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Catalyst Organizations as a New Organization Design for Innovation: The Case of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies

March 2018
Academy of Management Discoveries 4(4):amd.2017.0041

DOI:10.5465/amd.2017.0041

Authors:

Ann Majchrzak

University of Southern California

Terri L Griffith

Simon Fraser University

David K. Reetz

Technical University of Munich

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CATALYST ORGANIZATION

S AS A NEW ORGANIZATION

DESIGN FOR INNOVATION:

THE CASE OF HYPERLOOP TRANSPORTATION

TECHNOLOGIES

Journal:

Academy of Management Discoveries

Manuscript ID

AMD-2017-0041.R2

Manuscript Type:

Revision

Keywords:

Organizational Design, Structure and Control < Organizational &

Management Theory, Innovation < Performance & Effectiveness,

Organizational Design < Strategy Implementation

Abstract:

The crucial contingencies surrounding organization design for innovation

are experiencing drastic shifts. First, environmental uncertainty is rising

with the increasingly connected nature of innovation. Second, the internet

provides an almost costless supply of external knowledge. Current

organization design theory does not provide adequate frames for studying

organizations attempting to simultaneously leverage shifts of uncertainty

and the costless supply of external knowledge. In the process of

qualitatively examining one such organization – the crowd-based

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) – we find that HTT’s

design does not fit existing design schema. We label this new design form

a “catalyst” organization, clarifying how HTT’s design challenges existing

organization design principles while simultaneously showing researchers a

way forward to new theorizing. We derive implications for theories of

organization design, exploration, and online knowledge-creating

communities.

Academy of Management Discoveries

CATALYST ORGANIZATIONS AS A

NEW ORGANIZATION DESIGN FOR INNOVATION:

THE CASE OF HYPERLOOP TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES

ANN MAJCHRZAK

University of Southern California

Marshall School of Business

Los Angeles, CA 90089-1421

USA

Tel: +1-213-740-4023

e-mail: majchrza@usc.edu

DAVID K. REETZ

Technische Universität München

TUM School of Management

80333 Munich

Germany

Tel: +49-89-289-52803

e-mail: david.reetz@tum.de

TERRI L. GRIFFITH

Santa Clara University

Leavey School of Business

Lucas Hall

Santa Clara, CA 95053

USA

Tel: +1-408-256-3141

e-mail: t@terriGriffith.com

OLIVER ALEXY

Technische Universität München

TUM School of Management

80333 Munich

Germany

Tel: +49-89-289-52803

e-mail: o.alexy@tum.de

Acknowledgements

We thank Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. for their willingness to engage in

this research. The first and second authors are HTT contributors and receive small amounts of

equity compensation from that role. Earlier versions of this manuscript have greatly benefitted

from the feedback of conference participants at the 2016 Open and User Innovation Conference

and Michael Tushman. All remaining errors are of course our own.

Page 1 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

CATALYST ORGANIZATIONS AS A

NEW ORGANIZATION DESIGN FOR INNOVATION:

THE CASE OF HYPERLOOP TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES

ABSTRACT

The crucial contingencies surrounding organization design for innovation are experiencing

drastic shifts. First, environmental uncertainty is rising with the increasingly connected nature of

innovation. Second, the internet provides an almost costless supply of external knowledge.

Current organization design theory does not provide adequate frames for studying organizations

attempting to simultaneously leverage shifts of uncertainty and the costless supply of external

knowledge. In the process of qualitatively examining one such organization – the crowd-based

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) – we find that HTT’s design does not fit

existing design schema. We label this new design form a “catalyst” organization, clarifying how

HTT’s design challenges existing organization design principles while simultaneously showing

researchers a way forward to new theorizing. We derive implications for theories of organization

design, exploration, and online knowledge-creating communities.

Keywords: innovation, crowds, organization design, gig economy, environmental uncertainty

Page 2 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

CATALYST ORGANIZATIONS AS A

NEW ORGANIZATION DESIGN FOR INNOVATION:

THE CASE OF HYPERLOOP TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES

The 21

century has brought paradigm shifts in organization design for innovation. Caused

by the spread of the internet and globalization, firms compete on an innovation landscape

characterized by 1) increasing environmental uncertainty with interdependencies of

technological developments (requiring continuous and coordinated innovation in technology,

strategy, and product; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009); and 2) near-zero information exchange costs

(Altman, Nagle, & Tushman, 2015) creating an almost costless supply of external knowledge

available to the firm. This supply of external knowledge comes, not simply as information

transmitted across various media and formats, but in the form of people sharing their knowledge

and labor with the firm. A wealth of potential part-time contributors are available through

internet-enabled coordination tools ranging from gig-economy business platforms (e.g.,

Freelancer.com, UpWork) to interest-based community forums such as reddit and Digg. This

supply of knowledge, combined with environmental uncertainty, creates a ‘perfect storm’ that

affects the way we can or should design innovating organizations.

To identify what this may imply for our theorizing, we study how Hyperloop Transportation

Technologies, Inc. (HTT) created an organization design which catalyzes the supply of external

knowledge as the exclusive source of resources the firm uses. HTT’s mission is to change the

nature of public transportation from largely being slow, expensive, financially insolvent and

environmentally unsustainable to a system which is not only financially solvent, but so fast,

inexpensive, and enriching that people will decouple where they work, play, and live. Achieving

this vision involves the development of a slew of complex technologies, not the least of which is

the hyperloop -- a pod magnetically levitated within a vacuum tube able to cost-efficiently travel

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at speeds up to 700 mph (see Figure 1 for artists’ renderings).

--------Insert Figure 1 About Here--------

What makes HTT unique from its competitors (and most of the received organizational

design literature) is not just its expansive vision, but the organization design it uses to execute on

its vision. At the moment, HTT has fewer than 12 employees, though the CEO notes that this

number is fluid. Instead, it is almost entirely staffed by over 800 contributing professionals

distributed around the world. They exchange their as-needed part-time work hours for stock

options. Another group of over 50,000 individuals on various social media sites provide

opportunities for business development. The 800 contributors are not tangential actors as would

be used by organizations outsourcing to Upwork or other gig economy platforms (e.g., Barley,

Bechky, & Milliken, 2017), or in new organizational forms such as Oticon (Foss, 2003), but are

actors pursuing core strategic activities such as business development, partnership agreements,

basic R&D, lobbying public officials, marketing, human resource activities such as onboarding,

in-field feasibility analyses, and hardware and supply acquisition.

As with many of these emerging organization designs (Fjeldstad, et al., 2012; Gulati,

Puranam, & Tushman, 2012; Puranam, et al., 2014), HTT, at its foundation, is designed as would

be expected: contributors are self-organizing actors sharing knowledge through a commons with

the multi-actor collaboration enabled with “protocols, processes, and infrastructures” (Fjeldstad,

et al.: 739). However, such foundational characteristics fail to capture important nuances for how

HTT uses environmental uncertainties and knowledge supply to pursue its mission. For example,

even though actors are to some extent self-organizing some aspects of their organization, there

are other aspects that are not self-organized in order to rapidly proceed with opportunities as they

surface. Instead of laterally coordinating, as described for many of the new organizational forms

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(Fjeldstad et al., 2012; Dahlander & O’Mahony, 2011; Faraj et al., 2011), HTT is organized to

allow coordination hierarchically, bottom-up, layered, as well as laterally. Instead of

decomposing tasks as is commonly seen even among new organizational forms (Puranam et al.,

2014; Baldwin & Clark, 2006; MacCormack, Rusnak, & Baldwin, 2006), HTT does not. Instead

of openly sharing projects for external contributors to join, as is commonly done among such

new organizational forms as Wikipedia and open source software, as well as private

organizations such as Intel, Accenture, or Dell (Fjeldstad et al., 2012; Bayus, 2012), HTT does

not. Instead of recruiting self-organizing actors, as has been described for these new

organizational forms (Fjeldstad et al., 2012), HTT leverages actors of all types, including those

not particularly self-organizing.

Therefore, we offer HTT as an additional novel form of organizing using the criteria for

novelty proposed by Puranam and colleagues (2014). HTT solves the “universal” challenges of

organizing (task division, task allocation, reward distribution, information flows, and exception

handling) in new ways – but in a way so intermingled, dynamic, and with different foci as to

demand new theory. HTT is not so much a new form of organizing built out of “novel bundles of

old solutions” (Puranam et al., 2014: 173), but a new form of organizing enabled by an almost

costless supply of external knowledge. This catalyst organizational form is structurally different

from a collaborative community (e.g., Fjeldstad et al., 2012), or similar organization forms

previously hailed as novel (see Puranam et al., 2014).

The novelty of HTT’s catalyst organization design may be most easily understood when

described as a passion-driven, dynamic organization which uses an almost unlimited availability

of specialized knowledge to create and capture an almost unlimited supply of unanticipatable

opportunities. This new organizational form (1) uses non-modular task division and allocation to

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create limitless options, and (2) integrates work in a manner that allows for continuous

exploration even in the face of the need to produce. Its opportunity orientation transcends the

actor-orientation of other new organizational forms (Fjeldstad et al., 2012) by allowing

contributors throughout the system to match opportunities to available resources in a manner in

which the matching is not simply of different types of skills, but also in different levels of

commitment, different objects of passion, and non-overlapping relational networks. The

organization has those committed and those less committed, with the most committed (such as

the CEO, “hyperleaders,” Chairman of the Board, Director of Operations) leading the charge.

