Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) in its roles as both tools and agents are increasingly shaping how we design and study organizations. As tools, AI-based predictive technologies have been successfully applied to automate parts of organizational work as well as how we do organization science in both quantitative and qualitative research. As agents, predictive technologies can undertake and augment tasks that previously required human judgment and decision-making. However, given the opacity, lack of accountability, and embedded bias of these algorithms, contemporary management lacks required expertise to better leverage predictive technologies in their organizations. Our team is actively working on this challenge by exploring how to redesign organizations to efficiently benefit from the automation of knowledge work and decision-making, and how to do better organization science with the AI as tools. Between the tool and the agents, we also aim to advance the theoretical conceptualization of technology within organization and to transcend the above dichotomy. We seek to evaluate how it reshapes the conversation on organizational responsibilities during the innovation process.
To achieve this goal, we not only conduct in depth quantitative and qualitative inquiry, SMI recently established SAIL—the Strategy and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—which focuses on examining practical business problems using machine learning techniques. Finally, the Group, in collaboration with KOF Swiss Economic Institute (ETH) has recently been awarded a competitive research grant by the SNF to conduct a multi-year comprehensive empirical analysis of the state of digital transformation in Swiss firms, the effects of digital transformation on firm performance and market dynamics, and the mechanisms underlying successful digital transformation in firms.
 

Current and future healthcare challenges, including an ageing global population, lacking treatments for rare diseases, changing regulatory frameworks, and the recent Coronavirus Pandemic, require continuous improvement to healthcare systems and innovative therapies. For the past 10 years, the Group has studied innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, medical technologies and hospitals in close collaboration with industry partners. This research stream has led to unique insights in previously underexplored domains (e.g., early stage drug discovery in private enterprise) and numerous publications in leading scientific outlets. We further illustrate the Group’s achievements in this domain below.

The Group has consistently been at the forefront of research on organizational topics pertaining to online communities, including, internal and external knowledge flows, innovation processes and knowledge creation, knowledge evaluation, social practices and community dynamics, dispute resolution, incentives and motivation, and firm sponsorship and involvement. In collaboration with Eric von Hippel at MIT, von Krogh pioneered a fundamental contribution to organization theory—“the private-collective innovation model”— explaining the phenomenon of open source software “where users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software”. This work and the accompanying framework gave rise to a long-term research agenda that has since inspired much research on open source software, open innovation, and technology-enabled collaborative knowledge creation (Google Scholar, 2’696 citations).

Information systems (IS) pervade everyday organizational life. Managers and IS professionals build and evaluate IT artifacts, such as vocabulary, symbols, models, algorithms, procedures, and instantiations, tailored to organizational needs in order to solve problems that, until now, could not be addressed by information technology. The design science approach in IS established rigorous research guidelines that foster contributions to the problem-oriented, innovative, and effective creation, deployment, and evaluation of IT artifacts in organizations. However, a growing number of IT artifacts are not only created outside the organization, they also extend beyond the organization in terms of both complexity and dynamics. As a result, any one designer’s ability to fully understand and influence overall development remains limited. Working with systems and environments such as GNU Linux, Apache, or Mozilla, to name just a few of the largest and most popular open source (OS) families of programs, managers and designers face the challenge of using external IT artifacts—existing artifacts developed outside their organization. This design activity that encompasses relating to external IT artifacts is only partially understood: as reuse across organizations and as community relations entertained by firms.

The emerging literature on reuse of external IT artifacts considers search and adaptation efforts, whereas the literature on community relations emphasizes evaluation and sharing of IT artifacts. These design activities, while effective in tackling the challenge of dealing with external artifacts, partially ignore the systematic context difference between the external developers and the designers and users within the adopting organization. We currently lack a comprehensive framework that could inform design science research on the use of externally developed IT artifacts, in particular adaptation and evaluation. Crucially, use occurs in a different context from development and designers must be made aware of the effects external IT artifacts can have on use within the organization. Starting with the search for an IT artifact and problem formulation all the way through the adoption, development and internal evaluation, understanding the effects of use and context, that may limit “degrees of freedom” in design, has become a priority for IS researchers and practitioners. A strategic perspective reinforces the urgency because successful information systems (e.g. for knowledge management) rely on accessible and well integrated IT artifacts, and integration refers to the everyday context of use in an organization.

It is widely accepted that knowledge is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage for firms. During the last decades many theoretical and empirical studies have examined various facets of knowledge in organizations; scholars increasingly have become comfortable in using knowledge to explain a great variety of phenomena in organizations.

Researchers of the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation play a major role in further advancing the knowledge-based view of the firm. The Chair is engaged in theory building and conducting profound and widely recognized empirical research at highest levels. Various key articles including major contributions by the research team of SMI shape today’s understanding of organizational knowledge creation – the theory proposing that new knowledge is created through processes of conversion between tacit and explicit knowledge. In addition to conceptually refining and extending the fundamental assumptions, theories and constructs of the knowledge-based view of a firm, researchers at SMI further advance organization theory by considering and integrating novel perspectives to further understand organizations.

For example, SMI researchers examine the impact of leadership on knowledge creation in organizations. Even if leadership literature exhibits a long-standing and rich theoretical tradition, it has not been linked so far to the theory of knowledge creation. Recently the researchers at SMI have started contributing to the development of a theoretical framework of distributed leadership offering an integrated view of the roles of leadership at the interplay of knowledge processes, context and knowledge assets.

In most cases, innovation is not the outcome of individuals but the product of collective work of a group of people (e.g. research project team). Researchers at the SMI have emphasized the centrality of groups and social interactions both within and between organizations to further advance the knowledge-based view of the firm. They have contributed to the theory of organizational knowledge creation by developing a conceptual framework explaining different levels of tacit knowledge quality a group may achieve.

Following our principle that success of modern academia critically depends on collaborations and networking both within and between research groups, many of the research projects in the field of organization theory are conducted in cooperation with other academic groups sharing our vision and ambitions such as Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo, Japan) or MIT (Boston, USA).