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Organizational incentives and structures play a crucial role in realizing explorative and exploitative innovations in firms. Existing studies have neglected the role of trade-off mechanisms between the two on innovation ambidexterity. This study aims to investigate these trade-off mechanisms and their position on innovation ambidexterity.

Given the limited theoretical understanding, the authors conducted a case study with a sample of two Chinese firms with abundant interview and secondary data.

The results show that firms can develop innovation ambidexterity at two levels, namely, the time and space levels, using incentive synergy as well as organizational structures. Furthermore, the authors explain the role of the trade-off between incentive synergy and organizational structure in promoting a balance between explorative and exploitative innovation.

The authors propose trade-off mechanisms between incentive synergy and organizational structure and explore how trade-off mechanisms can play a role in promoting a balance of explorative and exploitative innovation at both time and space levels.

The concept of entrepreneurship in platform enterprises has evolved and developed. The purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurship in platform enterprises can be transformed into the sustainable innovation capability of enterprises based on knowledge integration.

This study adopts a questionnaire survey. The research samples are mainly from well-known domestic platform enterprises, EMBA students and professional online websites, 389 valid questionnaires were collected.

The results show that entrepreneurship has a positive impact on the sustainable innovation capability of platform enterprises, knowledge integration plays a partial mediating role between entrepreneurship and sustainable innovation capability of platform enterprises. Shared leadership plays a moderating role between entrepreneurship and knowledge integration and knowledge-sharing atmosphere plays a moderating role between knowledge integration and sustainable innovation capability of platform enterprises.

This paper emphasizes the key role of entrepreneurship in platform enterprises on the sustainable innovation capability and discusses the realization path of the sustainable innovation capability of platform enterprises from the perspective of knowledge integration, which is of great significance for developing the research system of entrepreneurship and promoting the construction of sustainable innovation capability of platform enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what organizational adaptability means in the digitized context and to discuss how manufacturing companies achieve organizational adaptability during the digital transformation process.

By conducting semi-structured interviews and acquiring archive data from a typical Chinese manufacturing company, this paper gathers extensive data. Based on this, a single-case study methodology is used to investigate organizational adaptability in digital transformation.

This study identifies the process by which companies achieve organizational adaptability during digital transformation and deconstructs organizational adaptability into three dimensions: structural adaptability, operational adaptability and governance adaptability. This study also explores how organizational adaptability is affected by digital capabilities.

This study proposes a process model to demonstrate how organizational adaptability may be attained during digital transformation and redefines organizational adaptability in the context of digitization.

The existing research rarely explains the role of dynamic capabilities in the creation of value co-creation behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to explore how dynamic capabilities play a role in avoiding value co-creation traps and generating new value co-creation behaviors.

This paper collects rich interview and archival data from two Chinese manufacturing companies to examine value co-creation in digital servitization by the case study.

The paper discovers the value co-creation traps that enterprises face in digital servitization and analyzes the important role of resource and technology integration capabilities in avoiding these traps. Also, the research explores how network capability affects the generation of new value co-creation behaviors.

This paper develops a framework for dynamic capabilities to avoid value co-creation traps and generate new value co-creation behaviors.

Building on the theory of resource-based view (RBV), this paper is determined to explore the key drivers that drive platform ecosystem adoption by small businesses and mediation mechanisms that facilitate the translation of these drivers into improved firm financial and nonfinancial performance.

In this study, structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data. A survey questionnaire was taken from 430 small businesses operating their businesses on various digital platform ecosystems in China to investigate the links between parameters by testing hypotheses. Digital startups operating their businesses on popular Chinese platform ecosystems, including Alibaba, Taobao, Jingdong, Maituan and HelloChe, were chosen.

The finding deciphers a nuanced interplay of the adoption drivers, with innovation capability emerging as a mediation mechanism translating these drivers into improved financial and non-financial performance.

The acknowledgment of potential drawbacks, such as the focus on specific drivers of platform ecosystem adoption, highlights the need for future research to explore additional factors that may influence adoption decisions. By examining institutional factors, market conditions or external shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities surrounding platform ecosystem dynamics and offer insights into adaptive strategies for businesses facing uncertainty.

The outcome benefits policymakers and ecosystem designers by creating and overseeing platform ecosystems that support the highlighted drivers. This study further serves as a roadmap for both platform owners and prospective small enterprises as they map their path toward the digital frontier.

The findings from the research indicate that small enterprises that embrace platform ecosystems can experience improved financial and non-financial performance, which in turn promotes economic development and the generation of jobs. By utilizing innovative strategies and maximizing their strategic advantages, these enterprises can not only prosper but also make significant contributions to community development and help alleviate joblessness. This highlights the significance of assisting with the incorporation of digital technology in small businesses to achieve wider societal advantages.

Research originality lies in bridging the gap between strategic inputs and measurable outcomes, stressing the vital function of a firm’s innovation in turning ecosystem-driven opportunities into enhanced performance. This means the pivotal role of this study lies in exploring platform ecosystem adoption drivers based on the theory of RBV and the way innovation capability of platform ecosystems facilitates the translation of these drivers into improved financial and nonfinancial performance.

The internet-based transition is the major trend for Chinese organizations with increasing demands imposed on their organization and management. As the organizational structures gradually improve flexibility, employees desire respect and development to a greater degree, which has given rise to a new leadership model-integrative leadership. This paper aims to investigate the impact of integrative leadership on employee’s innovation performance through a multilevel analysis.

This paper proposes the two situational factors employee psychological empowerment and human resource flexibility as the mediating factors impact the relationship between integrative leadership and employee innovation performance. Valid questionnaires were collected from 619 employees from 135 leader groups of High-tech companies in China.

