Bertrand Moingeon

ESCP Business School · Department of Management

This case explores French consumer goods company Danone's novel approach to knowledge management. In 2007, Human Resource Chief (Executive Vice President) Franck Mougin assesses the company's knowledge-sharing tools and considers his options going forward. Through informal knowledge marketplaces and sharing networks, Danone had helped managers conn...

This article focuses on changes in leadership’s discourse about the “triple bottom line” in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its founding days through to its acquisition by and integration into Unilever. For this study, we analyzed CEO claims about “who we are” from their letters in annual reports (what we label projected identity). A sample of employe...

There is neither fortune nor mirage at the bottom of the pyramid: the poor are helped, both through nutritional, social, and/or employment profits, but this doesn’t turn into a fortune for the multination corporation (MNC) involved. Building a social business model whose main purpose it to address issues of poverty (or other sustainable development...

Can a consortium of 16 organizations, including multinational corporations, local government agencies, and startups, turn a rundown Paris suburb into a “smart” (ecologically viable, high-tech, livable) neighborhood? This case explores how Bouygues Immobilier led such a project involving Alstom, Bouygues Energies & Services, Bouygues Telecom, EDF (E...

This paper focuses on changes in leadership’s discourse about the “triple bottom line” in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its founding days through to its acquisition by and integration into Unilever. For this study, we analyzed CEO claims about “who we are” from their letters in annual reports (what we label projected identity). A sample of employees...

A partir de l’étude de la joint venture entre Danone et le Groupe Grameen au Bangladesh, un social business visant à proposer un produit nutritif et sain aidant les enfants pauvres à lutter contre les carences alimentaires, cet article suggère que les entreprises développant des stratégies proactives en matière de RSE bâtissent, concomitamment, des...

Building on the study of the joint venture between Danone and the Bangladeshi Grameen Group, a social business aimed at offering a nutritive and healthy product helping poor children fight against food deprivation, this article suggests that companies developing proactive strategies in the field of CSR incidentally strengthen competencies needed fo...

The study of 47 cases of strategic innovations in existing companies allows to understand the uncertainty resulting from this type of strategy. When the new business model, introduced by the strategic innovation, concerns a niche or creates a new market, it can coexist in the company with the former model. But when it addresses successfully the hea...

The study of 47 cases of strategic innovations in existing companies allows to understand the uncertainty resulting from this type of strategy. When the new business model, introduced by the strategic innovation, concerns a niche or creates a new market, it can coexist in the company with the former model. But when it addresses successfully the hea...

Strategic Innovation does not necessarily imply a start-up or a new technology. Established companies can generate new and profitable business model, provided they open their minds and think in genuinely different ways. They must also be willing to carry out small scale experiment to test new ways of doing business. Consider the experience of secur...

Grameen bank, founded in 1976, has both pioneered the development of micro-finance, and created nearly 30 businesses designed to alleviate poverty. The article traces the gradual development of Grameen’s expertise in formulating social business models, which require new value propositions, value constellations and profit equations, and as such, res...

The purpose of this article is to show through a case study the inherent difficulties in creating and implementing a new business model in an existing firm. This research is based on a study of Valtis, a French security transportation firm whose CEO helped to introduce onto the market an innovative system based not on securing goods but on removing...

The purpose of this article is to show through a case study the inherent difficulties in creating and implementing a new business model in an existing firm. This research is based on a study of Valtis, a French security transportation firm whose CEO helped to introduce onto the market an innovative system based not on securing goods but on removing...

L'étude de quarante-sept cas d'innovations stratégiques dans des entreprises existantes permet d'éclairer l'incertitude résultant de ce type de stratégie. Lorsque le nouveau modèle économique, introduit par l'innovation stratégique, concerne une niche ou permet de créer un nouveau marché, il peut coexister dans l'entreprise avec l'ancien. Mais lors...

Prahalad urges multinationals to seek “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”: turning the poor into valuable customers can both alleviate poverty and create profit for the MNC. However, vigorous criticism has emerged. For example, Karnani argues that these ideas are a mirage: there are no profits possible for MNCs, and the poor are more assisted th...

