Big Data Analytics Capabilities and Innovation: The Mediating Role of Dynamic Capabilities and Moderating Effect of the Environment

With big data analytics growing rapidly in popularity, academics and practitioners have been considering the means through which they can incorporate the shifts these technologies bring into their competitive strategies. Drawing on the resource‐based view, the dynamic capabilities view, and on recent literature on big data analytics, this study examines the indirect relationship between a big data analytics capability (BDAC) and two types of innovation capabilities: incremental and radical. The study extends existing research by proposing that BDACs enable firms to generate insight that can help strengthen their dynamic capabilities, which in turn positively impact incremental and radical innovation capabilities. To test their proposed research model, the authors used survey data from 175 chief information officers and IT managers working in Greek firms. By means of partial least squares structural equation modelling, the results confirm the authors’ assumptions regarding the indirect effect that BDACs have on innovation capabilities. Specifically, they find that dynamic capabilities fully mediate the effect on both incremental and radical innovation capabilities. In addition, under conditions of high environmental heterogeneity, the impact of BDACs on dynamic capabilities and, in sequence, incremental innovation capability is enhanced, while under conditions of high environmental dynamism the effect of dynamic capabilities on incremental innovation capabilities is amplified.     

Response strategy to environment context factors using a lean and agile approach: Implications for firm performance

Based on the environment-strategy performance perspective and dynamic capabilities framework, we develop a theoretical model and hypotheses specifying how supply chain collaboration as a response to environment context factors – competitive intensity, supply uncertainty, technological turbulence and market turbulence, using a lean and agile strategy may influence firm performance. We test the model using partial least square structural equation modelling on data collected from a field survey with responses from 152 manufacturing firms representing a variety of industries. Empirical findings generally support the relationship between collaboration and firm performance using a lean and agile strategy. Also, for firms in industries that face environments characterised by high supply uncertainty and competitive intensity with, technological turbulence, the study finds evidence of a direct relationship between these environmental factors and supply chain collaboration. The findings provide an initial strategic response framework for appropriately aligning a lean and agile supply chain strategy through collaboration with environment context factors to achieve firm performance improvements.     

企业动态能力及其功效:环境不确定性的影响

当前关于动态能力的维度及其功效还存在较大分歧,有些学者甚至认为动态能力毫无价值,应该摒弃动态能力研究.本文从战略过程视角,依据相关文献与访谈调查,将动态能力分解为组织意会能力、柔性决策能力及动态执行能力,探讨了动态能力与持续优势的关系及环境不确定性在其中的影响作用.通过对中国地区217家企业的实证研究发现,动态能力确实对持续优势有显著的正向影响,环境不确定性是动态能力的驱动因素而非调节变量,环境动态性对企业持续优势有显著的正向影响,敌对性则对持续优势有显著的负向影响.本研究的结论澄清了动态能力的价值前提,探明了环境不确定性的影响机理,对理论研究与实践操作都有一定的启发意义.     

动态能力如何影响企业绩效——基于中国企业的实证研究

本研究以中国企业为样本对动态能力如何影响企业绩效的问题进行了分析和探讨。数据分析结果表明,战略过程对动态能力与企业绩效的正向作用关系具有明显的中介作用。但是,不同的动态能力维度对绩效的不同方面影响程度也不同,动态外部协调能力对企业绩效各个方面影响的显著程度在所有维度中最为突出,是企业在超竞争环境中树立竞争优势的关键。此外,动态能力构成维度间的路径关系表明,动态信息利用能力在企业动态适应外部环境变化过程中具有非常重要的节点作用,是企业培育动态能力路径的关键。     

Big Data and Predictive Analytics and Manufacturing Performance: Integrating Institutional Theory,Resource‐Based View and Big Data Culture

The importance of big data and predictive analytics has been at the forefront of research for operations and manufacturing management. The literature has reported the influence of big data and predictive analytics for improved supply chain and operational performance, but there has been a paucity of literature regarding the role of external institutional pressures on the resources of the organization to build big data capability. To address this gap, this paper draws on the resource‐based view of the firm, institutional theory and organizational culture to develop and test a model that describes the importance of resources for building capabilities, skills and big data culture and subsequently improving cost and operational performance. We test our research hypotheses using 195 surveys, gathered using a pre‐tested questionnaire. Our contribution lies in providing insights regarding the role of external pressures on the selection of resources under the moderating effect of big data culture and their utilization for capability building, and how this capability affects cost and operational performance.     

