Kurt Matzler

University of Innsbruck | UIBK

Previous research suggests that the distinctive nature of family firms, including both specific advantages and disadvantages related to their particular agency situation, influences innovation activities. Most studies, however, view family firms as homogeneous entities and thus neglect the heterogeneity of family firms when comparing them with nonf...

Instead of buying and owning products, consumers are increasingly interested in leasing and sharing them. Companies can benefit from the trend toward “collaborative consumption” through creative new approaches to defining and distributing their offerings.

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive model of M&A success. We integrate fundamental constructs of different schools and discuss their interdependencies with M&A success. Our theoretical framework was tested empirically across a sample of 106 SME transactions in the machinery, electronic, and logistic industries in the German-speaking part of C...

Emerging virtual worlds, such as the prominent Second Life, offer unprecedented opportunities for companies to collaborate with co-creating users. However, pioneering corporate co-creation systems fail to attract a satisfying level of participation and engagement. The experience users have with the co-creation system is the key to making virtual pl...

Crowdsourcing is typically associated with the incorporation of company-external stakeholders such as customers in the value creating process. This article proposes a framework for a company-internal application of crowdsourcing methods. It presents a set of five goals companies can pursue employing internal crowdsourcing. The practical approach of...

This study expands upon previous research on family firm leadership by exploring the role of CEO identity-i.e., family vs. nonfamily CEO-concerning the way media perceive the brand of the family firm-i.e., brand importance. Drawing on endorsement theory, we suggest that CEO identity influences media perception of the family firm and its brand, ther...

Startups and established firms collaborate in order to leverage complementary resources and innovative capabilities to sustain a competitive advantage. By forming alliances, startups are able to mitigate challenges connected to their smallness and lack of legitimacy. However, the underlying criteria by which startups screen and select potential col...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie Unternehmen Open Strategy als transparenten und inklusiven Ansatz der Strategiearbeit nutzen können, um disruptiven Gefahren erfolgreich zu begegnen. Es werden verschiedene offene Strategieformate vorgestellt, die es Unternehmen ermöglichen, neue disruptive Geschäftslogiken zu entwickeln und zu impleme...

In this study, we analyze how the performance-aspiration gap influences strategic change in family firms, providing evidence of the moderating role of family ownership in this relationship. According to socioemotional wealth (SEW) theory, family owners pursue non-financial as well as financial goals, are more risk-averse due to their personal wealt...

Eine neue Strategie wird meist hinter verschlossenen Türen diskutiert. Ein Fehler. Warum es sich lohnt, Mitarbeitende und Kunden einzubinden.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the key challenges experienced and lessons learned when organizations undergo large-scale agile transformations and seeks to answer the question of how incumbent firms achieve agility at scale. Design/methodology/approach Building on a case study of a multinational corporation seeking to scale up agility, the aut...

Innovation literature increasingly considers the importance of the temporal dimension of knowledge search. In particular, several qualitative studies demonstrate how family firms successfully search for and recombine mature knowledge into innovations. This paper extends this line of research by quantitatively examining knowledge search in family ve...

Marketing programs that evoke high satisfaction and marketing success in one culture often fail in others, but the understanding of those cultural differences is insufficient. The question of how culture is linked to consumer satisfaction is still not answered satisfactorily. One promising paradigm for exploring such questions comes from progress i...

Today companies are facing challenges to survive due to substantial transformations induced by digital technologies, ever-changing consumer demands, and environmental uncertainties. Thus, companies need to be innovative to sustain competitive advantages. Scholars and practitioners have recognized the potential of disruptive innovations as a key fac...

Business model innovation is a key driver for firms to stay at the competitive edge. Yet, while environmental factors significantly shape organizations, it is invariably also a reflection of the characteristics of the CEOs that organizes innovation. Therefore, while it is aligned with the need of the market, business model innovation emerges from w...

Making strategy behind closed doors is a prescription for failure when disruptions are coming from all directions.

