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Rotating
Leadership and Symbiotic Organization: Relationship Processes in the Context
of Collaborative Innovation (PDF)
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ABSTRACT Relationships between firms are at the heart of how industries are organized, and are central to industry innovation. Despite significant attention focusing on the exchange and endorsement value of these relationships, and how they are formed, very little attention has been given to their capacity to generate innovations. Using a multi-case, inductive study of eight technology collaborations between ten firms in the computing and communications industries, this paper examines how inter-organizational relationships engender innovation and adaptation in unpredictable and interdependent environments. Comparisons of successful and unsuccessful collaborations show that generating collaborative innovations depends not only on appropriate design conditions (e.g., governance form, social embeddedness) as suggested by prior literature, but also on using appropriate organizational processes that lead relationships over time. While less successful collaborations are associated with domineering leadership or consensus leadership processes, successful collaborations use a rotating leadership process that creates transient unilateral leadership opportunities for each partner. Rotating leadership involves revolving decision control between partners to engender high-quality contributions of technologies and IP, fluctuating cascades of network activation which dynamically modify innovative team composition, and zig-zagging relationship trajectories that effectively search the broader space of potential innovations. A broader contribution is to reframe inter-organizational relationships as organizational symbiosis, a state of organization that engenders mutually reinforcing adaptive changes to partner’s strategies and structures. In contrast to other images of relationships as engines of efficient exchange and endorsement, symbiotic relationships focus on engendering technology innovation, organizational adaptation, and industry transformation. Comments are welcome. |
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