Grateful to be mentioned. Even more grateful to work with wonderful colleagues on topics such as entrepreneurship, innovation, digitalization – all with a societal perspective.


Grateful to be mentioned. Even more grateful to work with wonderful colleagues on topics such as entrepreneurship, innovation, digitalization – all with a societal perspective.
In this new piece co-authored with Michael Smets, we explain that ventures may face not only a liability of newness but also a liability of novelty. The legitimacy threshold for ventures that are institutionally novel is higher than for those that are merely organizationally new. This is because they face both additional descriptive and evaluative liabilities. A new organizational form can be both “not understood” & “not accepted”.
Update: The paper has won the Emerald Literati Award 2021.
New article published in European Management Review co-authored together with John Amis. We argue that far too often is context relegated to the background in our field research and writings. Deep understanding and expertise of context is imperative for better theorizing. We present implications for theory, methodology, and community.
An article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about technology and entrepreneurship in times of crisis can be accessed here.
We live in troubled times. For long, humanity has sustained itself from the world’s resources. Recently, however, excessive production and consumption has threatened the “planetary boundaries” that sustain our existence, resulting in catastrophes such as biodiversity loss and the current climate crisis that we are in. At the same time, populism, extremism, and the polarization of societies is on the rise and social cohesion is under threat, with digital technologies allowing orchestrated misinformation campaigns to aggravate and challenge peace, democracy and social stability. In the context of these and other major societal concerns, it is apposite to ask what is the role of institutional theory in general, and in this case institutional logics in particular, in furthering our understanding of these so-called ‘grand challenges’.
This is what Laura, John and myself try to do in this article.
Grand challenges are fundamental societal concerns, and as such affect all of us in one way or another. We believe in the explanatory power and potential of the institutional logics perspective to further contribute to our understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our time. For this, we advocate for further reflection on four analytical dimensions: macro-level positioning, contextuality, temporality, and value plurality.
First, the notion of macro-level positioning links organizing principles to macro-level orders and embeds them in the interinstitutional system. It also embraces the environment as a key concern and logic. Second, contextuality moves away from a rather Northern-centric focus and takes into account the plurality of logics and their interaction across interinstitutional systems. Third, temporality is about the consideration of changing logics and logic constellations over time. Finally, value plurality brings back attention to the value-ladenness of logics themselves and offers a means to question concepts such as ‘the market’ and the market logic.
Integrating these four dimensions, we contend, will contribute towards a transformative institutional logics perspective in the sense that they offer key implications for our engagement with grand challenges. It will further open up opportunities for institutional scholars to make substantive contributions to society’s most pressing concerns.
In a new article Stephan Bohn, Nicolas Friederici and myself argue that some platforms become systemically relevant in a crisis, so we need regulation that takes this into account before and during the next crisis. The short piece was published open access in Internet Policy Review here.
Entrepreneurs can respond to opportunity in three ways: business-as-usual, pivoting, and new venture creation. This article in LSE Business Review is co-authored with Pegram Harrison.
Numerous digital platforms have emerged as a go-to response to the Covid-19 crisis – building on conventional platform characteristics, but using alternative, more inclusive organisational models.
Platforms face opportunities of market, motivation & momentum to address spatial, social & scale/speed challenges.
By offering the innovations that people most need right now, more inclusive platform alternatives may now have an opportunity to step up and secure a more significant role in the platform economy of the future.
The article is co-authored with Nicolas Friederici and Philip Meier.
Tackling COVID-19 requires coordinated, collaborative, and collective efforts that take into account other grand challenges including climate change. So how does this crisis relate to other grand challenges and how should we deal with the coronavirus that has triggered it?
New post by Patrick Haack and myself at Business & Society.