Open innovation methods can also be applied at a more general and strategic level — and this article presents a framework for doing just that. A simple insight sits at its heart: strategy is developed in three distinct phases, each of them requiring a different solution to get the balance between openness and secrecy right. Depending on whether a c...

In this perspective piece, we aim to broaden understanding of business model innovation (BMI) by expanding and deepening extant theoretical dimensions and positions in the literature. While a significant amount of research has been carried out on the phenomenon of BMI, the current theory does not fully capture the broad diversity and inherent impli...

How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world's most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It's not because they hire a new...

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important success drivers. Managers need to understand how satisfaction is formed, which factors to focus on, and how to increase the performance. The Kano model offers useful guidance for managers to increase customer satisfaction. It assumes that there are three different factors, which influence overall s...

Recognizing that business model innovation (BMI) is a constant source of value creation in the digital economy, we examine the nexus between absorptive capacity and strategic flexibility, and their effects on BMI. We argue that to increase strategic flexibility and innovate their business model, firms need to develop their potential absorptive capa...

This study investigates the influence of top managers’ individual innovation behavior on firm-level innovation activities, specifically on exploration and exploitation. The influence of individual actions depends on managerial discretion, which is dependent on the ownership context of a business. Thus, this study explores how family ownership moder...

This study examines the impact of family management on digital transformation with specific regard to the firm’s development of Internet of Things (IoT) innovations. Drawing on the distinctive characteristics of firms with family managers, such as the focus on family‐centered non‐economic goals, long tenure, emotional ties to existing assets, and r...

In this study, we advance two mechanisms that lead firms to engage in emerging digital technologies, namely, the dominant coalition's motivation and its ability to deploy the resources needed to pursue such motivation. Building on the performance and strategic development, and on board capital literature streams, we construe prior economic performa...

Based on survey data from 115 acquisitions completed between 2008 and 2011 by European acquirers from German-speaking countries, we find evidence that entrepreneurial leadership is a strong predictor of exploration and a weaker but significant driver of exploitation outcomes following M&A. Industry-wide environmental hostility negatively impacts th...

Employees’ commitment to change is an important prerequisite for change management success. We test how direct manager’s transformational leadership and top management communication impact employees’ commitment to change and how, in a transnational organization, these relationships are moderated by cultural distance. We measure cultural distance us...

Technological diversification has been linked to a wide range of phenomena, including financial performance, innovation, product diversification and inter‐organizational relationships. This is the first systematic review of this literature and provides an overview of its historical development and conceptual foundations. It finds that the role of c...

Technological diversification has been linked to a wide range of phenomena, including financial performance, innovation, product diversification and inter‐organizational relationships. This is the first systematic review of this literature and provides an overview of its historical development and conceptual foundations. It finds that the role of c...

Die Autoren beschreiben, wie sich die digitale Transformation in Unternehmen auf Ebene der Produkte, der Prozesse und ganzer Geschäftsmodelle auswirkt, wie sich Wertschöpfungslogiken verändern und wie ein Mehrwert durch Digitalisierung geschaffen werden kann. Anhand von Beispielen aus unterschiedlichen Branchen entwickeln sie sieben Ratschläge, wie...

Many tourist destinations strongly focus and depend on repeat visitors. A central assumption thereby is that repeat visitors are more profitable (e.g. through lower marketing costs) and that their positive word of mouth (WOM) is essential to attract new guests. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study to investigate the effect of pri...

Based on the management innovation of “Open Management” the authors explore chances as well as risks in view of management consulting. It becomes evident that most companies cannot find their way to “Open Management” without external support. Prima vista, good times for consultants. A closer look reveals: What companies currently need is not provid...

Purpose This paper aims to help managers understand digital disruption and implement strategies that will support the digital transformation of companies. Traditional companies need to learn from disruptive ventures and reimagine their business models based on digitalization. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on multiple case studies...

The present study investigates the influence of level 5 leadership, a leadership approach based on humility and professional will, on subordinate’s innovation behavior at work. The main aim is to shed further light on the understanding of how leadership can foster innovative behavior. Further we test if the dark triad of personality, consisting of...