Instead of standardized protocols, there are “guardrails” which allow individuals substantial

discretion within broad direction. Instead of basing coordination on dynamic lateral

relationships, HTT uses multiple different coordination mechanisms at once.

Despite these differences from common organizational design wisdom, HTT is successful

thus far. Within the first 34 months of its existence, HTT had 25 design patents pending; 49

corporate partners with agreements in United States, Slovakia, the United Arab Emirates,

Indonesia, India, South Korea, and France; booked $31.8M in cash investments, obtained $29M

in commitments and in-kind investments, received $22M in land rights; and had over 150,000

hours in development work provided by contributors in exchange for stock options. Compared to

their strongest competitor, HTT has been able to accomplish more with less expenditures. The

quality of the HTT hyperloop is meeting such safety, cost, and reliability targets that it is being

insured by the largest insurance company in the world.

How HTT has been able to accomplish this with fewer than 12 fulltime staff – of which nine

were hired only in the last year – is the focus of our research. Our initial look at HTT indicated

that its differentiation and integration organization design schemes were quite different from

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those described in hierarchical designs (March and Simon, 1958; Perrow, 1967; Thompson,

1967) as well as in collaborative communities (Fjeldstad et al., 2012). Therefore, our intention

here is to first describe the literature in terms of the pressures on traditional design characteristics

related to knowledge supply and environmental uncertainty, and how we would expect HTT to

be designed. Then we describe HTT’s organization design. Finally, in the discussion, we

summarize the elements of a catalyst organization.

Our summary argument from our examination of HTT is that, as organizations become

increasingly open to embracing uncertainty and low-cost external knowledge, organizational

design researchers will need to reconsider how differentiation and integration are conceptualized.

In these new catalyst forms of organizations, differentiation and integration give way to a

constant matching process in which projects, people, skills, and opportunities are morphed to fit

each other. The organization works because it focuses on evolving actionable objectives rather

than tasks, dialectical learning rather than integration, opportunity seizing from the bottom up

rather than exclusively top-down, and emergent and temporary roles aligned with varying layers

of commitment, instead of job titles. Managers may become just another temporary and

emergent role represented by those most willing to commit the time to broker, negotiate,

orchestrate and catalyze those individuals temporarily less committed.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Organization design is the process of designing roles, rules, and relationships that govern

any organizational activity (DeSantola & Gulati, 2017). To do so cohesively, any organization

design must address at least these fundamental challenges: 1) task division and allocation (jointly

referred to as the division of labor); and 2) reward provision (motivation), information provision

(coordination), and exception management—jointly referred to as the integration of effort

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(Galbraith, 1973; March & Simon 1958; Puranam, Alexy, & Reitzig, 2014).

Research has shown increasing environmental uncertainty (Burns & Stalker,1961; Grandori,

2010; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967) adds complexity to the division of labor and integration of

effort. In addition, some have suggested that decreasing information costs will also affect these

two fundamental challenges (Altman et al., 2015; Chesbrough, 2003; Zittrain, 2006). In the

presence of both a surplus of low-cost external knowledge and environmental uncertainty, there

are significant limitations in what is known. For example, despite a burgeoning literature on the

creation of radical, complex innovation through innovation ecosystems (Adner, 2012; Adner,

Oxley & Silverman, 2013), there is a still a paucity of work on how to design organizations that

would steer ecosystem creation under high uncertainty (Dattée, Alexy, & Autio, 2017; Le

Masson, Weil, & Hatchuel, 2009), in particular when it comes to incorporating opportunities

facilitated by increasing connectivity and decreasing costs of collaboration (Tilson; Lyytinen &

Sørensen, 2010; Yoo, Henfriedsson, & Lyytinen, 2010). Similarly, in the extensive literature on

project- and community-based approaches to radical innovation (Foss 2003; Foss & Dobrajska,

2015), organizational design is focused on increasing efficiency of coordination and resource

usage; yet, in a context of significant uncertainty and surplus of resources, efficiency may be less

important than effectively capturing opportunities.

Below we examine the literature on the effects of uncertain environments, then the effects of

low-cost knowledge, on integration and task division organization design choices. We then show

how we build on this research to suggest a series of analytic questions for our case study.

Effects of More Uncertain Environments on Organizational Design

Looking at work on organization design in high-uncertainty contexts, classic research

suggests organizations should create structures that are organic, adaptable, loosely-coupled, and

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ambidextrous (Burns & Stalker, 1961; Davis, Eisenhardt, & Bingham, 2009; Lawrence &

Lorsch, 1967; Thompson, 1967; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996). Organizational actors are expected

to deliberately react to the changing environmental contingencies by rapidly changing to new

organizational forms (Rindova & Kotha, 2001; Romanelli, 1991), drawing on their dynamic

capabilities for change (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000; Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997).

Yet, as uncertainty and ambiguity of the environment increases, the precise nature of the

organic, loosely-coupled, and ambidextrous organization becomes increasingly indeterminable

(Cardinal, Kreutzer, & Miller, 2017; Dattée et al., 2017; Davis et al., 2009). Firms need to

continuously search for technological and market-related discoveries before arriving at

something that can be successfully commercialized. Any newly arriving piece of knowledge may

not only provide a new opportunity individually, but also contain novel information about how

all other existing pieces of knowledge are (to be) connected (Drazin & Van de Ven, 1985; Miller,

1987) as they cannot directly anticipate the composition of the eventual value proposition for the

market.

Moreover, scholars suggest that organization designs in such highly uncertain environments

need to foster broad and external exploration in order to discover all relevant problem aspects

and their interconnections, (Katila & Ahuja, 2002), drawing on techniques such as structural

ambidexterity (Lavie & Rosenkopf, 2006; Lavie, Stettner, & Tushman, 2010; Tushman &

O’Reilly, 1996) or open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003). “Incomplete” organizations (Garud et

al., 2008) are one design option for settings where the exploration is so continuous and extensive

that the “boundary between the entity being designed and the context for which it is being

designed” (Garud et al., 2008: 351) is neither clear nor stable. Such organizations, even when not

been labeled as incomplete, have neither defined membership boundaries (Etzion & Ferraro,

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2010) nor a statically defined purpose, but the discovery or emergence of said purpose may be

the initial goal of the organization (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). One of the implications of such

uncertainty for organizational design may be one of rendering any a priori task division moot or

even counterproductive (Reetz & MacAulay, 2017; Sarasvathy, 2001).

An example is Dattée and colleagues’ (2017) description of ecosystem creation under

uncertainty, which they outline as an abductive process of discovery, rather than a priori

planning. Their argument is reminiscent of earlier work emphasizing the nature and importance

of design to tackle situations of high uncertainty (e.g., Dunne & Martin, 2006; Gruber, De Leon,

George, & Thompson, 2015; Simon, 1996). That work, which should still be considered an

emergent field of study (Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy, 2011; Jelinek, Romme, & Boland,

2008), suggests that organization designs in high uncertainty environments should not

necessarily try to respond to uncertainty through planning, but rather enable the theorizing and

exploration of multiple possible trajectories, as well as constantly adapting as new knowledge is

discovered.

Effects of Low-Cost Knowledge Supply on Organizational Design

Resources are a natural limit to such broad explorations. It is in this context that the decrease

of information costs, which some even consider as zero given technological progress (Altman et

al., 2015), leads to an abundance of the availability of external knowledge. Decreasing

knowledge costs will not only allow the organization to explore more broadly for innovation, but

also to involve an increasing number of external contributors.

However, to ensure broad exploration with external contributors, a variety of research

streams, such as those on crowdsourcing (Afuah & Tucci, 2012), Wikipedia (Kane &

Ransbotham, 2016), open innovation (Dodgson, Gann, & Salter, 2006), and open source

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software (Howison & Crowston, 2014) suggest that the tasks carried out by external contributors

should be directed by the focal organization using a priori defined modularized tasks (also see

Altman et al., 2015; MacCormack, Rusnak & Baldwin, 2006). This allows external contributors

not only to perform tasks that are of the most utility to the focal organization; it also allows

external contributors to perform the tasks at will, through self-selection. The literatures on meta-

organizations (Gulati et al., 2012), supplier networks (Dyer, 1996), and distributed innovation

communities (Bogers & West, 2012; Lakhani & Panetta, 2007) similarly depict the evolution of

such organizations as dependent on a central hierarchy to control the task structure.

Hence, at the system level, the organization controls the nature of the innovation. Indeed, we

would argue that this logic underlies many crowd-based approaches currently discussed in the

literature, in which surprisingly traditional organization designs (see also Puranam et al., 2014)

are implemented to fulfill the purpose of the organization. Although this literature inspires the

possibility of new organizational forms with less centralized control, the precise nature of how

control is maintained in an environment of an abundance of external knowledge supply needs

further development (Cardinal et al., 2017).

