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...

The development of new theory is often spurred by novel techniques that provide better answers to existing questions, or that allow asking new ones. In the field of strategy and organization science, models of complex adaptive systems have renewed theoretical work on a fundamental question: how...

It is a central tenet in the literature on organizational change that firms need to explore novel courses of action in order to adapt and survive. Should firms thus exhibit a “pro-innovation bias” when evaluating novel decision alternatives? Or should firms rather assess new opportunities as...

The creation of novel strategies, the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities, and the development of new technologies, capabilities, products or business models all involve solving complex problems that require making a large number of highly interdependent choices. The challenge that complex...