The results show that integrative leadership has positive impact on employees’ innovation performance through its multilevel impacts on two mediation factors include psychological empowerment of employees and human resource flexibility.

This research used cross-sectional studies due to constraints of research conditions. The measurements of all variables are done simultaneously, whereas the effects of integrative leadership on the development of corporations should be presented in a dynamic process. Therefore, in the future research, vertical research design should be adopted to deeply explore the effectiveness mechanism of integrative leadership in the context of corporate internet-based transition.

In the internet era, leaders cannot blindly pursue organizational performance. They must establish a flexible organizational structure and institutions to provide a platform for employee development, and integrative leaders need to pay attention to inspire the potential of employees and stimulate the enthusiasm of employees.

This study investigates a new leadership-integrative leadership and the relationship between integrative leadership and innovation performance in the context of Internet-based transitional Chinese organizations, thereby making important theoretical contributions as well as offering practical suggestions for improving leadership efficiency and innovation performance.

Enterprises generally change their organizational structures in an era of uncertainty for flexibility, and accordingly, employee entrepreneurship emerges as employees gain more power and responsibility during this process. This paper aims to explore how employee entrepreneurship impacts enterprises’ sustainable innovation capability. The authors consider the mediating effect of value cocreation and the moderating effect of role stress.

The authors adopted a questionnaire survey to test the hypothesis, and 356 questionnaires were collected from an online questionnaire platform.

The results show that employee entrepreneurship has a positive impact on sustainable innovation capability, value cocreation plays a partial mediating role in this relationship between employee entrepreneurship and value cocreation and role stress plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between employee entrepreneurship and value cocreation.

The study makes three main contributions to the literature concerning entrepreneurship and enterprise sustainable innovation capability. First, in relation to the entrepreneurship literature, the authors shift entrepreneurship research from entrepreneurs/leaders to employees in the digital transformation context and specify the connotation of employee entrepreneurship. This shift further enriches and broadens the research boundary of entrepreneurship (Bhide, 2000; Djankov et al., 2006). Second, we add the micro dynamic mechanism of sustainable innovation capability by focusing on the effect of employee entrepreneurship. Employee entrepreneurship positively contributes to enterprise sustainable innovation capability, which is partially mediated by value cocreation, and its impact on value cocreation is moderated by role stress due to the identity change of employees in the digital transformation context. The authors answer calls to clarify the micromechanisms of building enterprise competitive advantage (Terziovski and Sohal, 2020). The research confirms the relationship change between enterprises and consumers in value creation from separation to cooperation (Tu et al., 2020; Costa and Hafto, 2021). Additionally, the authors discuss the dynamic mechanism and factors of value cocreation at the employee level and further verify the positive effect of an active interaction among enterprises, consumers and other value creators (Matarazzo et al., 2021; Heinonen et al., 2013). This approach compensates for the deficiency of previous studies investigating the influence of value cocreation at the level of organization members.

The theoretical analysis and empirical conclusions of this study have important practical implications. First, employee entrepreneurship positively impacts enterprises’ sustainable innovation capabilities. Therefore, enterprises should stimulate their employees’ entrepreneurship to strengthen organizational resilience and adaptability, which are important for enterprises to survive in the changeable age. For example, enterprises can authorize their frontline employees with more resource allocation power and reduce hierarchical control; thus, their employees can address emergencies in a timely manner and catch fleeting market opportunities. Second, since value cocreation is a partial mechanism by which employee entrepreneurship contributes to an enterprise’s sustainable innovation capability, enterprises should help employees improve their capabilities and knowledge for value cocreation. For instance, enterprises should develop decision-making support toolkits, upscale training courses and efficient coordination tools to help employees achieve the necessary skills and knowledge. Only in this way can they qualify to perform an increasing number of autonomous tasks. Finally, employees’ role stress negatively moderates the relationship between employee entrepreneurship and value cocreation. This finding provides a reference for enterprises in position setting, role rule-making, role responsibility-planning, etc. Specifically, enterprises should build a feedback mechanism to manage employees’ role ambiguity, conflict and overload; thus, they can eliminate the potential negative effects on value cocreation and their sustainable innovation capability in a timely manner.

This study expands the boundary and connotation of entrepreneurship in an era of uncertainty, specifies the micromechanism of sustainable innovation capability and provides new insights for enterprises constructing their sustainable innovation capability.

This chapter outlines the philosophic underpinnings of the self-management paradigm developed over the past three decades by China’s Haier Group, a global leader in white goods. The successful transformation of Haier from a small resource-poor firm to a dominant global giant is often attributed to the self-management culture established in the company by its legendary leader Zhang Ruimin. This management paradigm is a function of the humbleness displayed by Mr. Zhang Ruimin and rooted in his strong belief in the traditional Chinese philosophy of I-Ching and Daoism. We show how the hexagram of Qian (“qian”: humbleness, modesty) from I-Ching is linked to Mr. Zhang’s humble approach and analyze how the six parts of the hexagram of Qian are related to the six development stages of the Haier Group. These insights are used to give some thoughts to the leadership challenge associated with the creation of a dynamic and responsive global organization.

The global business context is turbulent and becoming a dynamic complex system where small events can trigger large outcomes that are difficult to predict. This gives urgency to the search for responsive global organizations that are able to adapt the multinational corporate strategy so it provides a better fit with the changing demands of the environment. An important key to this challenge is to activate the responsive potential of the many individuals in the multinational corporation and use them to inform strategic decisions and gain updated insights from the field and instill an organizational culture with supportive structures that will release the entrepreneurial human potential throughout the global organization. The eight chapters presented in this book provide useful insights to fuel these considerations.