We suggest that, if the organization can involve contributors and their knowledge and

resources at zero cost, there is an advantage to the organization to engage an almost limitless

supply in a variety of explorative efforts (Afuah & Tucci 2012; Argote & Greve 2007; Altman et

al., 2015). If during exploration the organization discovers new knowledge that requires a change

in course or structure, reliance on external contributors for innovation should allow for faster

response compared to a monolithic organization (e.g., Adner, 2012; Gawer; 2014). As such,

integration across all the various explorations in the organization may be less important.

In sum, shifting our focus to contexts of significant environmental uncertainty with low-cost

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knowledge supply suggests that an effective organization design may be one which does not

modularize its tasks for external contributors. Moreover, how the organization integrates – if it

even tries – these various efforts at exploration is not clear. What would task division look like if

there was no a priori definition by the organization, and how would task allocation operate if

there was no menu from which potential contributors would choose? How could such an

organization ensure that contributors would be motivated, coordinated, and directed? In short,

what would be an appropriate configuration of design choices for an organization that would

seek to leverage a contributor community? Would there be new interdependencies or

complementarities across design elements (Puranam et al., 2014; Fjeldstad, Snow, Miles, &

Lettl, 2012), and what insights would these suggest for extant theories of organization and

innovation? These are the analytic questions we turn to next.

DATA AND METHODS

HTT exemplifies an organization leveraging near-zero information costs within an

environment of high uncertainty, trying to develop a radically new technological and market

solution by purposively drawing on external contributors to explore broadly and deeply. To our

knowledge, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) is the first commercial, large-

scale organization involved in co-creating an entirely new industry ecosystem and technology

developments with the involvement of thousands of contributors changing the future of

transportation. We selected HTT purposefully because of this vast ambition.

Background on Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT)

The transportation industry is broken [co-founder, Dirk Ahlborn].

There is no profitable mass transport system using available real estate today that is

human-centric, giving customers a rich humanistic experience [co-founder Bibop Gresta]

Page 12 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

Transportation is overcrowded, overloaded, overwhelmed [Chief Marketing Officer, Rob

Miller]

The hyperloop is one answer to the transportation industry’s woes but only if it is made

to be fast, safe, beautiful, net energy positive, and financially profitable, and the only way

to do that is to use existing technology when possible, the brightest and best minds to fill

in the technology gaps, and the willingness of thousands of people and organizations to

partner in order to help us change the worlds of insurance, finance, government

regulations, and customer experience. [Dirk Ahlborn]

HTT was inspired in 2013 by an Elon Musk white paper reminding the world of the

technology for a hyperloop, that it was time for the world to move forward with hyperloop

transportation, and Elon saying he was too busy to pursue it himself (more recently, one of

Musk’s firms, The Boring Company, is signaling that it might take up the hyperloop challenge,

Gibbs, 2017). A hyperloop refers to a fully enclosed vacuum tube with a levitated capsule

running inside the tube at up to 700 mph; the lack of air reduces the amount of energy needed to

move the capsule forward.

Shortly after the release of the white paper, HTT co-founder Dirk Ahlborn posted a project

on jumpstartfund.com, a community of entrepreneurs, asking

…our community if they thought we should be working on the [hyperloop] project. The

response was overwhelming. Many people said we should definitely do it, but there was

another button on that response page, one which said, ‘I would like to do this.’ The

overwhelming majority of people clicked that button as well. We then asked what the

company should be called and that is how the company started. [co-founder, Dirk

Ahlborn]

HTT’s co-founders selected a core group of about 100 top engineering and aerodynamics

specialists from around the world based on applications submitted on jumpstartfund.com. The

specialists spent some of their time not working on their day jobs to look at the technology side

of hyperloop in exchange for becoming stakeholders in the company. The specialists concluded

that the building of a hyperloop was possible by integrating existing technology, but that further

research and development would be needed to make the hyperloop financially solvent and

Page 13 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

energy positive, and that substantial work would be needed to develop an ecosystem supporting

fast, cheap public transportation.

Ahlborn and co-founder Bibop Gresta accepted the challenge:

HTT would be a technology licensing company providing solutions that are technical,

marketing, and a series of tools to create a hyperloop. We are not going to build. We are

rarely going to be involved directly in the design-and-build. We will be a provider of

solutions in R&D and project management in the implementation of the project. Our

project management approach will be a local approach with a global mind; nation by

nation we will identify local partners. [Gresta]

Together they developed a business model for the company which was to engage the world

in a movement of passionate engineers, designers, programmers, lawyers, marketers,

videographers, people with connections to government agencies, people with ideas, research and

development labs, universities, engineering firms and more.

Our model is the unique opportunity of contribution…We have $60M in assets through

work, through land, through pumps, travel around the world, companies paying us to

hear us speak which is financing our business development; if we need a simulator we

use the university; if we need a wind chamber, we have 11 available to us. We are trying

to use resources that exist instead of creating new ones. It’s for improving this planet. It’s

not philosophical and hippie. We are building this hyperloop in a different way for the

solution of humanity. Our model implies coopetition with external partners. If we are

successful we open a new path. We can inspire others to embrace and dig into this.

[Gresta]

In their vision, this notion of involving others in changing the world of transportation is not

only inspiring but essential.

“I looked at why 100’s of prior ‘hyperloop-like’ projects have failed. They failed because

they were dependent on one company of one person. So, we need to build a movement not

dependent on a single person.” [Ahlborn]

As of December 2017, HTT’s organization consists of approximately 800 individuals, some

of which are working independently in exchange for stock options and others are working with

44 industry-leading companies who are partnering in exchange for stock options. There are

minimal cash transfers. The work is primarily virtual (except when conducting in-field feasibility

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tests), but takes advantage of in-person conversations when members of the executive board

travel to locations where external contributors and partners reside.

The core of HTT are the external contributors who have signed a contributor agreement with

a minimum 10 hour/week commitment in exchange for stock options. These contributors vary

broadly across professional disciplines including people from engineering (representing a wide

swath of industries and all subspecialties), project management, business development, human

resources, social media, videography, marketing, legal, financial, government relations, and

construction. While the contributors number 800 people, about 300 are actively working on

issues at any moment, conducting the work of preparing proposals, meeting customer

requirements, research and development, marketing, and management. Contributors are from all

over the world, doing their work typically in addition to their formal, more traditional, jobs.

Additionally, there is a broader set of thousands of contributors who come to HTT via social

media and who completely self-determine how much time they want to contribute and what they

want to contribute with no promise of stock options; these contributors have led to discovery of

new ideas, new knowledge, social media recognition, business opportunities, and designs.

Data Collection

In the tradition of engaged scholarship (Van de Ven, 2007), we combined an ethnography

with a series of interviews and private and public data on HTT. The first two authors joined HTT

for 18 months on a ten-hour per week basis and are assigned to the global operations group as

experts on virtual collaboration and crowdsourcing. At the point of their onboarding, HTT rolled

out an enterprise collaboration tool (Facebook @ Work, FB@W, rebranded by Facebook as

Workplace in 2016) for which they became administrators, as well as serving as the liaison

between engineering and global operations. This involved attending 80 engineering design and

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operations meetings. In addition, they conducted repeated semi-structured interviews with 15

team leaders and five other engineering team members, as well as seven interviews with the CEO

(five lasted an hour, one three hours, and one five hours). They used a structured interview guide

including questions about reasons why individuals were involved in HTT, status of work, and

issues of concern. Finally, the research team reviewed all 4,000 posts to the FB@W

collaboration site. Table 1 provides an overview of the data sources.

------------Insert Table 1 About Here----------------

Data Analysis

We started our analysis by examining HTT’s organization design. For guidance, we used the

literature on challenges of organization design – the challenges all organizations must address to

support their existence. Here, we found it useful initially to follow Puranam and colleagues’

(2014) classification of task division, task allocation, incentives/rewards, coordination, and

decision-making for exceptions (Table 2 includes a summary of this assessment). Drawing on

this framework as a lens, we tried to identify the design choices that allowed HTT to operate at

the fruitful intersection of addressing uncertainty by leveraging a contributor community. Other

relevant work, especially Fjeldstad et al. (2012), was integrated the further we moved into the

interpretation of the data.

Our intuition from early conversations about HTT was that HTT’s design seemed to be

different from those previously described organizations making use of crowd-based actors. We

elaborated this view through repeated discussions with HTT leadership, in which the first two

authors, based on their initial notes, inquired about features of HTT’s organization design. We

then compared these features, individually and as a set, with existing literature describing related

phenomena (as reflected in Table 2), similar to cross-case comparisons (Yin, 2014).

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-----------Insert Table 2 about here-----------------

To refine our understanding, and to follow good practice for qualitative work (Denzin &

Lincoln, 1998; Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013), the two authors involved with HTT discussed

their insights with the authors who were not. These discussions took place in person and

electronically, and facilitated by the iterative drafting and discussion of working papers

expressing preliminary findings. The team shared these drafts with HTT to ensure accuracy.

Proceeding in the above way, we became increasingly able to build bridges to existing

theory and enter a process of abductive reasoning (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013; Peirce, 1878).

