Antonella Martini

University of Pisa | UNIPI · Department of Energy, Process and System Engineering

The aim of this article was to explore the relationship between human actors and technology in the context of a social media platform, developed by a leading Italian firm in the food industry, and created to keep in contact with its customers, while gathering innovative ideas from them. In order to address these issues, we adopt a theoretical appro...

External search strategies remain ineffective without the ability of the firm to communicate and share internally what has been absorbed from the environment. Most of the empirical studies have mainly discussed this complementarity between knowledge search and internal knowledge processing capabilities by looking at the last ones in terms of spendi...

As academic and practitioner studies on crowdsourcing have been building up since 2006, the subject itself has progressively gained in importance within the broad field of management. No systematic review on the topic has so far appeared in management journals, however; moreover, the field suffers from ambiguity in the topic's definition, which in...

Originally developed for software development, Agile approaches are increasingly adopted by organizations that seek flexibility in the face of rapid change. However, little attention has been paid to potential negative consequences of the implementation of Agile in large-scale settings. We undertook a multi-site study of a multinational telecom com...

Innovation is one of the most critical means in supporting and improving the competitive position of the firm, in particular, and a firm's survival and growth depend greatly on its ability to balance the exploitation of existing knowledge with the exploration of new possibilities, by building ambidexterity capability. While different alternatives t...

This study offers a phenomenological account of the institutional context's role in Agile teams' knowledge work. Drawing from 44 semi-structured interviews and naturalistic observations of Agile teams in the Telco sector, the study emphasizes sensemaking activities through which team members navigate daily situations, revealing internal mechanisms...

Digital media are a means to deliver products and services, but also a channel to interact with consumers and a source of information on users’ preferences. Data shared by customers on the web, the User-Generated Content (UGC), can give entrepreneurs a detailed perspective of the market. This work examines an application of Natural Language Process...

Nearly 20 years ago, industry started engaging with the open innovation paradigm as a new mindset to foster innovation and think about leveraging the opportunities offered outside the company boundaries. Today, the shift from a mostly close to a much more open mindset is almost done, but new opportunities and challenges are still arising. Digital t...

The main approaches to study the cognitive aspects of product-use interaction involve many theoretical models that map the match or mismatch among the users’ and designers’ knowledge, beliefs, and expectations into positive interactions (affordances, alternative uses) or negative interactions (misuse and failure). However, these assumptions have on...

We still know little about the role of higher education in the digital transformation. If on one side the labor market is constantly evolving and is asking for an up-skilling process of the workforce, higher education institutions struggle to be agile enough. Therefore, it is necessary to measure and to better understand this gap. In this paper, we...

The use of Agile practices is typically associated to a wide array of benefits for organizations. This paper extends growing research on the ‘dark’ side of Agile by investigating the depletion of innovation in a large telco company following the large-scale implementation of Agile in R&D units. Our qualitative study reveals a shift in the organizat...

Engineering Design (ED) is a complex process in which the reuse of knowledge is crucial: applying the knowledge consolidated in previous design activities to future design activities means performing them in a better way. The relevance of data in ED is even more crucial in a business context in which Data Science (DS) is literally revolutionizing t...

The digitalisation of all the activities from the closer to the shopfloor (manufacturing and production) to the more abstract ones, typical of office duties, is pervading the new digital era and Covid19 accelerated such a transition. Although more and more data are available, companies are reluctant to share their data and the more they are linked...

A series of disruption, technologies, and events characterized the last ten years. To cite a few of them Industry 4.0 paradigm (and related technologies) came out, blockchain and smart contracts affirmed as a potential technology beyond the currency sector, the new hype on Artificial Intelligence created high expectations and interest and, finally,...

Purpose. Drawing from the knowledge-based view of the firm, the work explores the knowledge management practices that the acquirer uses (1) to exploit its knowledge creating conditions for the exploitation of the target’s knowledge and (2) to explore its knowledge by realizing routines for the integration of new knowledge within the target. Design/...

As technology progresses, organizations must understand where to direct their value-creating efforts to achieve or sustain competitive advantage. This is even more true in the case of emerging technologies, where innovative activities often focus on achieving a technology promise, while overlooking a set of technological, operational, organizationa...

The unprecedented global environmental crisis we are facing nowadays is pushing the economic actors to rethink their approach to sustainable development. As a consequence, firms are increasingly adopting and implementing eco-innovations in their processes in order to improve the management of scarce natural resources. This paper describes a method...