A Study of the Role Played by Manufacturing Strategic Objectives and Capabilities in Understanding the Relationship between Porter's Generic Strategies and Business Performance

An appropriate alignment between business strategy, manufacturing strategic objectives and manufacturing capabilities reportedly influences business performance positively. However, few papers empirically analyse this proposition for the case of Porter's generic strategies of cost leadership and differentiation, and none jointly considers all four elements. This paper integrates strategies, capabilities and performance in a single model and proposes that both manufacturing competitive priorities and capabilities, articulated in terms of cost and flexibility, are essential for explaining the link between generic business strategies and business commercial and financial performance. Within this analytic framework, we test whether companies that emphasize one business strategy rather than another achieve a better alignment and superior performance. The analyses conducted with a sample of 148 Spanish manufacturers provide general support for these propositions and contribute to a deeper understanding of the role played by functional strategies in understanding the outcomes of business strategy.     

Creative Search and Strategic Sense-making: Missing Dimensions in the Concept of Dynamic Capabilities

In this paper we discuss the role of managerial agency in creating and shaping dynamic capabilities. We argue that dynamic capability is a phenomenon that enables a deviation to take place from the knowledge that otherwise would have arisen cumulatively from experiential learning. In addition we argue that to create major changes in patterns of knowledge accumulation managers need to be purposefully and creatively engaged. Such agency is identifiable in two cognitive processes we call creative search and strategic sense-making. We show how these processes differ in respect to their temporal orientation and relationship to uncertainty and by adopting a process perspective we demonstrate how creative search, strategic sense-making and experiential learning are complementary. This notion of complementarity implies that these processes, notwithstanding their contrasting characteristics, coexist together and serve to offer an explanation for how knowledge progresses at a firm level. Variance is introduced into the framework proposed through the identification of factors that influence the coexistence of creative search and strategic sense-making. The argument developed is illustrated through the use of an emergent technology context.     

整合能力与企业绩效：商业模式创新的中介作用

经济全球化的背景下,企业为了构建竞争优势,获取更好的绩效,开始利用整合能力和商业模式创新应对多变的外部环境。然而,当前研究对于两者之间存在何种联系的认识是模糊的。针对理论研究的缺陷,基于动态能力的理论视角,通过分析商业模式创新对整合能力与企业绩效的中介作用,揭示企业整合能力和商业模式创新促进企业绩效提高的内在机制,采用中国6省1市319个企业样本数据,运用线性回归的统计方法对理论假设进行实证检验。研究结果表明,整合能力和商业模式创新都对企业绩效具有正向的促进作用,同时整合能力与企业绩效之间存在着一定的中间机制。整合能力通过提高组织变革和价值创造效率两个方面促进商业模式创新,而商业模式创新作为中间纽带将整合能力与企业绩效联系起来。企业的整合能力越高,越有利于开展商业模式创新,进而促进企业绩效的提高。研究揭示了整合能力和商业模式创新共同促进企业绩效提高的内在理论机制,打开了能力与绩效间关系的“黑箱”,对于中国企业开展商业模式创新具有重要的实践指导意义。     

基于和谐管理理论的企业动态能力研究

基于和谐管理理论的组织运行模式,从组织学习的角度,以横向基于认知的构建和纵向基于适应性的演化两个维度展开,界定了动态能力的内涵.首先,认为动态能力包括组织对环境变化的认知能力以及在新主题导引下对原有资源配置方式做出调整以适应变化的能力,是组织在日常运行过程中应对外界变化时全体组织成员的学习能力;其次,认为动态能力是在构建与演化两个维度的耦合中演化的;第三,从组织运行的主题形成、主题实现和反馈学习三个阶段归纳了影响动态能力形成和演化的因素,这些因素主要分布在组织和领导两个层次上,最后针对已有动态能力研究中存在的一些问题进行了讨论.     