That is, we combined our increasingly refined observation of HTT with established logics of

organization design (as also described in our literature review) to derive a novel explanation of

how organizations may operate differently when leveraging high uncertainty by exploiting near-

zero information cost. We believe that the following offers the “best” explanation of the data, but

we also acknowledge that other scholars might look at the same data and find a different best

solution (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013: 73). We look forward to other interpretations, but also offer

that our hybrid team (two authors involved with the organization and data collection, and two not

– as well as our editor and reviewers), helped in mitigating interpretive bias.

FINDINGS

We found that HTT’s organization design showed considerable overlap between the five

dimensions identified by Puranam and colleagues (2014). Accordingly, we collapsed the

dimensions into the classic two fundamental organizational design challenges of labor division

(i.e., task division and allocation) and integration of effort (i.e., information and reward

provision, to which we also add exception management). Below we describe the findings with

respect to the two aggregate dimensions, summarizing them in Table 3. To distinguish between

Page 17 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

data obtained from the sources and our interpretations, we have put data in single-spaced italics,

indicating the source or set of sources.

-----------------------------Insert Table 3 about here---------------------------

Division of Labor

There is an overwhelming amount of work that needs to be accomplished for HTT to

develop a financially and environmentally sustainable hyperloop-based transportation system.

The list of work, as compiled from a range of documents and interviews, includes:

• Negotiating with governments and regulators to allow a “flying” device using magnetic

levitation and support initial costs of building one, as well as developing a new system of

regulations with governments since the hyperloop is neither a plane nor a train.

• Developing a range of technologies such as the hyperloop itself to meet the specifications

of being locally maintainable, safe, customer-centric, componentized to fit with different

nation needs, and low-cost; developing complementary products such as special steel and

windows to absorb impact; developing algorithms such as those for engineering the best

routes for the hyperloop in any nation undertaking a feasibility study; and integrating

alternative sources of energy to minimize the costs of operating the hyperloop.

• Developing organizational practices and information systems for managing a large

population of interested and contributing parties.

• Encouraging societal acceptance of transport through a tube.

• Developing alternatives for the “last mile” between the hyperloop station and final

destination.

• Convincing an entire ecosystem of insurers, construction companies, and transportation

companies to collaborate and reuse for sustainability rather than design and develop

from scratch.

• Developing and brokering licensing deals.

To execute on this work, a variety of organizational structures have been proposed over

time, with the latest shown in Figure 2. In this circular figure, the larger community of people

interested in the hyperloop provide the “talent pool” to staff “sprints” of short-duration. Sprints

are projects conducted within the purview of one or more specialty teams managed by “heads”

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(also called hyperleaders) who are associated with one of six divisions in the company:

engineering, marketing, legal, operations, finance, and digital. There is a multi-person strategic

committee which generally does not engage in day-to-day activities, consisting of the CEO,

Chairman, and Chief of Global Operations.

-------------Insert Figure 2 about here -------------

There have been many conversations among HTT contributors about how all the work that

needs to be done should be divided into tasks. A variety of different approaches have been used

including the sprints described above, posting narrowly defined micro-tasks, announcements to

the community of broad sets of needs, and no announcements at all allowing community

members to do what they thought best. We outline below HTT’s labor division design in terms

of three insights: how tasks are designed and selected, how cross-task work is managed, and how

tasks are actually given to HTT from the external community.

How tasks are designed and selected. The current approach for those within the formal

contributor boundaries, where legal agreements have been signed and contributors are working

in exchange for stock options, is to design tasks and projects collaboratively. Tasks are

considered open-ended problems to be solved such that they require multiple perspectives, but

there is no agreement on the scope of a task. Some tasks are quite broadly scoped such as “CFD”

(run some computational fluid dynamics analysis) while others are quite narrowly scoped such

as: “take a look at this beta software and let us know about the user interface.” About a year

ago, several agile software consultants became contributors, bringing a partnership with the

Trello agile software product, and offered to help teams keep track of their task lists more

effectively on a Trello board. One of the learnings shared by the consultants was that the

definition of a task differed to a great extent between the teams.

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Each team is responsible for its own board. Teams can setup the board any way they like

and they can change their board any way they like. In general, a board should be setup

with a prioritized backlog list on the far left which the team can use to pull tasks from. To

the right of the backlog list are usually a blocked list, an in-progress list and a completed

list. Note that teams can add lists as appropriate for them. During each team meeting it is

important that each task on the board is discussed. Tasks should flow across the board to

the completed list. If tasks are not flowing, they are blocked or no work is being done or

the tasks are too large to complete and need to be decomposed. Hope this helps.

[Hyperleader on FB@W]

Contributors are encouraged to collaboratively suggest new tasks for their own teams, either

on the Trello board or on FB@W, as well as tasks that could be done by contributors not on their

own team, and listed on FB@W. Examples from FB@W include:

• Hey HTT..,we have an urgent video shoot at the Design Studio tomorrow. I need a few

able body folks to help me carry gear and help with general PA stuff. Please message

me ASAP.

• To anyone in the crowd: There is a Facebook at Work API for the social graph. Can

anyone from this wonderful crowd of ours help us with this?

• To the Energy storage team only, we need to identify potential partners for low-cost,

high-storage, and small batteries for energy storage.

For HTT, collaboratively suggesting or designing tasks means that once a suggestion has

been made, if someone is willing to respond to perform the task, then the task has been designed

and allocated! If the task takes more than 20 hours of someone’s time, then a “project” is created.

Example projects include: “Design the geometry of the capsule,” and “Develop a software

platform that creates routes from point A to point B with a variety of parameters specified.”

We were able to note several reasons why HTT evolved this approach to task division. First,

they found that narrowly defined micro-tasks often became obsolete within a matter of hours or

days in such a high-change environment. For example, a task of “having someone translate a

drawing into a 3-D CAD tool” changed when a new partner stepped in to offer a new 3D CAD

tool to use. Second, tasks that were too narrowly defined did not allow sufficient innovativeness

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to provide both value to HTT and sufficient responsibility for contributors to take the time to

review the quality of their own work:

When I tried to precisely tell a contributing partner how I wanted the video to look, it

came out in a way I didn’t like it. Then I found a different contributing partner who is

more creative and we collaborated about the storyboard and they provided some real

strong creative input and the marketing video is much better [Chief Marketing Officer]

Not standardizing the meaning, scope, and definition of tasks seems to allow for much more

flexibility about requests for needs to be filled by the crowd. For example, in response to the

interview question: “What are your engineering needs?” responses were quite varied:

• specific skills (e.g., “ability to do dynamic flow analysis”),

• actions (“people to input CAD models”), and

• roles (e.g., “systems engineer”).

Moreover, this flexibility was embraced by the strategic committee since it allowed for the

creation of multiple competing projects! If contributors identified an approach to solving a

problem that was quite different from the approach being followed by an existing team, a new

team was created, competing against the existing team. This allowed for parallel exploration to

occur, leveraging both the abundant knowledge supply as well as the need to consider alternative

breakthroughs in an uncertain environment. Initially, contributors were taken aback by having

“to compete” within their own organization, but over time, the value of having multiple design

teams for various problems has proven itself as some approaches ended up providing a better

match to supplier and/or customer interests.

When announcements of new tasks are posted on FB@W, they are responded to extremely

quickly—often within an hour. For example, in the screenshot below (Figure 3), the original

request was made at 10:47am, with a response by 11AM!

----Insert Figure 3 about here ----

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No one, even contributors assigned to a particular team, is directed to perform a task; the

tasks are just laid out (e.g., using a Trello board or FB@W or an email or a WhatsApp message)

and then contributors indicate their willingness to complete the task. Initially, contributors

assigned to a team were encouraged to only sign up for tasks within their own team. However,

that expectation has evolved so that both the executive team and hyperleaders no longer feel they

own the individual team members’ time. This enables any contributor to commit to any task that

is posted.

One consequence of allowing anyone to commit to any posted task is the surprises about

who commits to perform which tasks. For example, one member who originally joined HTT to

help teams adopt the agile development methodology, later contributed to engineering the

propulsion system. Why?

“Because I am interested in reducing road blocks across the design and I thought I might

have something to contribute.”

This openness to have work accomplished by unanticipated contributors is a prized aspect of

the catalyst nature of HTT. Hyperleaders and at least one member of each team are professional

specialists on the team’s topic (for example, the hyperleader for the capsule is someone who has

engineered fuselages for airplanes in the past and thus is extremely expert at designing capsules).

Consequently, if someone less expert on the topic is interested in joining the team, this is

welcomed. This diversity allows for the incorporation of new ideas and perspectives into the

design discussions, as illustrated in the example above with the agile development consultant

joining a propulsion system team.

This openness to pleasant surprises is particularly important given the interdependencies and

multi-dimensional aspects of the hyperloop technology and transportation ecosystem (e.g.,

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political, technical, geographic, social, regulatory, financial, as well as engineering, project

management, risk reduction, and construction). The executive team and hyperleaders have

increasingly supported the need for unplanned cross-fertilization across teams and specialties:

Every tiny change in one area has implications for other areas. For example, if change in

size of door, this has implications for vacuum team, pod team, interior design, electrical,

mechanical, etc. [report by contributor on interviews with hyperleaders]

Consequently, managing the interdependencies across tasks has become a significant focus of the

organizational design.