Previous research has shown the importance of individual learning goal orientation for both job and task performance and consequently organizational performance. Despite its importance, knowledge on the antecedents of learning goal orientation remains scarce, especially in the context of self‐managing team‐based organizations. In fact, most of the...

Literature investigating social media-based innovation has grown considerably in the last years, making a timely review. Accordingly, we systematically review studies of the so-called “latency phase” (2003-2013) outlining a framework based on two main actors – innovation seeker and innovation provider – and three main questions – why (determinants)...

The relationship between patent portfolio diversity and firm profitability is conceptually opaque and empirically equivocal. We contribute to the literature with a systematic analysis of this relationship by carrying out an empirical investigation based on a sample of 391 international firms. We generate data for patent portfolio diversity at the l...

This paper proposes a Decision Support System that can provide European policy makers with systematic guidance in allocating and prioritizing scant public resources. We do so by taking the stance of the Smart Specialisation Strategies which aim at consolidating the regional strengths and make effective and efficient use of public investment in R&D....

Regional innovation is more and more considered an important enabler of welfare. It is no coincidence that the European Commission has started looking at regional peculiarities and dynamics, in order to focus Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization towards effective investment policies. In this context, this work aims to support...

Given the great opportunities provided by Open Collaborative Networks (OCNs), their success depends on the effective integration of composite business logic at all stages. However, a dilemma between cooperation and competition is often found in environments where the access to business knowledge can provide absolute advantages over the competition....

Purpose: When the iPhone will be a dinosaur, the Post-it® will still be around! We are at Weil am Rhein, Germany. The year is 2010. With the exhibition “Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things”, the Vitra Design Museum and Hi-Cone present 43 everyday objects that entered our lives remaining unchanged for decades. Why is it the case? What makes...

Recognizing a serious lack of research on routinized individual actions and organizational adaptation in the stability-change paradox, we intend to provide an in-depth explanation of the way in which agile methods affect organizational learning in self-managed, team-based organizations, taking a multi-level evolutionary approach. We explore learnin...

While the interplay between practices and logics is a central tenant of the institutional logics perspective, we still know little about how institutional logics are affected and modified by the introduction of new practices. Our work investigates how the introduction of new practices meant to foster innovation leads to the emergence and stabilizat...

This chapter aims to explore Management Control Systems (MCS) resulting from the implementation of agile development methods, relying on an established MCS taxonomy. An abductive approach was adopted, considering the shortage of research evaluating the post-adoption effects of agile methods. Four organizations from an international telecommunicatio...

The concept of collaborative networks has attracted considerable attention, especially in two knowledge domains: innovation and operation management. Although collaborative networks have evolved into many forms, their central role in triggering debates has not gone unnoticed. In this paper, we aim to contribute to these debates through a bibliometr...

The increasing globalization, challenges for the competitiveness, and resources prioritization are among the causes forcing the European (EU) regions to rethink their overall approach to regional economic development. To deal with such a complexity, EU policy makers deployed a program called Smart Specialisation Strategies (SSS) which aims at conso...

In this paper, we perform a systematic study of all the firms created between 1990 and 2014 characterizing the Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our contribution builds upon a methodology using business registrations and predictive analytics to develop population level estimates of entrepreneurial quality and regional entrepreneurship potential th...

Despite the number of research studies in the domain of organizational ambidexterity has grown during recent years, this topic remains still unfocused and limited due to a lack of more encompassing conceptual efforts. Drawing on our advanced understanding of the nature and micro-foundation of self-managing team-based organizations’ learning capabil...

As technological problems and societal challenges become increasingly complex, designers are urged to recombine knowledge from different sources in order to innovate. In this paper we question how nature may be the key source of inspiration. Precisely, the work presented in this paper focuses on the impact that bio-inspired design is having on the...

This research explores how the interaction of science and technology played a major role in shaping the rise and development of the bioinformatics industry. Two research questions are investigated: 1) to what extent does science contribute to the development of bioinformatics inventions? 2) What is the likelihood for a bioinformatics invention to b...

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene are currently attracting the largest investments by firms focussing on the development of nanotechnologies. However, firms are heterogeneous in their ability to develop nanotechnologies that present different levels of radicalness and a different potential to become basic building blocks of future developments....

This article uses a bundle of bibliometric and text-mining techniques to provide a systematic assessment of the intellectual core of the Social Media-based innovation research field. The goal of this study is to identify main research areas, understand the current state of development and suggest potential future directions by analysing co-citation...

