Topic:
“Looking for allies: how individuals organize collaboration for experimentation outside routine work in corporate firms”

Speaker:
Nadine Scholz
(PhD Student in Corporate Entrepreneurship & Innovation, King’s College London)

Date：
April 12th (Wednesday) 2023
from 16:30 to 18:00

Venue:
onsite
IIR Laboratory 1 (Room#119) of the first floor of the IIR building

Organizer:
Yaichi Aoshima

Abstract:
Companies often establish structured innovation programs such as intrapreneurship programs and idea challenges to harness employee creativity and enable them to experiment with new ideas. Nevertheless, employees often also take initiative to work on ideas outside such formal organizational structures to introduce innovations for the company or generate organizational change, and, as they do so, they face particular constraints. This study explores inductively how individuals mobilize support and build the conditions that allow them to develop venture ideas targeting innovation outside routine work in incumbent firms. We use the lens of experimental spaces as ways of bounded social spaces to better understand how individuals organize interaction and support through different forms of boundary work to develop their ideas. Drawing on an embedded multiple case study of six wildcard ventures in a large multinational company in the personal care industry, we identify two forms of organizing collaboration that nurture nascent corporate experimentation: community-nurtured and opportunity-nurtured collaboration. The two forms emerge through the effects of different social processes and network mobilizing strategies to enable resource combinations which shape entrepreneurial experimentation activities. Hence, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of the unfolding dynamics of interaction, collaboration, and learning enabling alternative organizing forms for collaboration that nurture nascent entrepreneurial ideas in organizations.

Topic:
“Corporate-Startup Partnering: Exploring Attention Dynamics in Asymmetric Settings”

Speaker:
Anoop Madhok
(Professor, York University)

Date：
June 7 (Wednesday), 2023
from 16:30 to 18:00

Venue:
onsite
IIR Laboratory 2 (Room#219) of the second floor of the IIR building

Organizer:
Ivar Padrón-Hernández

Abstract:
Startups concurrently partnering with large corporations compete for the latter’s attention. We extend the attention-based view from an intraorganizational to an interorganizational context by exploring how startups differ in attention received from the corporation, their actions to attract and sustain such attention, and the impact of attention dynamics on the partnership outcomes. Our research uncovers two discontinuous contests for attention involving corporate and divisional managers, highlighting the import of the distributed nature of attention. Reflecting this, our case findings reveal how startups’ appreciation of and responsiveness to the different cognitive schema and corresponding stimuli of corporate and divisional managers was critical to understanding the distinct attention trajectories and disparate outcomes. Our focus on attention complements the dominant focus on trust in research on relational dynamics.

Deadline:
9:00, June 7, 2023

For registration, please click on “Innovation Forum” below.