Managing across tasks. HTT’s executive team envisioned early on to use agile project

management techniques (agilemanifesto.org), even though agile methods are generally used for

tasks which can be micro-managed such as standard software development rather than highly

interconnected, complex, and uncertain tasks (Dybå & Dingsøyr, 2008). They had hoped to

institute short three-week sprint tasks focused on an engineering design problem but found: “The

three-week sprints don’t work” [Co-Founder]. One reason for why they do not work appears to

be that it is difficult to define a do-able three-week sprint such the tasks are sufficiently

independent and require relatively little knowledge of what has transpired before the start of the

sprint. If the actors were full-time, the intensity of a three-week collaborative effort might be

feasible.

Instead of three-week sprints, contributors appear to prefer structured weekly

teleconferences so that they can plan their busy full-time, non-HTT, work schedules around one-

week sprints. During the teleconferences, contributors enjoy engaging in a collaborative design

effort, as well as discussions to identify engineering issues that need resolution, and alternatives

for resolution. They then volunteer to explore the alternatives over the course of the week before

the next teleconference. While the engineers tend to use FB@W to keep others informed of their

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progress during the week, other parts of the organization, including the executive team do not,

preferring less open and more controlled communication tools of email, Slack (another internet-

based messaging system), and WhatsApp (a texting tool)

Tasks Given to HTT From External Community. Instead of tasks being defined by HTT

and assigned to the external community to perform, HTT does the opposite. The external

community of 30,000-50,000 on various social media sites frequently identifies tasks – as

opportunities - for the HTT executive team to perform. These tasks, as compiled from a series of

interviews with the Strategic Committee include:

• Specific opportunities for executive team members to speak at conferences about HTT.

For example, Gresta was invited to give a keynote speech to a global entrepreneur forum

in India, an invitation which was made possible by local people in India interested in

HTT. “It turned out to be about 14 people locally. We asked them to notify the media, and

then to help us make appointments with relevant government officials while we were

there. They did this because they would like a hyperloop in India; they didn’t receive

stock for their time.”

• Scheduling meetings for the HTT executive team with high-level government officials

including prime ministers and directors of transportation. An inquiry from a community

member about the possibility of meeting with officials in Toulouse, France led eventually

to the negotiation of a major hyperloop test track, land, and an R&D center situated in

the booming industrial park of Toulouse.

• Early-stage technology developments to be pursued for incorporation into hyperloop

development. The exclusive license which HTT is using to power its hyperloop started

with an inquiry posted by a community member.

• Suggestions for companies to partner with. Some of the companies that HTT is partnering

with today came about because someone in the community suggested that HTT contact

the company because the potential partner is doing some work that would be relevant to

HTT and, a partnership would result in mutually beneficial outcomes.

While only those speaking engagements that occur in a strategic area of interest are responded to,

most of the other inquiries are almost always at least initially examined.

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Integration of Effort

For Puranam et al. (2014), integration refers to how contributors are motivated and provided

the necessary information to perform their work in a coordinated fashion (see also Malone &

Crowston, 1994). We find that HTT integrates by using a variety of design elements, many of

which alone are not novel, but together help create a highly fluid organizational design. We

highlight these elements in Table 3, with examples from HTT’s approach to their talent pool,

culture, on-boarding and engagement practices.

Talent pool. Apparent from Figure 2 is the importance of the talent pool. The talent pool

refers not to people, but the relational networks, skills, passion, and commitment available to

HTT. The CMO has coined the phrase: “What we need are people who have Talent + Passion +

Responsibility” [emphasis from the original]. The larger external community provides talent in

the manner of tasking described above: of providing opportunities for introductions to CEOs,

investors, government officials, speaking engagements, and regulatory agencies. The smaller,

core crowd of contributors are those who have been on-boarded and signed the contractual stock

option agreement. These contributors – either as individuals or as representatives of partnering

organizations – are charged with executing on the opportunities provided by the larger

community. Such activities include designing the hyperloop and ancillary technologies, writing

proposals and marketing collateral, sharing design specifications back and forth with

collaborating companies, and providing the “boots on the ground” to accomplish feasibility

studies and testing. This requires professionals who feel responsible for the success of the

community, rather than just an organization. In the words of one member: “the people you meet

at HTT are absolutely amazing: smart, hard-working, committed, creative, fun, and passionate—

just the people I love to hang around with online and off.”

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There has been no problem in obtaining resumes. Estimates from the CEO, Chief Operating

Officer, and Human Resources Director, indicate an average of 100 resumes are submitted every

week, either via LinkedIn or to one of the company’s websites. There are triggers that tend to

spark an influx of resumes: Executive speaking engagements, recruiters/contributors who look

for specific talent defined by the executives, and advertisements on online job markets such as

AngelList. The challenge comes in matching the resumes to HTT’s organization culture and the

available opportunities.

Culture. Over time, HTT contributors helped to create the company’s mission and values

statements, as shown in Figure 4.

-----Insert Figure 4 about here -----

The vision of moving humanity forward is meant to signify that HTT is concerned first and

foremost with the passenger, not with the technology or stock market or investor value.

Delivering the next breakthrough is intentionally chosen to indicate that HTT is a technology

licensing company, intent on continuing to develop technologies associated with, and ancillary

to, the hyperloop. The core values emphasize the nature of the people they want in the

organization; people who don’t “sit on the sidelines but instead make things happen,” take

responsibility for professionalism in their work, don’t just dream but engage in doing, recognize

that HTT is a passionate movement rather than just a company, and solve problems that require a

vision of tomorrow and collaboration today. We summarize the culture these statements

exemplify into four essential elements: 1) being extremely collaborative when disruptive, 2)

being willing to take the initiative without knowing if it will bear fruit for the organization or

oneself, 3) working as part of a proliferating potpourri of largely self-governing teams with

uncertain interdependent elements between the teams, and 4) knowing how to catalyze others to

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perform tasks in a context in which many tasks are self-selected. This four-part culture is a direct

function of the environment in which HTT operates.

The first element—intense collaborative disruption—is needed as a check-and-balance on

disruptive ideas. If one contributor offers an idea that is too disruptive for the organization, the

collaboration required to bring that idea to fruition will help to smooth out some of the

disruptiveness of the idea. The following example of intense collaborative disruption comes from

a series of interactions via FB@W between the first author and the Hyperleader responsible for

Engineering Integration:

One contributor interested in organizational design suggested that the engineering

department be reorganized into project management and R&D so that those

engineers interested in project management could be engaged in that discipline

and those interested in R&D could be engaged in the R&D activities. Since several

engineering hyperleaders agreed, plans were made to disrupt the organization to

make the change. Then, unexpectedly, an opportunity surfaced to conduct a

hyperloop feasibility study for a government. During the feasibility study, both

project management and R&D engineering became quite intertwined, making it

clear that such a bifurcation of engineering would not have been a good idea.

Consequently, the idea was not pursued further.

The second cultural element—being willing to take initiative without knowing if it will bear

fruit for the organization or oneself—is needed since there are so many uncertainties and the

organization must be responsive to changes in market and technology conditions, that an

initiative which seems worthy at one point, may no longer be needed at another and vice versa.

The first author compiled the following example over several months based on initial

engineering design meetings, and then repeated interviews with several members of the

engineering team over time.

The engineering R&D team took the initiative to develop the hyperloop design

on the assumption that the capsule will be run through concrete tubes because

ultimately there would not be enough steel to create all the tubes in the world.

The engineers spent considerable time analyzing the safety, risk, cost and

feasibility of concrete tubes under varying environmental conditions. Most

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recently, the CEO announced the completion of a successful negotiation with

a steel company in Spain to deliver steel tubes to Toulouse in exchange for

stock options. The R&D engineers had to be willing to immediately pivot to

consider the possibility that sometimes the tube will be built in steel and other

times will be built with concrete.

Since the hyperloop design is intended to be a “glocal” technology customizable to each

nation and thus a platform spawning a pluralistic suite of products, the R&D efforts for the

concrete tube may be useful later. Initially, the ability to embrace such pivoting was a difficult

cultural element for many HTT contributors since it often meant that their most recent work felt

unappreciated.

