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This paper presents a case study describing the development of an innovation team in a large Swedish telecom company, the aim of which is to find, test and promote new product and service concepts. Drawing on experience from the team’s first year of operation, it is concluded that certain roles given within the team, especially that of the manager in charge of boundary work vis‐à‐vis the line organization, actualize a range of issues pertinent to the study of corporate venturing but redress these in a new light. For instance the notion of guiding an innovation through a locally conceived “innovation space” is presented, and shown to require a previously under‐emphasized measure of social and cognitive engagement on the part of the team.

This article describes an informal process of new product innovation that took place outside of the established structures in a large Swedish telecom company; how a number of individuals brought a product idea from invention to innovation by creating and enabling an informal competence network within the company. The purpose of the article is to bring out a number of insights into how “networked innovation” might be accomplished and supported, by elaborating this case and pointing to some of its management implications.

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of self in the process of independent technological innovation. In‐depth interviews were conducted with technological innovators from start‐up firms in IT, biotech and advanced services concerning the subjective and social forms of engagement in the innovation process. Emerging factors in the interview data revealed aspects pertaining to the innovator’s reflexive self‐conception, innovator ego‐involvement in the venture, forms of commitment and control, personal and social stakes, and various self‐oriented cognitive strategies. It is argued that the self‐concept allows the innovator to come into view as a social and subjective being who is involved in reflexive activities such as dynamic role‐taking, “is” vs “ought” reflections and social negotiations.

To develop a decision model supporting employee involvement in industrial vulnerability reduction.

A synthesis review of some of the relevant extant literature on technological/industrial vulnerability, and their application within a normative decision‐making model (i.e. the “Vroom‐Yetton model”).

The insights on vulnerability drawn from the literature are highly amenable to a systematic decision‐making model for employee involvement. Various aspects of vulnerability, specifically with regard to substantial, social and temporal dimensions may be included in such a model.

New insights about the context‐dependent aspects of vulnerability are offered by considering these within a contingency decision model. This suggests that vulnerability categories are not absolute, but have to be assessed in relation to a specific decision‐making framework.

The developed model provides a way of weighting various dimensions of vulnerability and making more appropriate decisions regarding leadership style in a range of circumstances.

While decision models exist for assessing risk in organizations, no contingency model for employee involvement in vulnerability assessment has been presented to date.

This paper argues that knowledge mapping may provide a fruitful avenue for intellectual capital management in academic environments such as university departments. However, while some research has been conducted on knowledge mapping and intellectual capital management in the public sector, the university has so far not been directly considered for this type of management. The paper initially reviews the functions and techniques of knowledge mapping and assesses these in the light of academic demands. Second, the result of a focus group study is presented, where academic leaders were asked to reflect of the uses of knowledge mapping at their departments and institutes. Finally a number of suggestions are made as to the rationale and conduct of knowledge mapping in academe.

The present paper is a cross‐sectional case study of knowledge management (KM) initiatives at Ericsson. The general aim of the study was to investigate how a large Swedish telecom corporation developed and integrated KM tools with existing organizational structure, needs and tasks, and to pinpoint opportunities and pitfalls in this regard. In order to do this the authors mapped and categorized the KM initiatives developed in the company. The method used was a series of semi‐structured interviews which focused on, among other things, getting respondents to identify the organizational needs that arise as a result of context and task. The results are presented in a two‐by‐two matrix categorizing KM initiatives as to content and mode of implementation. The paper concludes with a number of hypotheses and propositions that may be used for further investigation into how firms may go about optimally organizing their knowledge management strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate public partners’ motives for seeking and/or accepting partnerships with third sector organisations.

The approach is to seek to identify and explain motives from different perspectives; as responses to government failure or voluntary failure, as related to governance structures, and/or as driven by resource dependencies. The empirical material was gathered through semi-structured interviews with public employees in Swedish municipalities. The aim of the interviews was to grasp the public partners’ motives for partnerships with third sector organisations. Each interview started with questions on the presence and forms of partnerships, thus creating a backdrop for the motives, both during the interview and as a map of the partnership landscape.

The most prominent motives for public engagement in partnerships with third sector organisations are related to democratic values, the need to solve concrete problems, and economic rationality. The motives vary with the type of partnership of which there is considerable variation in scale, content and contribution; the types of partnership vary with different policy fields and services. Different perspectives highlight different motives but none of them excludes other perspectives.

The main contribution of the paper is the empirically based findings of a multi-layered public–third sector partnership landscape where policy fields, forms and complex motives are intertwined.

Despite the abundance of research in open innovation, few contributions explore it at inter-organizational level, and particularly with a focus on healthcare ecosystem, characterized by a dense network of relationships among public and private organizations (hospitals, companies and universities) as well as other actors that can be labeled as “untraditional” player, i.e. doctors, nurses and patients. The purpose of this paper is to cover this gap and explore how knowledge is transferred and flows among all the healthcare ecosystems’ players in order to support open innovation processes.

The paper is conceptual in nature and adopts a narrative literature review approach. In particular, insights gathered from open innovation literature at the inter-organizational network level, with a particular attention to healthcare ecosystems, and from the knowledge transfer processes, are analyzed in order to propose an interpretative framework for the understanding of knowledge transfer in open innovation with a focus on healthcare ecosystem.

The paper proposes an original interpretative framework for knowledge transfer to support open innovation in healthcare ecosystems, composed of four main components: healthcare ecosystem’s players’ categories; knowledge flows among different categories of players along the exploration and exploitation stages of innovation development; players’ motivations for open innovation; and players’ positions in the innovation process. In addition, assuming the intermediary network as the suitable organizational model for healthcare ecosystem, four classification scenarios are identified on the basis of the main players’ influence degree and motivations for open innovation.

The paper offers interpretative lenses for managers and policy makers in understanding the most suitable organizational models able to encourage open innovation in healthcare ecosystems, taking into consideration the players’ motivation and the knowledge transfer processes on the basis of the innovation results.

The paper introduces a novel framework that fills a gap in the innovation management literature, by pointing out the key role of external not R&D players, like patients, involved in knowledge transfer for open innovation processes in healthcare ecosystems.

Physical appearances constitute a criterion of discrimination recognised by the French law. This topic is often raised in the field of media and advertising, but the consequences of stereotypes and prejudices about appearances at work are not taken into account as much. However, this criterion is subject to a multitude of normative injunctions, located in time and space, and significantly affects all spheres of life. Voluntary or involuntary transgression of these norms leads to processes of segregation, discrimination and harassment. These processes are all the more insidious because their legitimacy is less questioned than when it concerns a criterion shared by a collective such as race or gender. Appearances are, in fact, perceived as individual characteristics; moreover, some of them are perceived as controllable, which justifies the unfavourable treatment of people who do not fit the norm.

At work, recruitment is the most obvious step in which appearances play a role because first impressions are largely based on them. But remuneration or daily life at the office is also affected by beliefs and expectations about appearances. After presenting testimonies from focus groups on this issue, we offer some advices for organisations concerned by the topic.