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The purpose of this paper is to assess innovation in the hotel sector in Sweden and to investigate how structural and organizational factors influence hotel’s likelihood of producing service/product, process, organizational and marketing innovations.

This paper is based on responses from 174 hotels with membership in the Swedish hotel association. Responses were collected via a web-based survey.

This paper provides insights about the nature and extent of innovations in the hotel sector. Although traditionally considered rigid and non-innovative, around half of the responding hotels produced at least one type of innovation. Most common are service/product and marketing innovations. A hotel’s likelihood of innovating depends largely on structural independence (non-chain), having an explicit innovation strategy and investing in non-traditional R&D.

Because of the chosen design (convenience sampling), the results of this paper may lack generalizability. Therefore, future research is encouraged to test the hypotheses further.

Managers in the hospitality industry can influence the production of innovations in the hotel sector. By promoting flexibility, defining and communicating an innovation strategy, and engaging in non-traditional R&D activities, practitioners can better respond to the changing business environment.

This paper presents a systematic, and internationally recognized, method for assessing four types of innovation in the hotel sector. Its originality stems also from its approach to investigating how key structural and organizational factors, when considered in the same analysis, predict service/product, process, organizational and marketing innovations.

Indie developers are part of the creative fringe of the video game industry, fashioning an identity for themselves as a community committed to the development of video games as a cultural expression and art form. In playing this role, money-making is ambiguous inasmuch as economic return is honorable if such interests remain unarticulated and execute minimal influence on the development work process, while the possibility of producing a successful commercial video game is simultaneously one of the primary motivations for new industry entrants. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper reports on the empirical material drawn from a study of indie video game developers in Sweden, a leading country for video game development.

To reconcile tensions between video game development in terms of being both cultural/and artistic production and business activity, easily compromising the perceived authenticity of the subject in the eyes of audiences (e.g. hardcore gamers), indie developers distinguish between monetary motives ex ante and compensation ex post the release of the game. Indie developers thus emphasize the metonymic function of money as this not only indicates economic value and currency but also denotes a number of business practices that indie developers have otherwise avoided in their career planning as they believe these practices would restrain their creativity and skills.

The study contributes to the scholarship on video game development, the literature on creative industries, and the economic sociology literature examining the social meaning of money and how social norms and values are manifested in professional ideologies and practices.

Life science innovation is a complex domain of professional work including scientific know-how, regulatory expertise, and commercialization and marketing skills. While the investment in basic life science research has soared over the last decades, resulting in a substantial growth in scientific know-how, the life science industry (and most notably pharmaceutical companies) unfortunately reports a meagre innovative output. In order to counteract waning innovation productivity, new organizational initiatives seek to better bridge and bond existing life science resources. The purpose of this paper is to report a case study of bio venture hub initiative located in a major multinational pharmaceutical company.

Drawing on institutional work literature, an empirical study based on case study methodology demonstrates that new life science collaborations demand both external and internal institutional work to challenge conventional wisdom, making the legal protection of intellectual properties a key factor in the field and that in turn complicates much firm collaborations. Such institutional work questions existing practices and opens up new pathways in life science innovation work.

The bio hub initiative, which in considerable ways breaks with the traditional in-house and new drug development activities located in enclosed R&D departments and in collaboration with clinical research organizations, demands extensive institutional work and political savoir-faire to create legitimacy and operational stability. Not only are there practical, legal, and regulatory issues to handle, but the long-term legitimacy and financial stability of the bio hub initiative demands support from both internal and external significant actors and stakeholders. The external institutional work in turn demands a set of skills in the bio venture hub’s management team, including detailed scientific and regulatory expertise, communicative skills, and the charisma and story-telling capacities to convince and win over sceptics. The internal institutional work, in turn, demands an understanding of extant legal frameworks and fiscal policies, the ability to handle a series of practical and administrative routines (i.e. how to procure the chemicals used in the laboratory work or how to make substance libraries available), and to serve as a “match-maker” between the bio venture hub companies and the experts located at the hosting company.

The case study provides first-hand empirical data from an unique initiative in the pharmaceutical industry to create novel collaborative spaces where small-sized life science companies can take advantage of the mature firm’s expertise and stock of know-how, also benefitting the hosting company as new collaborations unfold and providing a detailed understanding of ongoing life science innovation projects. In this view, all agencies embedded in institutional field (i.e. what has been addressed as “institutional work” – the active work to create, maintain, or disrupt institutions) both to some extent destabilize existing practise and create new practices better aligned with new conditions and relations between relevant and mutually dependent organizations. The empirical study supports the need for incorporating the concept of agency in institutional theory and thus contributes to the literature on institutional work by showing how one of the industries, the pharmaceutical industry, being strongly fortified by intellectual property rights (i.e. a variety of patents), inhibiting the free sharing of scientific and regulatory know-how and expertise, is in fact now being in the process of rethinking the “closed-doors” tradition of the industry. That is, the institutional work conducted in the bio venture hub is indicative of new ideas entering Big Pharma.

This paper aims to illustrate how open innovation is implemented in practice in a large multinational corporation and to discuss how masculine discourses of rational control and competition are reinforced during such a process.

An exploratory single case study approach has been employed. Qualitative empirical data (interviews and documents) are derived from a four year longitudinal research project on open and distributed innovation processes in the automotive industry.

Masculinity enters the discourse of open innovation through prescribed classical management ideals in line with auditing and bureaucratisation. The paper illustrates how these masculine discourses are reproduced rather than challenged by open innovation. It also highlights how the preoccupation with control and conquest tends to silence alternative (feminine) discourses which could otherwise enrich the radical and creative features of the open innovation paradigm.

The paper is suggesting that the potential disruptive force in the open innovation paradigm tends to be watered down when appropriated by classical managerial ideals. It shows how difficult it is for managers to incorporate alternative (feminine) discourses when acting within a strong masculine hegemony.

The open innovation paradigm leans on aspects such as “openness”, “collaboration”, “creativity” and “intuition” – much in line with feminine discursive connotations. But when masculine norms govern the company setting, these alternative modes of organising tend to be either marginalised or appropriated and transformed in ways that ensure they are compatible with discourses and practices of masculinity.

This study provides insights into how discourses of masculinity play out and manifest themselves in the management of the firm. By doing so, it challenges the underlying and often uncritical assumptions of open innovation's disruptive force on contemporary managerial practice.