The third cultural component— working as part of a proliferating potpourri of largely self-

governing teams with uncertain interdependent elements between the teams —is needed because

there are so many interdependent components of the hyperloop transportation industry still under

development. Below, two examples illustrate this cultural component:

• Safety regulations for the hyperloop are being developed as technologies are being

developed and as estimates of risk are being developed. Since there is no experience

of a vacuum-sealed tube transporting passengers at high speed, analogs to high-

speed rail and airplanes are often used. Therefore, engineers on the safety team are

often interfacing with the regulatory team. [compiled from interviews with the Safety

Hyperleader]

• Passenger Experience. The paramount emphasis on passenger experience permeates

most aspects of the design. Some of the basic passenger experience principles being

pursued include completely electronic and seamless experience with the passenger’s

“time never wasted” [Gresta]. Therefore, capsules need to be designed not just for

comfort but various passenger use cases from working to purchasing. Such a capsule

design affects the way seats are oriented. The orientation of seats affects the speed of

egress and ingress into the capsule. Designing the station for a 10-second time

window between capsules coming in and leaving the station is affected by this speed

of egress/ingress. If capsules are leaving every 10 seconds, do passengers even need

tickets in advance? If passengers are using non-hyperloop means to arrive at the

station (such as Uber or Lyft), is there a way to integrate with these others to allow a

seamless enriched journey from the time of thinking about a trip to the time of travel,

and thinking about the next trip? [compiled from interviews with Station Team

member and co-founder Gresta]

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These interdependencies are not unusual in complex engineering efforts. To handle the

interdependencies, integration standards are often created, specifying design assumptions such as

the weight, speed, or energy load allowed (see Boeing 777, for example, Thomke and Fujimoto

2000). However, with HTT, enforcement of integration standards may remove a market

opportunity. So, every team must design to assumptions about what might be feasible integration

standards. This can cause frustration. In the words of one engineering contributor:

If we don’t know details about this component, we cannot make certain design

assumptions, and unless we can make these design assumptions, we cannot move forward

with the design of other components.

However, instead of enforcing integration standards, the executive team repeatedly responded to

these frustrations by encouraging the engineers to move forward in designing to the very general

specifications of the hyperloop, but not to be constrained by integration standards. This

approach, while unusual for engineering, has allowed HTT to be quite flexible in quickly

meeting different client requires for feasibility proposals. In other words, each client creates its

own requirements which force temporary integration standards, which then lead to rapidly

configuring the more general design for the specific client, as a form of just-in-time engineering.

The fourth cultural element—knowing how to catalyze others to perform tasks in a context

in which many tasks are self-selected—is needed because the company’s talent pool is not

required to perform any specific task. The Chief Marketing Officer notes:

This is a very important element in our organization. The traditional carrot/stick model

does not work. How do we keep our contributors and community enthused? How do you

ensure there's a sense of purpose and responsibility?

Even though contributors receive stock options in exchange for the work, they exhibit a

substantial amount of free will in self-selecting contributions and tasks to perform. The self-

selection nature of the contributions means that contributors often need to be sold on the personal

Page 29 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

value of a task and the value of the task for the organization. A compilation of posts on FB@W

provide two illustrate examples of the need to catalyze others to accept tasks:

• On FB@W, requests were made repeatedly for individuals to contribute to a central

project management document. Few responded. However, once an upcoming

feasibility study was announced and the connection to the central project

management document was made explicit, contributors quickly added their work to

the document.

• On FB@W, contributors often post media reports about competitors. At one point, a

contributor posted a media report announcing a successful public test of a hyperloop

component by a competitor. Over a several day period, contributors shared on

FB@W and during weekly teleconferences and emails concerns about the

implications for HTT’s success in such a competitive marketplace. Finally, the CEO

posted on FB@W a message indicating the downsides of the competitor’s technology

and explained how HTT was still ahead of the competitor. This post helped to

redirect the contributors back to focusing on the work, rather than discussing the

competition.

The posting of new tasks has, therefore, increasingly been accompanied by a justification

of the need for the task. Clearly, tasks requested by the CEO or Chief Global Operations Officer

are more likely to be self-selected, but since tasks can be suggested by anyone at any time in

response to any opportunity, the importance of justification for catalyzing others to engage in

posted tasks has now become part of the culture.

Onboarding. Hiring and onboarding at HTT are challenging because professional specialists

need to be collaboratively disruptive, willing to offer new projects, and spend time selling

projects to others. Once an HR director was hired by HTT, attention was placed on ensuring that

recruiting, screening, and onboarding were identifying people to sign the contributor agreement

who represented the best fit. An example of how the application and onboarding process evolved

is described below based on a compilation of observations of the changes in the onboarding site

over time, and interviews with the HR director:

The application process has evolved from requesting resumes to coupling

resumes with short answers about the precise nature of the contribution the

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contributor wants to make and why the contributor believes she can work in

such an environment. Once hired, the new hire self-certifies through an

online self-guided process of reading about the company and its culture. The

new hire is then assigned to a hyperleader who is asked to monitor the new

hire’s behavior and offer mentoring.

Keeping contributors engaged. Once hired and assigned to a hyperleader, new contributors

often look for guidance rather than jumping on a task described in a teleconference.

Consequently, as more contributors come onboard, hyperleaders (many of whom are 10-hour a

week contributors) have the increasing responsibility for not just meeting milestones in their

functional discipline (marketing, human resources, engineering, etc.), but also for assigning tasks

to new hires. Often these tasks require training—on HTT’s tools, current design state and

assumptions, HTT’s culture, and the proper network of other contributors to ask questions. This

takes time. There is some discussion as to whether hyperleaders need to become full-time to

manage contributors, but there is also acknowledgment that this might come at a cost of losing

hyperleaders who can only work part-time (given many of them are employed full-time in

traditional organizations).

Standards and procedures. Since HTT’s mission is to collaboratively disrupt by catalyzing

change, HTT provides incentives for collaborative disruption in a variety of ways: converting

part-time contributors to full-time paid staff if desired, publicly recognizing collaborative work

well-done and achievements that are good for the larger organization, and encouraging

contributors to take initiative to design the organization as they would like to see it work, rather

than looking to senior management as drivers of organizational change.

Designing procedures for an organization like HTT is not simple. Standardization is difficult

because each person is working with the language of their own tools, country, business, and

discipline, and sometimes substantially different views of what a new transportation system

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might look like. All this variation means that processes and procedures need to be more of

“guardrails,” a term used in agile project management (e.g., Sutherland & Sutherland, 2014)

rather than rigid ways of working. Creating guardrails that are acceptable to others takes time

(and the attention of the Cultural Director and the head of HR). This means procedures such as

certain reporting guardrails about how much time contributors should spend on a task in

exchange for a stock option have taken longer to create, waiting for sufficient socialization

among contributors. Despite the guardrail indicating that FB@W should be used for

collaboration, FB@W is still minimally used by the executive team, marketing, and business

development. This allowance of personal preferences in performing the work is part of this

concept of collaborative disruption: if others are not ready, then it will not happen.

DISCUSSION

In this paper, we set out to describe how an organization could manage, and even gain from,

uncertainty by deploying an organizational design that leverages an environment of near-zero

information cost. We described how HTT learned to design itself to accomplish its broad mission

of creating a movement for sustainable transportation. The primary contribution of our paper is

hence HTT itself; an organization that operates as a crowd-sourced ecosystem capable of

proactively leading and reacting to the development of new technology and ecosystems. We

label HTT a “catalyst organization” because it serves as a platform to catalyze new technologies,

new business connections among contributors, and the creation of a new market and ecosystem.

It is the largest crowd-sourced startup, with a community of followers numbering over 50,000.

The many contracts it has acquired and the state of its development—accomplished primarily

with the labor of part-time professionals in exchange for stock options—is unprecedented. Next,

we summarize the core aspects of this novel organization design and then derive implications for

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theory and practice in research on search, organization design, and communities.

The Catalyst Organization: A Novel Organization Design for Innovative Search

As argued by Puranam et al. (2014), many of the emerging organizational designs are simply

novel bundles of old solutions to age-old challenges of organizational design. We believe HTT is

more than that. First, the age-old challenges are based on a notion of efficient operations (which

drives the need to differentiate by task and then hierarchically or laterally integrate). But, in a

context of near-zero cost external knowledge supply, efficiency is a less important driver of

design. Second, the distinctions of the five challenges presume their value for analyzing new

organizational form and yet the interdependencies among the five challenges suggest that new

sets of challenges may better capture the realities of the catalyst organization. Third, the classic

design solutions to differentiation and integration - which fundamentally focus on achieving

organizational goals through a hierarchy defining tasks, rewards, and information flow - places

people in a responsive passive role. But, under conditions of such significant market and

technological uncertainty, coupled with a virtually infinite potential supply of external

knowledge, people’s choices to make offerings to the firm become much more of the defining

role in the design.

The resources people can offer HTT are not just knowledge, but range from networks to

hardware supplies, from time to attention, from existing skills to willingness to learn new skills.

This creates an ever-changing structure, hierarchy, and workforce. The stability comes from the

firm having a clear vision developed not by the founder but by a flow of contributors having

frequent catalyzing experiences, a volume of opportunities presenting themselves, a volume of

people offering their resources, a number of commons for sharing resource needs and

availability, and crossable layers of commitment levels so that the organization and contributors

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can adjust to changing demands.

This new form is therefore not based on the design solutions to the differentiation and

integration challenges. It is neither promoted 1) classically as tasks being divided and allocated,

and hierarchy integrating across the task divisions, nor 2) aligned with current views of emerging

designs as self-organizing. A classic differentiation and integration design would create too

much filtering and delays in the ability to quickly and proactively engage in the huge range of

unforeseen opportunities presented by an uncertain environment, as well as capture unforeseen

offerings of passion, resources, skill, and time from the low-cost supply of external knowledge.

A pure self-organizing design with standardized practices such as used with Wikipedia also

would not work because the process for achieving the mission is too unpredictable.