Adapting to market liberalization: The role of dynamic capabilities,initial resource conditions,and strategic path choices in determining evolutionary fitness of Less Developed Country (LDC) firms

Economic liberalization leads to higher competitive intensity that spurs strategic changes in LDC domestic firms. I apply the dynamic capabilities lens to post-liberalization adaptation of LDC domestic firms. Based upon the logic of fit, I argue that initial resource conditions, strategic paths, and requisite dynamic capabilities must match to enhance evolutionary fitness of firms. I propose that LDC firms with strong core and complementary capabilities will adopt strategies of increasing scale and scope, along with cultivating an acquisition dynamic capability to enhance fitness. LDC firms with weak core but strong complementary capabilities could enhance fitness by forming rent-creating alliances with Multinational Enterprises (MNE), and building relational dynamic capabilities. Finally, LDC firms with weak core and complementary capabilities can gain benefits towards fitness by enacting political strategies supported by political dynamic capabilities.     

Big Data‐Savvy Teams’ Skills,Big Data‐Driven Actions and Business Performance

Prior studies on big data analytics have emphasized the importance of specific big data skills and capabilities for organizational success; however, they have largely neglected to investigate the use of cross‐functional teams’ skills and links to the role played by relevant data‐driven actions and business performance. Drawing on the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm and on unique data collected from 240 big data experts working in global agrifood networks, we examine the links between the use of big data‐savvy (BDS) teams’ skills, big data‐driven (BDD) actions and business performance. BDS teams depend on multi‐disciplinary skills (e.g. computing, mathematics, statistics, machine learning and business domain knowledge) that help them turn their traditional business operations into modern data‐driven insights (e.g. knowing real‐time price changes and customer preferences), leading to BDD actions that enhance business performance. Our results, raised from structural equation modelling, indicate that BDS teams’ skills that produce valuable insights are the key determinants for BDD actions, which ultimately contribute to business performance. We further demonstrate that those organizations that emphasize BDD actions perform better compared to those that do not focus on such applications and relevant insights.     

Managing big data in the retail industry of Singapore: Examining the impact on customer satisfaction and organizational performance

Much of the research on big data analytics has been centered on technical or system development. Research has been carried out on the usage of big data analytics to understand customer relationships and experience, amongst others. Still, there is a lack of research in the retail industry considering big data management, examining the impact on customer satisfaction and organizational performance in the retail sector. Retailers explore analytics to gain a unified picture of their customers and operations across the store or online channels and make strategic decisions contributing to the growth of the retail industry. Thereof, this study has been conducted by majorly focusing on the Singapore retail industry to clarify the feasibility of big data management analytics. Quantitative research method was employed involving 500 participants from the retail industry of Singapore. The results of the study stated that amongst the different big data analytics utilized within the retail industry of Singapore, social media analytics had been majorly answered by the participants. Future researchers can study about the upcoming retail trends in Singapore and how the effects of big data analysis changed in the past few years and deal with the unexpected future recessions in the retail industry within Singapore.     

Embeddedness of Organizational Capabilities*

Managers must regularly make decisions on how to access and deploy their limited resources in order to build organizational capabilities for a sustainable competitive advantage. However, failure to recognize that organizational capabilities involve complex and intricately woven underlying processes may lead to an incomplete understanding of how capabilities affect competitive advantage. As a means of understanding this underlying complexity, we discuss how managerial decisions on resource acquisition and deployment influence capability embeddedness and argue that capability embeddedness has an incremental effect on firm performance beyond the effects from organizational resources and capabilities. To investigate these issues, we present a hierarchical composed error structure framework that relies on cross‐sectional data (and allows for generalizations to panel data). We demonstrate the framework in the context of retailing, where we show that the embeddedness of organizational capabilities influences retailer performance above and beyond the tangible and intangible resources and capabilities that a retailer possesses. Our results illustrate that understanding how resources and capabilities influence performance at different hierarchical levels within a firm can aid managers to make better decisions on how they can embed certain capabilities within the structural and social relationships within the firm. Moreover, understanding whether the underlying objectives of the capabilities that are being built and cultivated have convergent or divergent goals is critical, as it can influence the extent to which the embedded capabilities enhance firm performance.     

Reconsidering ordinary and dynamic capabilities in strategic change

Dynamic capabilities research explains the ability of firms to respond to dynamic environments by reconfiguring inert and insufficiently flexible ordinary capabilities. However, more recent research ascribes the routines that constitute ordinary capabilities the ability to evolve endogenously. This study aims to develop dynamic capability research by increasing our understanding of the relations between and the roles played by ordinary and dynamic capabilities in producing purposeful responses to environmental dynamism. Drawing on longitudinal, qualitative data, we show how ordinary capabilities make important contributions to organizational responses to dynamic environments. Our findings pose challenges to key assumptions of extant dynamic capabilities research and allow us to explicate new roles for ordinary and dynamic capabilities, thus advancing the understanding of the relation between dynamic and ordinary capabilities and advancing understanding of one of the central issues in dynamic capabilities research: firms’ capacity to respond to changing environments.     

