What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Exporting challenges of SMEs: A review and future research agenda

Exploring the Contributions of Involving Ordinary Users in Ideation of Technology-Based Services

https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/21890351/2018_Internationalization_.pdf

Internationalization orientation in SMEs: the mediating role of technological innovation

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/4b6cccbb-855f-42fc-ba18-0ad78632d44e/1/International Business Models 20-05-2017.pdf

SME international business models: the role of context and experience

Emerging markets offer a wide range of opportunities for firms from developed markets, especially in terms of high growth potential. However, business models that enable firms to achieve competitive advantage in their home markets are often challenged by the different nature of emerging markets. Firms, therefore, have to innovate and adapt their business models to better fit the specific context of these international markets. Based on a longitudinal case study of a German luxury automobile manufacturer's internationalization to India, we develop a phase model of the business model adaptation process to emerging markets. We find that firms adapt their business models in four phases: international extension, local emergence, local expansion, and local consolidation. Firms step-wise adjust business model components along this process to develop a local emerging market business model. In each phase of the business model adaptation process, firms emphasize different components of the business model, before they enter into continuous adjustments of all business model components. Furthermore, we find that firms overall adjust some components of their business model more significantly than others. Our findings are of particular relevance to the literature on business model internationalization and the literature that points out the evolutionary, step-wise nature of business model innovation.

Business model adaptation for emerging markets: a case study of a German automobile manufacturer in India

Plain language summary 
Home country institutions, for instance chambers of commerce and educational systems, can support firms' efforts to expand into foreign markets. However, only some firms utilize this support and become successful in international markets. We propose that these firms have a particular ability to leverage institutions; they have institutional leverage capability. More precisely, we explain that firms need to be aware of the institutional support, access it, decide to adopt it, and adapt their resources to fully exploit the institutions available in their home countries. We recommend that firms design organizational structures and processes to leverage institutions for internationalization. We illustrate our suggestions with the example of the German ‘hidden champions,’ medium-sized firms that are global market leaders, and how they leverage institutions to internationalize. 
Technical summary 
We develop the notion of a firm's institutional leverage capability in order to explain heterogeneity among firms with respect to their ability to turn a location's generally available institutional benefits into firm-specific institutional competitive advantages. Institutional leverage capability represents a higher-order construct formed by the four components of awareness, access, adoption and adaption of institutional benefits. It is of particular strategic relevance in institutional contexts that provide high levels of support to firms. Firms can use institutional competitive advantages, which they generate by leveraging their home country's institutions, for the purpose of internationalization. We illustrate our argument using the example of several mid-sized German companies that have leveraged home-country institutional benefits and attained leading positions in international markets. Copyright © 2016 Strategic Management Society.

Institutional Leverage Capability: Creating and Using Institutional Advantages for Internationalization

The digital age allows for integration of dispersed groups into the innovation process. These heterogeneous groups of individuals varying in size and knowledge distribution, also referred to as crowds, build the basis for open innovation contests (OIC), one of the most common forms of crowdsourcing innovation. Different from more focused forms of open innovation, at OIC innovation managers often do not identify or evaluate participants ex‐ante. Instead, innovation managers often make use of open calls for participation and assume efficient self‐selection of participants i.e., that only motivated and qualified participants will volunteer and engage in the innovation contest. This behavior reflects one of the key assumption of crowdsourcing in participatory innovation settings. However, not every self‐selected member is in the position to solve the contest task appropriately. Hence, innovation contests often result in large numbers of submissions, covering a wide range of quality levels, causing decision biases and significant workloads for innovation managers to select ideas. This problem is referred to as “crowding”. In order to reduce “crowding”, open innovation researchers are interested in understanding which types of individuals make the “best” contributions and therefore should be preferably encouraged to participate in in OIC. In this paper, we are assessing what characterizes those participants who submit innovative ideas to OIC, in particular those who submit incremental ideas vs. those who have more radical ideas. Drawing on the componential model of creativity and data generated in innovation contest held by chocolate producer Ritter Sport, we analyze the effect of participants‘ creativity, domain knowledge, and several motivational factors on the innovativeness of their contributions. We find all of these factors to affect the innovativeness of an idea. However, regarding generating incremental or radical innovations, some factors have opposing roles. Our findings imply for practice that innovation managers must decide which type of innovations they intend to generate and then design contests to attract participants with the required characteristics, if they want to increase the number of appropriate ideas and reduce the problems of “crowding”.

Submission quality in open innovation contests ‐ an analysis of individual‐level determinants of idea innovativeness

The internationalization of hidden champions: setting the context for advancing research on emerging market strategies for German Mittelstand firms

The Dark Side of Business Model Innovation – An Empirical Investigation into the Evolvement of Customer Resistance and the Effectiveness of Potential Countermeasures

Christian Landau

Papers

Business model adaptation for emerging markets: a case study of a German automobile manufacturer in India

Institutional Leverage Capability: Creating and Using Institutional Advantages for Internationalization

Submission quality in open innovation contests ‐ an analysis of individual‐level determinants of idea innovativeness

The internationalization of hidden champions: setting the context for advancing research on emerging market strategies for German Mittelstand firms

The Dark Side of Business Model Innovation – An Empirical Investigation into the Evolvement of Customer Resistance and the Effectiveness of Potential Countermeasures