Therefore, we suggest a new organizational form – which we refer to as a catalyst

organization – which is needed explicitly because the intention of the organization is to engage

as many opportunities as possible across a broad uncertain and evolving market and technology

landscape using an abundant supply of external knowledge and resources available at a low-cost.

At the most fundamental level, this new organizational form (1) uses non-modular task division

and allocation to create limitless options, and (2) integrates work in a manner that allows for

continuous exploration even in the face of the need to produce. It is these differences which

allow HTT to operate effectively at the intersection of environmental uncertainty and potential

engagement from an almost limitless community of contributors.

As we show in Table 4 below, HTT also differs from Fjeldstad et al.’s (2012) actor-oriented

organization design. Apparent in this comparison is that HTT is not easily characterized as

exclusively an actor-oriented design, although it has elements of such a design. Instead of

decomposing tasks, there is a substantial amount of opportunity-to-available resource matching

Page 34 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

distinctions that surface as projects unfold, and in which the distinctions are not simply in

different types of skills, but also in different levels of commitment, different objects of passion,

and non-overlapping relational networks that can be brought to bear. Instead of direct control and

exchange, there is an attempt at orchestration that is not done by any single conductor, but rather

by those committed to completing a project. Instead of standardized protocols, there are

“guardrails” allowing individuals substantial discretion within broad direction. Instead of basing

coordination on dynamic lateral relationships, there are multiple different coordination

mechanisms in use at the same time. In sum, the novelty of HTT’s catalyst organization design

may be most easily understood when described as a passion-driven, dynamic movement

organized to create and capture an almost unlimited supply of unanticipatable opportunities

through the supply of low-cost and highly specialized knowledge. While Wikipedia and open

source development projects are movements, their organizations are not intended to create

unanticipatable opportunities. While Oticon (Foss, 2003), Blade.com (Fjeldstad et al., 2012), and

R&D teams (Ben-Menaham et al., 2016) are organizations looking for opportunities, they are not

drawing on the contributions of external actors.

----Insert Table 4 About Here ------

HTT stands out even when examined in the logic of real options where a few technological

pathways are explored in parallel (Adner & Levinthal, 2008; Gruber, MacMillan, & Thompson,

2013). Given the abundance of potential contributors, in principle, HTT can explore a sheer

limitless amount of parallel ideas, as long as there are individuals interested in executing them.

At the same time, this dynamic mandates that HTT not prescribe the precise way in which things

are done. Put differently, HTT cannot dictate a modular task division because it cannot precisely

predict what the right task division is (Reetz & MacAulay, 2017). In addition, modularization in

Page 35 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

the hope for skill-matched self-selection should also not be an aim, as it is not foreseeable

precisely which talents will be required. Rather, HTT can be continuously informed about

potential avenues for further development when contributors decide to embark on them, or when

new knowledge enters the organization through its many connections to the outside world.

To integrate these dispersed external contributions, the catalyst design needs to incentivize

as well as react to discoveries which may fundamentally alter the way HTT should operate. HTT

seems to have set up a structure which is continuously able to adapt. The work, and who does it,

is emergent. Given uncertainty, it is important that a continuous process of discovery and

disruption is kept in motion. By providing team- and community-level incentives, and by

relegating information dependencies to the team level, HTT can foster diversity in the

explorative efforts undertaken. The large amount of available slack (interested contributors)

sustains these efforts. Furthermore, HTT explicitly reminds contributors that “we all are

disrupters” -- contributors are constantly challenged, and evaluated on, their ability to generate

new proposals and suggestions for implementation. A Cultural Director, who has taken on a role

of sharing to all HTT contributors descriptions of other companies known for disruptions,

facilitates this. At the same time, the relatively stable onion structure and the official cultural

guardrails ensure that some control/agency over the development and integration is kept by HTT.

We think that the catalyst organization may become a template to create organization

designs for contexts like HTT’s: where uncertainty is high and systemic, and for which a large

contributor base can be activated at near zero knowledge acquisition costs. For example, such a

design may prove fruitful for organizations tackling wicked problems (e.g., Rittel & Webber,

1973) or grand societal challenges (e.g., George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016),

which will also feature difficult-to-foresee interdependencies as well as large communities of

Page 36 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

potential contributors.

At the same time, we do not claim that the catalyst organization is an optimal organization

design. Rather, we suggest that is well-functioning in the setting we have identified, and call for

future research to identify not only (in line with our above suggestions) other settings in which

this design may be suitable, but also to inquire more generally which shifting boundary

conditions (see also: Gulati et al., 2012) would impact the efficacy of this model.

Implications for Theories of Organization Design

HTT’s non-modularity of task division may have implications for work on organization

design more broadly than the description of a new organizational form. If it is true that we are

moving toward a gig economy (see: Barley et al., 2017), where a temporary workforce with, at

best, weak organizational affiliation or commitment assumes temporary responsibility for tasks,

task division becomes the pivotal point of contact. So far, as we have noted, the literature on

organization design argues that modularity is essential to engage volunteers (Afuah & Tucci,

2012; MacCormack et al., 2006). Yet, as observers of organizational design, we must remind

ourselves of the equally well-known research showing that broader job responsibilities lead to

more perceived meaningfulness in work (Hackman & Oldham, 1980) and job satisfaction

(Wood, Veldhoven, Croon, & De Menezes, 2012). Broader job responsibilities may also be

aligned with the preferences of millennials (Ng & McGinnis, 2015). Therefore, research on

organization design will need to consider not just the design of the organization, but the design

and meaningfulness of the broader ecosystem. That is, instead of thinking of organization design

as focused on tasks as requirements for individual or group performance, our understanding may

be deepened if volunteers could not just pick from a set of well-defined tasks, but even partake in

designing and redesigning the tasks themselves as conditions and contexts change (Oldham &

Page 37 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

Hackman 2010).

HTT’s form of integration—to focus on time, skills, commitments, actions, and passion of

people to disrupt, learn, and instill learning in others – instead of coordinate, control (Fjeldstad et

al. 2012), and execute tasks —may increasingly be expected of 21

century organizations.

Instead of having funding rounds, we might foresee that 21

century organizations such as HTT

have talent and commitment layers and rounds (Applegate, Griffith, & Majchrzak, 2017), where

people can shift from active to inactive, from inactive to active, from not involved to onboarding,

from a community fan to active business opportunity creator. The challenge then is not growth in

a traditional sense of resource spending, or even talent acquisition, but rather catalyzing new

“bundles of energy” willing to dialectically engage with others, act rather than “sit on the

sidelines,” demonstrate passionate professionalism in everything that is done, bring personal

networks of relationships and resources to bear, learn new skills, and collaboratively disrupt the

world. In turn, this could become a fertile ground to use ideas generated in the context of catalyst

organizations to study the boundary conditions of traditional organizations.

Implications for Theories of Exploration

Classic perspectives on exploration (e.g., Simon, 1973) usually still assume organizations

and tasks to be structured around decomposable goals (Clement & Puranam, 2017; Puranam &

Swamy, 2016). While this may be true if the set of all eventual tasks is known a priori, when this

is not the case and tasks are modularized too early, the organization may end up exploring in the

wrong places (Dattée et al., 2017).

Flexibility then is needed both in how exploration is carried out and how to evaluate the

results. The specter of unlimited and broad contributors provides the ability to use contributors to

define and conduct the exploration, as well as evaluate options received. Essentially, the catalyst

Page 38 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

organization is maximizing structural ambidexterity (e.g., Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996) down to

the level of the individual opportunity and unique skill, since a sheer limitless number of real

options can be explored in parallel. Consequently, a catalyst organization offers an alternative to

one of the central premises of Afuah and Tucci (2012) about when a firm should engage in

crowdsourcing. Afuah and Tucci argue that crowdsourcing requires modularization so that

specialized actors can use their local search knowledge. Similarly, MacCormack, et al. (2006)

highlight how the open source project Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, only

took off after being modularized so that potential volunteers could identify more “chunk-size”

contributions. The alternative presented by the HTT case is that, given a sufficiently large and

diverse contributor base encouraged to collaboratively engage in the design as well as the

accomplishment of work, non-modularization will lead contributors to explore more broadly as

their worldviews collide with other worldviews—a likely prerequisite for successful explorations

under high uncertainty (Dattée et al., 2017; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009).

Implications for such a design on organizational design scholarship are many. We know

little about collaborative exploration behavior. What is the process by which seekers and solvers

co-define an exploration need to ensure disruptive thought? How are alternatives evaluated when

generated from collaborative exploration? How is the decision to stop exploring made?

Implications for Theories of Communities

The HTT case highlights how communities and formal organizations (with senior managers

and bounded legal status) are increasingly merging given zero information costs and

environmental uncertainty. Given high uncertainty, it is unclear who forms today’s periphery of

the community, and whether the notion of a periphery of a community even makes sense

anymore. With uncertainty comes the need for shifting roles, in a manner like HTT’s, where

Page 39 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

contributors can select which roles to play in the onion structure, playing multiple roles across

boundaries at the same time. Also, contributors not yet involved with the organization need to be

considered, given their potential relevance if the organization were to change. This is necessary

to avoid developing path-dependencies that would prematurely include or exclude specific

subgroups.