Building Organizational and Scientific Platforms in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Process Perspective on the Development of Dynamic Capabilities

In this paper, we examine the process of dynamic capability development in a large pharmaceutical firm. Using interviews with multiple managers at different organizational levels, we developed two narratives of the process of developing two separate dynamic capabilities in the same firm. We focus on three areas that prior research has shown to be critical in the early stages of the process of implementing new strategic initiatives: the cognitive orientations of key personnel, managerial action undertaken within the firm, and the firm's internal and external contexts. We provide evidence that managers undertake specific initiatives based on their own particular cognitive orientations , and that senior managers play a major role in the development of capabilities by imprinting the organization with their specific cognitive orientation and then orchestrating the multilevel organizational routines necessary for actualization of a capability. These replicable actions by senior management during the early stages of capability development can lead to the development of a capability that is not initially in the cognitive frames of lower level employees. Finally, we will show that internal and external contingencies have a profound impact on the decision to develop a capability, and to discontinue its development. Our findings thus suggest that the process of developing new capabilities shares common elements with other strategic initiatives.     

知识管理战略、组织能力与绩效的关系实证研究

本文在文献研究的基础上归纳出描述和测量知识管理战略的六个主要维度:外部导向、内部导向、显性导向、隐性导向、探索导向和利用导向.基于397家中国企业的问卷调查所得数据,本文检验了知识管理战略、组织能力和企业绩效三者的关系,发现知识管理战略能显著地提升组织能力,而组织能力对企业绩效有显著的促进作用,组织能力在知识管理战略与企业绩效的关系中起完全中介作用.     

A framework for supporting health capability-based planning: Identifying and structuring health capabilities

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that health security systems must be redesigned, in a way that they are better prepared and ready to cope with multiple and diverse health threats, from predictable and well-known epidemics to unexpected and challenging pandemics. A powerful way of accomplishing this goal is to focus the planning on health capabilities. This focus may enhance the ability to respond to and recover from health threats and emergencies, while helping to identify the level of resources required to maintain and build up those capabilities that are critical in ensuring the preparedness of health security systems. However, current attempts for defining and organizing health capabilities have some important limitations. First, such attempts were not designed to consider diverse scenarios and multiple health threats. Second, they provide a limited representation of capabilities and lack a systemic perspective. Third, they struggle to identify capability and resource gaps. In this article, we thus propose a new framework for identifying and structuring health capabilities and support health capability planning. The suggested framework has three main potential benefits. First, the framework may help policymakers in planning under high levels of uncertainty, by considering multiple realistic and stressful scenarios. Second, it can provide risk analysts with a more comprehensive representation of health capabilities and their complex relationships. Third, it can support planners in identifying resource and capability gaps. We illustrate the use of the framework in practice considering an outbreak scenario caused by three different health threats (COVID-19, Ebola, and Influenza viruses).     

技术能力如何转化为竞争优势：组织动态能力观点

技术创业型公司拥有雄厚的技术能力,然而并不表明这些公司也具备相当的竞争优势.技术能力转化为竞争优势的过程中受到组织动态能力(知识整合能力)影响.技术创业型公司的组织动态能力包括两个方面的具体知识整合能力,即来自市场/客户的需求信息与组织技术能力之间的知识整合能力以及公司内部不同职能部门之间的知识整合能力.技术创业型公司组织动态能力过程是影响技术能力转化为竞争优势的关键过程.本文通过对三家典型的技术创业型公司案例研究来解释有关理论假设.     

Cultural Intelligence and Offshore Outsourcing Success: A Framework of Firm‐Level Intercultural Capability*

This article discusses the importance of firm‐level cultural intelligence in the context of international business ventures such as offshoring. We identify the recent movement toward global delivery models in offshoring ventures as the strategic imperative for offshoring partners to acquire and develop firm‐level cultural intelligence. Drawing on Earley and Ang's (2003) conceptualization of cultural intelligence and the resource based view of the firm, we develop a conceptual framework of firm‐level cultural intelligence. The framework comprises three dimensions of intercultural capabilities of the firm: managerial, competitive, and structural. We propose items to measure these three dimensions and discuss theoretical and managerial implications.