Digitalisierung ist eine der größten Herausforderungen in der Innovation. Viele Technologien sind disruptiv und zerstören bestehende Geschäftsmodelle. Die Digitalisierung wirkt dabei auf drei Ebenen: Produkte, Prozesse und gesamte Geschäftsmodelle. In diesem Beitrag wird beschrieben, wie die Digitalisierung Wertschöpfungslogiken verändert, welche H...

We explore the effect of prior performance on the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, a major requirement for successful technology-based product development in the digital era. Recognizing a dearth of systematic empirical studies in the field of digitalization, we build on unbalanced panel data on 207 large US manufacturing firms...

We examine the role of social and human board capital on Internet of Things (IoT) technology development. Despite the high economic potential of the IoT, research has failed to explain how firms govern themselves and organize their boards for the development of IoT technology. In our panel study between 2002 and 2012, we draw on patent data to test...

Value creation in acquisitions is a complex topic with divergent theoretical roots and mixed empirical evidence. In empirical research, the study of strategic fit between an acquirer and target as an important indicator of synergy often yields ambiguous findings, for two major reasons: the conceptualization of the fit construct and that construct's...

Etablierte Unternehmen müssen nicht alles allein machen. So erkennen Sie, welche Art von externem Innovationslabor zu Ihnen passt.

The present study examines the previously untested effect of work ethic on individual innovation behavior. These entrenched personal values that may remain unaffected by organizational constitution are suggested to shape a person's inclination to engage in innovative action. Deploying partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM),...

Research Summary: This article explores the impact of family and professional managers on performance and how this relationship is affected by international and product diversification. Using a dataset of 262 German firms from 2000 to 2009, we find that an increasing proportion of family managers on the management board is associated with higher pe...

This paper examines the relationship between technological, product and international diversification. Drawing on the resource based view it investigates how growth in product and international diversification affects technological diversification and specifically aims to clarify which strategy shows the stronger impact. Our results suggest a posit...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) remain an essential strategy for corporate development, enabling many firms to cope with changing environments, markets, and technologies (Bauer and Matzler, 2014; Swaminathan et al., 2008; Weber and Drori, 2011). For example, in 2010 General Electric announced a plan to invest about US$30 billion over the next three...

The sharing economy, a rising pattern in consumption behavior that is based on accessing and reusing products to utilize idle capacity, presents both tremendous possibilities and significant threats for emerging as well as incumbent businesses. As of today, it is unclear whether this economy is merely another ephemeral trend in consumption or wheth...

Strategy development has traditionally been exclusive and secretive. Social software offers new opportunities to harness the collective intelligence of the crowd within organizations and allows more open, participatory modes of strategizing. This paper describes this new phenomenon of open strategy though crowdsourcing and discusses its implication...

Speed of integration is cited to be an important success factor for acquisitions. Still, there is a lack of consensus on the relationship between integration speed and performance. We separate human and task integration speed and find opposing effects for them in 116 acquisitions completed in Central Europe between 2007 and 2009. While task integra...

Venture success has been related to numerous characteristics of entrepreneurs including their enduring personality traits. Separately, recent scholarship has elucidated trait “Grit” comprising two dimensions, “Consistency of Interests” (or “Passion”) and “Perseverance of Effort”, and validated Grit as a predictor of success in areas such as educati...

This paper focuses on common ground as an informal coordination mechanism during post-merger integration. In particular, we investigate if shared knowledge and shared beliefs between acquirer and target trigger a self-coordination mechanism among employees and therefore can act as an alternative path to human integration in mature industries. We ar...

Research on the phenomenon of business model (&) innovation is taking place in related perspectives. Next to innovation and entrepreneurship literature, theories of firm strategy closely relate to the ongoing conceptualization of the business model concept. We first review in this article the linkage between the business model, innovating the busin...

Tourism destinations increasingly use brand-personification strategies to evoke favorable consumer reactions. These reactions, however, may hinge on cultural differences. This paper investigates the relationships among nation brand personality perceptions, consumer brand-self congruity, and the visit intention of a country as a tourism destination....