Regional innovation is more and more considered an important enabler of welfare. It is no coincidence that the European Commission has started looking at regional peculiarities and dynamics, in order to focus Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization towards effective investment policies. In this context, this work aims to support...

Agile methodologies have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their responsiveness. However, few studies have empirically analysed the effect of Agile on long-term organizational goals such as learning and innovation. Using an abductive approach, this study examines the relationships between self-regulated teams’ social...

We introduce this special issue on the multi-faceted nature of collaborative innovation by summarizing the most important accomplishments of the current debate. Then, we focus on the pressure that agents face to rethink and rejuvenate their collaborative practices in order to accomplish a certain degree of innovativeness. On the basis of two key di...

The concept of collaborative networks has attracted considerable attention, especially in two knowledge domains: innovation and operation management. Although collaborative networks have evolved into many forms, their central role in triggering debates has not gone unnoticed. In this paper, we aim to contribute to these debates through a bibliometr...

The concept of collaborative networks has attracted considerable attention, especially in two knowledge domains: innovation and operation management. Although collaborative networks have evolved into many forms, their central role in triggering debates has not gone unnoticed. In this paper, we aim to contribute to these debates through a bibliometr...

Seen in a historical perspective, work has undergone dramatic changes. As a consequence, different work configurations emerge. Conducting a cluster analysis based on empirical data, we show the existence of these working configurations and we describe them accordingly to the flexibility allowed by firms regarding: (i) the place where work is accomp...

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between human actors and technology in the context of a social media platform, developed by a leading Italian firm in the food industry. In order to address these issues, we adopt a theoretical approach that is deeply rooted in Pickering’s “mangle” theory, and Jones’ subsequent metaphor of “dou...

Research suggests the firm's structural and contextual attributes that foster ambidexterity, but theory and testing on their combined effects on knowledge creation, ambidexterity and financial performance remain rather poor. By using a theoretical perspectives built on organisation design and the knowledge-based view of the firm, this article takes...

This paper focuses on the practices and techniques that can be used at the front end of innovation to search for radical or discontinuous new product ideas. It addresses a gap in the literature by using empirical data to identify the dimensions of a firm’s capability to search for new ideas for potential radical innovation. A review of the literatu...

In this paper, we shed light on why academics are in one of the best positions to orchestrate inter-organisational initiatives of continuous innovation (CI) within an innovation context that is shifting towards an open collaborative ecosystem mode. Two rationales seem to explain the potential key role of academics within a CI ecosystem: 1) their in...

Given the great opportunities provided by Open Collaborative Networks, their success depends on the effective integration of composite business logic at all stages. However, a dilemma between cooperation and competition is often found in environments where the access to business knowledge can provide absolute advantages over the competition. Indeed...

This paper investigates the nature of bioinformatics inventions by analysing technological contributions (patents). By analyzing data from USPTO, EPO, and WIPO, we tried to shed some light on the antecedents that gave rise to what can be thought of as an interdisciplinary radical innovation. A quadruple helix of actors, entailing the exceptional ro...

Hospitals struggle to balance exploratory and exploitatory processes. To this end, Information Technology and Information Systems (IT/IS) can play a strategic role. However, literature has only marginally analysed how they can be adopted—within and among hospitals—in order to configure paths for managing the tensions between exploration and exploit...

This article investigates a social media-enabled customer co-creation project at the front-end of innovation (FEI) in a well-known, large-scale food manufacturer. It sheds light on the role of social media technology in transforming the characteristics of FEI in terms of boundaries and knowledge distance. What type of exploratory or exploitative in...

Managing innovation and particularly searching for new ideas in a steady state environment is different than in discontinuous conditions where traditional practices and routines may prove ineffective. This paper reviews and empirically explores the field of search strategies and practices for discontinuous innovation and, for the first time, tests...

This chapter explores how Italian firms face radical innovation process under discontinuous conditions. More specifically, it empirically investigates (1) the search phase of the innovation process, in terms of search practice profiles and (2) how organizational context, search practices and exploratory outcomes (performance) are related. The analy...

This paper is about the way diverse companies come to create and develop innovation together, with the aim of accomplishing a certain degree of radicalness. On the basis of the knowlegde about the likelihoods of accomplishing a certain innovation, the knowledge about the nature of the outcomes, and the time frames, a theoretical framework has been...

Identifying, developing and commercialising innovations through traditional approaches are often ineffective or inefficient when discontinuous conditions occur. New or additional capabilities and practices are desirable for organisations under such complex conditions. Based on a comprehensive literature review about search practices and drawing on...

The Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) is a global network studying the innovation processes through which the synergistic combination between exploratory and exploitatory activities fosters a synergistic combination of operational effectiveness and strategic flexibility – allowing firms to achieve superior performance. This paper presents the t...

Whereas there is a wealth of contributions on the topic of continuous innovation (CI) in firms, there is still a clear need for works addressing how the existing knowledge on combining various types of innovation with operational excellence and strategic flexibility in a fruitful manner. Any attempt to generate actionable knowledge about CI that at...

Purpose. The article explores how ICT supports the open enterprise approach, which is emerging empirically as one of Enterprise 2.0 model. More specifically , it explores (1) the applications characteristics-in terms of drivers and barriers-adopted by companies to support E2.0, and (2) the different ways of integrating applications in the E2.0. Des...

This paper analyses innovation ambidexterity – as defined in terms of exploration and exploitation attainments of knowledge and innovation - its antecedents in terms of organizational context and structure and its consequences in terms of financial performance. It is the first attempt to test the mediation effect of knowledge between antecedents on...

As the world was about to recover from the first wave of the financial crisis in autumn 2010, ‘Practicing innovation in times of discontinuity’ was a highly adequate theme for the 11th Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) conference. This issue of Creativity and Innovation Management contains a set of four articles that are based on papers present...

This article investigates a customer co‐creation project at the front end of the innovation process at a large well‐known Italian food manufacturer, which is enabled by social media. The purpose is to shed light on the role of such technology in transforming the characteristics of the FEI, in terms of boundaries and knowledge distance: what type of...

External knowledge has been the object of increasing attention in the past few years, corresponding to the rise in company innovation models that are based on a higher degree of openness towards external actors. This study investigates the practices that firms adopt in searching for external knowledge to innovate their products, exploring the relat...

Although there is broad agreement that ambidexterity somehow relates to the simultaneous pursuit of exploratory and exploitative activities, a lack of conceptual clarity exists regarding the extent to which ambidexterity concerns matching the magnitude (BD) of exploration and exploitation on a relative basis, or concerns the combined magnitude (CD)...

There has been a vast debate in recent years about usage patterns of social computing and Web 2.0 tools in learning contexts. A growing number of researchers suggest that certain pedagogical approaches are best suited in these contexts, since they involve active engagement, social learning, continuous feedback, enabling students' autonomous underst...

This paper focuses on the practices and techniques that can be used at the front end of innovation to search for radical or discontinuous new product ideas. It addresses a gap in the literature by using empirical, survey data to identify the dimensions of a firm's capability to search for new ideas for radical or discontinuous innovation. To do thi...

Managing innovation and particularly searching for new ideas in a steady state environment is different than in discontinuous conditions where traditional practices and routines may prove ineffective. This paper reviews and empirically explores the field of search strategies and practices for discontinuous innovation and, for the first time, tests...

In the knowledge society the processes of learning and of knowledge management take place, very often, online and in social online environments, thus producing issues of complexity and sustainability, related to cognitive processes of learning, that students - even at university level - are not always able to understand and / or to deal with. As a...

Management literature has highlighted that under discontinuous conditions, incumbents have encountered serious obstacles in identifying, developing, and commercializing innovations as traditional and validated 'good' approaches are not adequate, or even counterproductive. It is therefore necessary to identify and deploy the practices that organisat...

Knowledge Management (KM) of intellectual capital has become a central theme in today's business environment and a commonly cited source of competitive advantage. This paper argues that one of the main drivers of knowledge -related organizational problems is the dispersed nature of organizational knowledge. In today's global economy, much of econom...

Purpose. The article explores how ICT supports the open enterprise approach, which is emerging empirically as one of Enterprise 2.0 model. More specifically, it explores (1) the applications characteristics - in terms of drivers and barriers - adopted by companies to support E2.0, and (2) the different ways of integrating applications in the E2.0....

Continuous Improvement (CI) has been analysed in the literature from two different perspectives: as a set of practices and processes and as a set of competitive abilities. What is however still lacking is an overall perspective that integrates both practices and abilities and at the same time enables assessing their mutual relations as well as thei...

We could synthesise the content of our contribution by using the following metaphor: who is the best driver? The one who learned to drive with a driving-instructor or a self-taught driver? Out of metaphor: how continuous improvement (CI) should be developed? Is a company that follows a linear approach in the CI development more effective than one t...