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Festivals are conceptualised in this chapter as temporary organisations embedded in more permanent structures (e.g. festival lead organisation). Festivals face a series of paradoxical tensions common to temporary organisations in creative fields. These tensions arise, in part, from the diversity of actors involved in festivals and the distinctive values and priorities they bring to their festival organisational involvement. Lucca Comics & Games (LC&G), which is one of the biggest comic-cons in the world, operates in the intersection of different institutional contexts, which include a wide range of actors involved. Thus, tensions appear within the LC&G domain as a result of these actors’ different levels of involvement in the festival organisation and their diverse identities. These tensions and their resolutions will be analysed from the perspective of extant theory on paradox. A specific focus of this chapter is on the belonging paradox, which concerns the role of competing identities among different types of festival participants and how these competing identities are manifested in the organisational identity of LC&G, its structures and processes. Our study provides evidence of identity tensions as both/and relationships that are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. The authors also suggest that ‘place identity’ requires further examination as a distinctive feature of temporary organising in festivals, considering its role in mediating tensions arising from the belonging paradox amongst festival main actors (exhibitors, artists, public bodies and lead organisation employees).

Project-based organization (PBO) can serve as a temporary organizational form in response to uncertainty or turbulent environmental conditions. An updated retrospective study of the Danish hearing aids maker Oticon illustrates the role of PBO (the so-called spaghetti organization) in guiding the company through a specific period of industry turbulence and the company leader's search for a more effective structure to organize innovation within the company. The spaghetti organization was experimental in two distinct senses. First, the spaghetti organization tested the limits of decentralization, bottom-up self-organizing innovation, and PBO. Inspired by the experience of just how dysfunctional hierarchy could become, Oticon's spaghetti organization tested the limits of nonhierarchy. And unlike the failed Brook Farm utopia of the 1840s, the utopia of radical project-based organizing at Oticon proved highly successful as a means of promoting innovation even if the spaghetti organization was not sustainable in its original form and required subsequent modification. Second, Oticon was essentially a natural experiment testing and refuting the complementarities-based claim that intermediate forms of organization which include elements of both hierarchical organization and team (or project-based) organization are inherently unstable.

Temporary organisations are time-limited organisations that are created with a deliberate termination point. Temporary organisations can increase flexibility, allow for innovative and transformative activities with less resource commitment, and reflect a ‘Zeitgeist’ of acceleration and time limitation in society. They also give rise to tensions and paradoxes that require new adaptive and coordinative practices. Research on temporary organisations has moved from primarily exploring the distinction between temporary and permanent organisations to using temporary organisations to study a range of phenomena such as temporality, acceleration, identity, and attachment–detachment dilemmas. This volume reflects this new orientation. We map empirical phenomena along the lines of events, projects and networks, and explore three conceptual themes that run through the nine chapters that comprise this volume: (1) temporality in temporary organisations; (2) the interaction between temporary and permanent organisations; and (3) the strategies and practices that temporary organisation develop in response to tensions and paradoxes.

An important task for all strategy leaders contemplating the use of co-creation is to determine how well the numerous co-creation project-design choices available to them align with their strategic priorities.

In order to implement co-creation, firms need to assess how their projects or initiatives support their strategic commitments and priorities. To this end, the authors offer managers a practical, easy-to-use assessment framework.

Executives should consider their approach to co-creation in terms of crafting and managing a portfolio of initiatives to be categorized and managed differently according to their strategic significance – high, medium or low.

A six-question assessment framework was inductively derived from an extensive literature review (113 articles) focusing on practices associated with co-creation and stakeholder involvement. Though they do not represent an exhaustive list of categories for assessment, they do, however, identify strategically important choices involved in designing co-creation ventures.

The six-question assessment framework is applied to the case of the Xerox-P&G co-innovation partnership, which illustrates how such significant co-creation initiatives might be profiled, and their main design choices analyzed.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to co‐creation theory by integrating conceptual insights from the management and marketing literatures that are both concerned with co‐creation phenomena. It aims to develop a reference model for comparing how different organizations organize and manage their co‐creation ventures. It also aims to apply the authors' framework to four distinct cases that illustrate the differences in co‐creation practice within different co‐creation environments.

The authors compare four different companies based on case profiles. Each company is employing its own distinct approach to co‐creating. The authors employ a method mix including literature analysis, structured interviews, document and web site analysis, as well as participation.

The reference model offers a set of useful dimensions for case‐based inquiry. The case comparisons show how firms may decide to systematise and manage a mix of co‐creation activities within B2B versus B2C contexts, utilising either crowd‐sourced or non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Further, the case comparisons suggest that there are less differences in B2B versus B2C co‐creation as compared with crowd‐sourced versus non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Ultimately, implementation decisions in one dimension of co‐creation design (e.g. whom to involve in co‐creation) will affect other dimensions of implementation and governance (e.g. how much intimacy) and thus how co‐creation needs to be managed.

The paper presents case comparisons utilising B2B versus B2C, as well as crowd versus non‐crowd‐sourcing examples of co‐creation and an original decision support framework for assessing and comparing co‐creation choices.

This case study of a fashion-design company aims to show how a co-creation initiative produces competitive advantage by nurturing creativity, expanding the company’s innovation capabilities and enabling it to engage with both taste-making customers and designers from anywhere in the world.

In 2009, Fronteer Strategy, a Netherlands-based market-analysis firm published a conceptual framework for identifying specifically how a firm’s processes and initiatives employ co-creation. This case looks at how this theoretical framework compares with the actual complexities of the co-creation process developed by Own Label.

Own Label’s co-creation approach is a hybrid model that utilizes more than one type of co-creation across its fashion-design process.

What makes co-creation in design-intensive industries a disruptive approach is the democratization of the process by which design choices are made.

Own Label is utilizing its hybrid models of co-creation in order to strategically position its self in niche markets, adapt faster to trends, as well as to be a design leader.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on a broad body of work that responds to the boundaryless career concept, first introduced in 1993, and to anticipate new theory-building and research.

Covers the origination of the concept, its meaning and definition, the underlying influence of an earlier group of careers scholars from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective.

Identifies three categories of activity – involving internal debates, fresh theoretical contributions, and new collaborative opportunities – that have occurred citing boundaryless career scholarship.

Suggests how scholars can build on the legacy of both organizational and boundaryless careers research in their future work.

Links between foundational MIT work on careers, boundaryless careers and current debates to suggests future research directions.