In innovation contests, companies post innovation-related problems to a large crowd and award the best submitted idea. It has been shown that the size and heterogeneity of the crowd are central to the success. One facet of heterogeneity of communities is professionalism; i.e., the degrees to which participants use general principles and standardize...

Purpose – Under certain conditions, a mass of people can be smarter than the best expert – even if the expert is part of the group. In this paper we show how leaders can improve decision making by tapping into the collective intelligence of their organization. Design/methodology/approach – Based on James Surowiecki’s four conditions of collective i...

„Teilen ist postmodern und cool, Besitz hingegen ein Auslaufmodell“, meinen Rachel Botsman und Roo Rogers und deuten dabei einen gesellschaftlichen Wandel an, der nicht zuletzt durch die steigende Präsenz des World Wide Web an Bedeutung gewinnt. Die sogenannte „Sharing Economy“ ist dabei nicht nur ein digitales Phänomen. Immer mehr Menschen erkenne...

Strategy development has traditionally been exclusive and secretive. Social software offers new opportunities to harness the collective intelligence of the crowd within organizations and allows more open, participatory modes of strategizing. This paper describes this new phenomenon of open strategy though crowdsourcing and discusses its implication...

Disruption is "creative destruction". The old is destroyed, the new - better or different - is created. The digital transformation radically and comprehensively changes markets and companies. Many of these changes are disruptive and destroy existing and functioning things. But new things also emerge. Never before has it been so easy to develop a gr...

This paper illustrates the effects of post-merger integration speed on M&A performance and the moderating role of decision-making preferences. For a better understanding of the effects of integration speed, we separate the role of human and task integration speed. The results, obtained from a survey based on 99 M&A transactions with acquirers from...

The ability to exploit and explore within the context of innovation has become an important issue in the strategic management of firms. What has been missing from this discussion is a consideration of the ability and willingness of different family constituencies to arrive at organizational ambidexterity (OA). We propose that due to their idiosyncr...

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss the barriers to successful business model innovation and derive implications for management on how to overcome each barrier, as many attempts to innovate a business model have failed. Design/methodology/approach – The authors draw on their experience they gained in numerous business model innovation projects an...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a prominent strategy for many businesses to foster growth, market expansion, and innovation. Furthermore, many transactions span national borders making them a relevant phenomenon in the field of International Management. The annual transaction volume exceeds the GDP of large countries like Brazil (Bauer, Hautz &...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether transformational leadership behavior is a function of the leader’s own self-respect and his/her evaluation of being capable, significant, and worthy (self-esteem). It is also tested whether transformational leadership is related to innovation success. Design/methodology/approach – Data...

This paper presents new measures of technological and customer-side relatedness constructed from widely available secondary data. Relatedness is a concept central to predicting the existence and nature of a relationship between corporate diversification and firm performance. Yet, finding appropriate measures has been an ongoing struggle. The widely...

Prior research on user behavior in online innovation contests has mainly focused on factors that positively impact prosocial, collaborative behavior, which should ultimately lead to innovative outcomes. However, little is known about the effects of more negative personal characteristics that might result in more competitive, antisocial, and even un...

This study investigates the influence of the individual innovativeness construct on the two strategic orientations of exploration and exploitation, and also explores how family firms moderate the relationship between individual innovativeness and exploration-exploitation. The study contributes to literature by shedding light on innovativeness at th...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to detect and challenge generally accepted management and consulting practice in Mergers & Acquisitions (M&As). M&As have been an important issue in strategic management and corporate development for decades. The integration process of two separate entities has been found to be of importance, and has, accordin...

Purpose Stabilizing business in highly competitive and volatile business-to-business (B2B) markets is a strategic imperative for many companies. In such a context, customer retention through the creation of switching barriers (i.e. by increasing switching costs) is a common strategy. In this study, we develop a network of relationships among custom...

Purpose – This paper aims to clarify the role of intuition in managerial decision making by identifying when intuitive decision making is typically applied, of what value it is for organizations and what inhibits its application. Design/methodology/approach – The authors combine insights from cognitive and social psychology with empirical evidence...

