dynamic capabilities or persist with them? In the face of the possibility of either the demise of strategic management (Hambrick, 2004) or the discovery of its ‘Holy Grail’ (H&P, 2009: 99), we decided to let the evidence speak for itself. In this essay, we intervene in the debate between A&B and H&P to propose that a specific developmental process of conceptual and empirical work might explain their different assessment of dynamic capabilities. A remarkable number3 of prior reviews on dynamic capabilities have focused on conceptual inconsistencies and contradictions (e.g. Barreto, 2010), but have not taken fully into account the effects of a process which often leads researchers to cease ‘to specify the assumptions that underlie the concept or construct and treat it like a general-purpose solution to an increasing 457977 SOQ10410.1177/1476127012457977Strategic OrganizationGiudici and Reinmoeller 2012

Integrated IT Systems to Capitalize on Market Knowledge

To survive in today’s knowledge-based competition, firms need to manage knowledge efficiently and effectively. This chapter proposes a conceptual framework for multi-dynamic knowledge management.

Relational Capital and Individual Exploration: Unravelling the Influence of Goal Alignment and Knowledge Acquisition:

We investigate how the relational capital of a person within an organization affects the extent to which she or he conducts exploration activities. Our theory separates out a negative effect that comes from aligning goals with other organizational members from a positive effect that stems from acquiring knowledge from them. Our data from 150 members of the R&D teams of three leading R&D-intensive firms support the theoretical model. By developing and testing this theory, we contribute to the literature on exploration, which lacks understanding of the antecedents of individual exploration in organizations. We also contribute to relational capital literature, which has focused on organizational and group-level exploration, but which has shown inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between relational capital and exploration. A reason for this may be that this body of research has emphasized positive effects of relational capital for exploration only, and has not accounted for the different mechanisms that mediate the effects of relational capital on individual exploration activities. Our theory offers a more comprehensive view by explaining how relational capital may provide both benefits and liabilities to individual exploration activities.

Managing the Knowledge‐Creating Context: A Strategic Time Approach

Understanding the contexts of knowledge is necessary to manage knowledge processes successfully. The goal of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework for understanding and utilizing knowledge that is embedded in contexts, focusing on the relationship between time and knowledge processes. This paper integrates the time lens and the literature on the knowledge based view to develop four different time contexts that can enable different organizational knowledge processes. Propositions on how to utilize time to create enabling contexts for organizational knowledge creation and innovation are developed. Suggested intervention strategies help to create contexts for knowledge creation and exploitation.

The Persistence of a Stigmatized Practice: A Study of Competitive Intelligence

Studies on the diffusion of practices provide valuable insights into how organizations adopt, adapt, sustain and abandon practices over time. However, few studies focus on how stigmatized practices diffuse and persist, even when they risk tainting the adopters. To address this issue and understand how firms manage stigmatized practices, we study US organizations associated with the practice of competitive intelligence (CI) between 1985 and 2012. CI includes legitimate information gathering practices that are sometimes also associated with infringements and espionage. Our findings suggest that CI became highly diffused and persisted despite the risk of stigmatizing its adopters. We identified three factors to explain CIs persistence: (1) keeping it opaque to avoid the negative effects of stigmatization, (2) ‘constructing’ usefulness to justify its ongoing use by leveraging accepted beliefs and invoking fear of unilateral abandonment and (3) adapting it by developing multiple versions to increase its zone of acceptability. These three factors contribute to practice persistence by allowing firms to dilute the potential stigma from use of the practice. Our contribution lies in explaining the adoption, diffusion and ongoing use of a stigmatized practice whose benefits cannot be overtly acknowledged or made public.

Service Innovation: Towards Designing New Business Models for Aging Societies

The aging of industrialized countries, led by Japan, requires firms to fundamentally rethink their business models. Firms active in Japan have to reconsider how to deal with unprecedented demographic change, which alters the resources available, to satisfy the shifting demand. Throughout the supply chain, aging of human talent and retirement requires firms to anticipate and prevent the negative effects of losing knowledge and skills. Adjusting the supply chain, developing new products, and/or augmenting products with services to target the silver market may offer short-term benefits but are not enough to sustain success. Firms need to develop and implement new business models leveraging service innovation to meet the needs in aging societies. Examples of service innovations and the case study of Seven-Eleven Japan and Yamato Transports’ shared business model innovation illustrate how companies can seize the opportunities to create and capture more value in aging societies.

Knowledge Creation Architecture - Constructing the Places for Knowledge Assets and Competitive Advantage

Knowledge has long been a neglected resource in economics and business. In recent years many authors discussed the importance of knowledge as a source of sustainable competitive advantage (Drucker 1994; Edvinsson/Sullivan 1997; Stewart 1997; Winter 1988; Leonard-Barton 1992; Prahalad and Hamel 1990; Sveiby 1997; Teece / Pisano / Shuen 1997). Often, however, the discussion remains without solid argumentation on knowledge as source of competitive advantage. This chapter suggests that knowledge creation architecture is the existential foundation to capture organizational knowledge assets and gain competitive advantage.

Knowledge creation in Japan: towards bridging productive communities

This paper captures the consolidation of the growing field of knowledge management in Japan and the West by bibliometric analyses, showing the importance of knowledge creation theory as a holistic view for overcoming the organisational dilemma of how to create knowledge and exploit it at the same time. Inductively developing the concepts of common ground and complementary specialisation, the paper shows similarities and differences between productive research communities in Japan and the West. Deeply rooted in epistemological traditions, the complementary specialisation in research activities offers opportunities through better integration of productive communities and dynamic knowledge creation.

Following Fashion: Visible Progressiveness and the Social Construction of Firm Value

A central tenet underlying studies on management fashions is that the diffusion of novel forms, models and techniques is driven by an institutional norm of progress, which is the societal expectation that managers will continuously use ‘new and improved’ management practices. We add to the literature on management fashions by arguing that, if the display of progressiveness in the manner of managing and organizing is expected of organizations, firms that are visibly progressive would be evaluated more positively by organizational audiences following this institutional prescription. Using article counts of co-occurrences of firms and various fashionable management practices in Wall Street Journal, we hypothesize positive effects of such associations on security analysts’ evaluations of these firms. Results support this hypothesis. Our study enriches the management fashion literature by highlighting the consequential relevance of organizational adherence to the norm of progress.

Leaping to Optima? Knowledge Creation and Behavioral Theory

Since the 1990s, Knowledge Creation Theory has had much influence in different areas of management research including organization theory, strategic management, innovation management and related areas of scientific inquiry. Its central concepts have become a major influence to many theoretical and empirical studies focused on knowledge-based phenomena in organizations. Instead of reviewing the seminal concepts of SECI model and enabling conditions (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), or later concepts such as ‘ba’ (Nonaka & Konno, 1998), enablers (von Krogh, Ichijo, & Nonaka, 2000), knowledge creating capabilities (Nonaka, Toyama, & Nagata, 2000) and creative routines (Nonaka & Reinmoeller, 2002). By documenting their impact, I choose to attend to the complementary relationship between Knowledge Creation Theory (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995, von Krogh, Ichijo, & Nonaka, 2000) and the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Cyert & March, 1963), arguably one of the most influential theories that clearly is foundational for the Evolutionary Theory of the Firm (Nelson & Winter, 1982) the attention-based view of the firm (Ocasio, 1997) but also an inspiration for Ikujiro Nonaka’s Knowledge Creation Theory.