Cas Harvard Business School, n° 9-608-052

Inter-organizational communities of practice (IOCoPs) are today an emergent research topic and studies in this area are still in an exploratory phase. Theoretical mechanisms are vaguely specified and empirical studies are incipient. For this reason, this paper firstly aims at presenting the specificities and stakes of such organizational forms, est...

How can an organization define policy for managing its knowledge ? In this article, an integrative model is proposed : the Learning Mix. It consists of 4 interacting facets: Information Technology, Learning Structure, Knowledge Portfolio and Learning Identity.

This paper deals with knowledge management both as a practice and as a concept. We argue that both practitioners and academics have dismissed the issue of power too quickly. One may summarize the prevailing discourse on power within the context of KM the following way: 'Yes, knowledge is power, but shared knowledge is more power'. We posit that kno...

Preface by Charles Fombrum, General Introduction, Section 1. The Dynamics of Identities The five facets of collective identity Guillaume Soenen and Bertrand Moingeon The hybrid identity of law firms Stuart Albert and Edward Adams Where do we go from here? Predicting identification among dispersed employees Kevin W. Rock and Micheal G. Pratt Section...

‘Who are we?’ is one of the most essential questions organizations and their executives need to address. Answering the identity question has bearing on the positioning of the company, its structure, its culture, its communication strategy and its human resources policy. In fact, it will inform much of what the company does. However, executives are...

Cas Harvard Business School, n° 9-608-051

L'objectif de cet article est de comprendre comment les quatre composantes du Learning Mix interagissent sur la création de connaissances dans les organisations. Chacune de ces composantes peut en effet se révéler aussi bien un levier qu'un frein au développement du savoir. Une première partie définit les composantes du modèle. Une deuxième partie...

A FRENCH PERSPECTIVE ON IDENTITY This paper introduces a distinct approach to organizational identity study which has lately been known as the `French School of Thought' (Moingeon and Ramanantsoa, 1997). Larçon and Reitter (1979) defined identity as a set of interdependent characteristics of an organization which give the organization specificity,...

This paper concentrates on the analysis of organizational resources, competencies and capabilities as well as on the organizational architectures which facilitate their acquisition and use. On the basis of these concepts, the paper proposes an analysis grid which is then applied to a case study of Salomon, world leader in the winter sports equipmen...

The authors argue that the creation and sustaining of a firm's competitive advantage must be heavily based on the dynamics of how the firm's resources are acquired and managed. Such a resource-based view leads into a study of the relationships between organizational learning and competitive advantage. Similarly, it requires greater integration of s...

This article reviews theories of organizational learning and presents a framework with which to organize the literature. We argue that unit of analysis provides one critical distinction in the organizational learning literature and research objective provides another. The resulting two-by-two matrix contains four categories of research, which we ha...

Since the 1970s, French researchers have elaborated a theoretical framework built around the concept of organizational identity. This theoretical framework integrates concepts from several research disciplines, including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and history. Although this approach focuses primarily on improving the understanding of th...

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 594

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 602

Organizations need to develop learning strategies to survive and develop in increasingly uncertain and changing markets. In this book, researchers from Europe and the United States explore theories of strategic management and organizational behaviour to establish a link between learning processes and competitive advantage, within a variety of organ...

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 553

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 552

Cet article met en évidence l'intérêt que revêt l'approche sociologique de Bourdieu pour le marketing. La théorie de l'habitus et du champ permet d'accéder à une meilleure compréhension de la logique distributionnelle des pratiques et des consommations. Différentes applications sont fournies pour des biens non durables (alimentation, art, sport) et...

The socio-economic approach that we are proposing is opposed top that adopted by supporters of the theory of rational action. This approach leads us to denounce models which represent man as an actor free from all economic and social conditioning as unrealistic. We believe that the homo-oeconomicus model in which man is nothing but a disembodied be...

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 414