Unternehmertum wird hinlänglich mit dem Thema Innovation und der marktwirtschaftlichen Verwertung von Innovationen in Verbindung gebracht. Bereits Schumpeter (1934) charakterisierte den Unternehmer als kreativen Zerstörer, der Märkte durch innovatives Handeln aus dem Gleichgewicht bringt und so den Fortschritt vorantreibt. Egal ob als Schöpfer oder...

Die betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung beschäftigt sich nun seit mehr als 100 Jahren mit der Frage effektiver Führung (Antonakis et al., 2004; Bass & Bass, 2008), dennoch hat das Thema nicht an Aktualität verloren. Immer noch wissen wir zu wenig über das Phänomen „Führung“, wie die „Ressource Mensch“ nachhaltig und für alle Beteiligten bzw. Stakehol...

Stellen Sie sich vor, ein Manager, der in den 1960er Jahren verstorben war, hat die Chance für ein paar Stunden in unserer Zeit auf die Erde zurückzukommen. Er würde staunen, was sich alles verändert hat: Wir waren in der Zwischenzeit auf dem Mond, drucken alle möglichen Gegenstände mit 3D-Druckern aus, lassen uns von einer angenehmen Stimme im Aut...

The articles making it to this special issue bears the mark of a core logic of process based entrepreneurial perspectives; the performative quality of practicing entrepreneurial scholarship (“process is how process does”; Helin, Hernes, Hjorth and Holt, 2014), rather than writing something about whatever in a non-entrepreneurial way but locating it...

Cultural differences are an important issue for cross-border M&A. Empirical evidence for the impact of cultural differences on M&A performance is mixed. A major reason for these inconclusive results relies on integration. One main motive for cross-border transactions is the acquisition of innovative capabilities. In a study of innovation-driven M&A...

In the last decades volatility in returns, cash flows and sales has steadily increased. Understanding drivers of performance volatility is therefore of high interest. The present study examines the role of family influence on performance volatility. Agency theory and the resource-based view are integrated to explain differential effects of family o...

Organizations increasingly initiate Internet-based innovation-contest communities through which individuals can interact and contribute to the innovation process. To successfully manage these communities, organizations need to understand what roles members assume, how they communicate and vary in their contribution behavior. In this exploratory stu...

Advances in social and cognitive psychology and related fields have drawn attention to the role of intuition in organizational decision making. In this study we link intuitive and deliberate decision-making styles to the success of exploration and exploitation activities, which are understood as two qualitatively opposing strategies that organizati...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to expand the knowledge about the value of intuition for organizational innovativeness and organizational factors inhibiting intuitive decision making. Design/methodology/approach - The study develops and tests a theoretical model that relates intuitive and deliberate decision-making styles to organizational i...

Purpose – In every market there are non-consumers – potential customers that withstand an innovation. A common reason is that products targeted to early adopters or the mass market are over-engineered. Established companies usually neglect the laggards in a market. This offers growth opportunities for new entrants. These market niches can be unlock...

Strategy development has traditionally been exclusive (i.e. the job of the top management team) and secretive (to protect competitive advantages). Social software offers new opportunities for involving a large crowd in strategy processes and thus harnessing the collective intelligence of an organization and allowing more open and participatory mode...

Open innovation has enjoyed widespread acceptance among large companies. SMEs, and especially micro firms, face specific challenges when adopting and implementing open innovation approaches. This paper describes a regional platform that was set up to support SMEs and micro firms to implement open innovation. The platform focuses on community-based...

All good things come from above. Why do some companies succeed again and again in achieving above-average success while others come under pressure? The results of a major international strategic research project involving more than 1,300 executives from eight countries are clear: the attitudes, values, attitudes and behaviors of top management form...

This panel will discuss tendencies promoting more open strategizing processes in a variety of contexts. Openness here refers both to greater transparency (internal and external), and to wider inclusion of stakeholders (internal and external). Panelists will draw on their empirical research across a range of sectors and types of organizations, inclu...