With the emergence of pure internet-based service providers, the business landscape of fully integrated telecommunications providers - industry incumbents that provide services on their own infrastructure - has changed massively. While various pure service providers exhibit successful business...

While some firms build cars or smartphones, Rocket Internet builds companies. The incubator and investment firm has pioneered an extreme approach to new venture creation that is often referred to as a "startup factory:" it rapidly assembles and scales new companies, replicating business models...

Die öffentliche Hand besitzt eines der grössten und bedeutensten Immobilienvermögen der Schweiz. Vor allem auf Bundesebene und in grösseren Kantonen erkennt man immer mehr das grosse Vermögenspotential, welches in diesen umfangreichen Immobilienbeständen schlummert. Zurzeit wird dort...

It is a central tenet in design theory that decomposing complex systems into modules allows the module-level units to search independently for new alternatives. Yet as complex systems are at best near-decomposable, modular decompositions contain inter-modular interdependencies, some of which may...

Research on flat firms has many dimensions. To introduce this special issue, we start our essay with a thought experiment. In his novella Flatland (1884), Edwin A. Abbott describes life in a “flat,” two-dimensional world that is populated by geometric shapes—squares, lines, triangles, and...

While some firms build cars or smartphones, Rocket Internet builds companies. The incubator and investment firm has pioneered an extreme approach to new venture creation that is often referred to as a "startup factory:" it rapidly assembles and scales new companies, replicating business models...

With the emergence of pure internet-based service providers, the business landscape of fully integrated telecommunications providers - industry incumbents that provide services on their own infrastructure - has changed massively. While various pure service providers exhibit successful business...

Organizations are frequently faced with high levels of complexity. While the importance of search for dealing with complex systems is widely acknowledged, how organizations should structure their search processes remains rather unexplored. This paper starts to address a basic question: how much...

We study the phenomenon of “company builders” – a recent type of business incubators that create new ventures in a factory-like manner, i.e., with a focus on efficiency and scale, and by using standardized processes and shared resources. To characterize this novel organizational form and...

Designing complex product systems across firms poses significant organizational challenges. While much research has focused on how interdependencies between system components can hamper the integration of collective efforts, the fact that complex systems consist of multiple hierarchic levels has...