There is also the question of the value that catalyst organizations add to the community.

HTT is an example of a collaborative organization rooted in a desire to reuse existing resources

among contributors rather than reinventing new resources. Unlike research on collaborative

organizations (Fjeldstad et al., 2012; Snow, Håkonsson, & Obel, 2016), HTT seems to suggest

that a central organization is needed to help catalyze a larger contributor community. The

catalyst is not the supervisor of the contributor, but how the organization provides the

contributors a virtual room in which to meet, become stimulated by other’s work, make new

connections, and become energized in the talent and skills contributors have and how they can

use them for worthwhile purposes. Research questions are many, however. Why, for example,

has the notion of a hyperloop stimulated such world-wide attention? Is there a “cool factor” that

defines successful and less successfully sustained communities? Does this mean that apparently

mundane problems, like reducing mosquitos, will not be able to sustain their communities? Do

catalyst organizations redefine benefits for contributors such that contributors may be able to

receive no payment, no recognition, and no physical evidence of involvement purely in exchange

for the glow of being listened to?

Implications for Practice

Dirk Ahlborn and Bibop Gresta, HTT’s co-founders, have spent the last four years

attempting to convince CEOs, investors, and customers to adopt HTT’s organization design.

Page 40 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

They encourage executives to help employees gain an ecosystem orientation to work. They argue

that everyone has the potential to offer ideas and business opportunities, that boundaries around

organizations are simply mind games rather than realities, and that any product today is simply a

product on its way to obsolescence. While it may take a village to raise a child, it increasingly

takes worldwide communities to make societal change.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research

Our case of HTT, while offering exciting insights, also has limitations. We see both direct

next steps for future research and opportunities for these ideas to inform other streams of

research. Validation of the catalyst organizational form, and its generalizability, is of the essence.

While we identified many organizations similar to HTT on one or several dimensions (see Table

2), we could not find another organization that was the same on all of them. Future research

should strive to find and assess organizations with parallel dimensions to HTT to better

understand the interdependencies we found here. Additionally, it is crucial to study the

conditions under which organizations with a similar purpose (but different design) could be more

efficacious than HTT, and vice versa.

The context provided both strength and limitations. HTT is not simply building software (as

in open source), knowledge (as in Wikipedia), t-shirts (as in Threadless), or a one-off innovation

challenge such as promoted by InnoCentive, but rather an entire industry supporting the creation,

implementation, and ongoing service of self-sustaining public transportation. This makes HTT

unique among new organizational forms. The broad nature of the goals gives us confidence that

it is not the digital nature of the product which is driving the effects we are observing.

Consequently, our findings may translate broadly to other industries that are capital-intensive

and/or high in the importance of complementary assets. We do, however, acknowledge that it

Page 41 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

may be precisely because HTT is not just building a product, but rather an entire industry

ecosystem which may create one-time effects which could influence our results.

Finally, our findings give a renewed impetus for research trying to identify “new” forms of

organizing (Dunbar & Starbuck, 2006; Greenwood & Miller, 2010; Walsh, Meyer, &

Schoonhoven, 2006; Puranam et al., 2014). Indeed, our results highlight that new organizational

forms emerge as traditional distinctions between task division and integration become

increasingly less important than the nuances of how work gets done. We see the HTT example

challenging assumptions held in our theories, and pushing their boundary conditions.

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Table 1:

Sources of Data

Format Source Focus of Content

Interviews Hyperleaders (i.e., team heads) for engineering design:

Design Execution, Engineering Integration, Systems

Structure, Pylon Design, Tube Design, Demonstration

Project, Pod Design

Why participants joined, how they learned about HTT, goals they

hoped to accomplish, roles played in the organization, changes

seen in the organization since joining, and background on the

reasons for changes.

Hyperleaders for non-technical design: Marketing,

Human Resources, Culture, Animation, Business

Development, Media, Global Operations, Strategic

partnerships

Interviews CEO, COO Strategic vision, cultural values, expectations, progress

Organization documents

On-boarding website, contributor agreement, press

releases, press descriptions of HTT, organization chart,

HTT executive summary

Changes experienced by the organization over the 18 months

Engineering documents Design drawings, system architecture, design

assumptions, project management documents, risk

assessments, scope of work, requests for information

Reconfigurations of teams in terms of responsibilities and tasks

Observations of

teleconference meetings

Listened to 80 engineering related meetings, each lasting

between 45 - 120 minutes

Changes to how engineering is organized and reasons

Observations of posts

on the collaboration

technology

Reviewing the 4000 posts to the collaboration

technology, including events, group descriptions, likes,

chat messages, comments, replies, and votes

Focused primarily on comments related to changes in organization

design, and changes to the how the technology is used by

members

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Table 2:

Comparing Crowd-based Approaches to Innovation

Characteristic

of organizing

Knowledge Production

Crowdsourcing: Wikipedia

Innovation

tournaments:

NASA Solve

Two-Sided Crowds:

Threadless

Open Source Software:

Linux

Catalyst Organization:

HTT

Purpose Give every single person on

the planet free access to the

sum of all human knowledge.

Engage the public in

NASA innovation

Design fashionable t-

shirts

Develop free and

accessible software

Change the world

and produce corporate

revenue

Problem Clarity

& Ambiguity of

Solution

Clearly stated; no room for

interpretation: “Write an

encyclopedia that is modelled

after the Encyclopedia

Britannica.”

Clearly stated;

interpretation within

strict boundaries: “Solve

a [specific] technical

problem in space flight.”

Clearly stated;

interpretation within

strict boundaries:

“Create a t-shirt print.”

Clearly stated

interpretation within

strict boundaries:

“Program lines of code

that provide a specific

function.”

Broadly stated,

interpretation within

fuzzy boundaries:

“Develop a low-pressure

tube transportation

system.”

Task Division No centralized task division.

NASA and their

governmental partners

create the challenges

Artists submit designs;

communities score

designs

Founder provides layer 1

architecture; visible to

everyone

Broad descriptions of

tasks

Task Allocation Self-selection (based on

preferences) into articles

Self-selection (based on

skills and preferences)

into contests

Self-

selection (based on

skills and preferences)

into design submission,

feedback, and/or voting

Self-selection (based on

skills and preferences)

into coding, bug fixing,

support

Self-selection into

extended membership

pool. After vetting, self-

selection into tasks

Motivation

(Reward

Distribution)

Intrinsic motivation,

visibility within community

Mainly prizes, status, and

signalling

Artists: learning, status,

signalling, community.

Community: access to

unique goods &

engagement

Universal free access to

OSS; learning, status,

signalling, community

Stock options, passion,

intrinsic motivation

Coordination

(Information

Provision)

Through “talk page” When outcomes are

shared

Crowds and artists

vote, see votes and

feedback

Comments, forums;

source code

Guardrails, socialized

control, collaborative

technology

Exception

Management

Lateral authority for articles.

Structural decisions by firm

None (problems are one-

shot games)

Lateral authority for

challenges. Structural

decisions by firm

Founder-led hierarchy

for key tasks; lateral

authority for crowd work

Collaborative decision-

making on what is

explored.

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Table 3:

HTT Case Description

Organizational Design Challenge

HTT’s Characteristic Features

Division of Labor: Task Division,

Allocation, and Execution

•

Holistic, less modularized tasks

• Mutual agreement on task assignment

• Tasks related to entire ecosystem

• Task performers come from entire ecosystem

• Multiple competing tasks

• Use of one-week sprints for task completion

• No pre-defined task-skill matching but instead

ensuring range of skills within talent pool

• Tasks are often duplicated to get competing

viewpoints

• Tasks include environmental scanning by

contributors providing the organization with

opportunity to pivot quickly

• Community-driven micro tasks given to HTT

management

Integration of Effort: Motivating

Contributors, Coordination,

Collaboration, and Control

•

Contributors work for future stock options &

guarantee minimum 10 hrs/week

• Cultural guardrails encouraging disruption and

collaboration & movement and membership

rather than tasks and individual ideas

• Socialized control methods through collaboration

• Use of technology for socialization, coordination

& collaboration

• Part-time managers

• Control through parallel paths to see which path

is more fruitful

• Tools for collaboration

Page 45 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

Table 4:

Comparison of Catalyst Organization HTT vs. Actor-Oriented Architecture

HTT – Catalyst Organization Actor-Oriented Architecture

(examples from Fjeldstad et al.,

2012)

Organizational design is a combination of

hierarchy, bottom-up information flows, and

networks

Organizational design is focused on

dynamic lateral networks of

relationships

Hierarchy used for orchestration, not control or

coordination. Work is prioritized based on what

people and skills are present.

Direct exchange (rather than

hierarchical planning, etc.) among

the actors leads to control and

coordination

Goals are not determined through control but

through the direct exchange among the

contributors to match opportunities and

knowledge, problems and solutions, needed

actions and available free time, roles and

commitments.

“Control is the determination of

goals, the allocation of resources to

pursue them, and the monitoring of

goal fulfillment and resource use.”

p. 746

Matching of talent to goal by identifying

niches/distinctions across people in available time,

passion, knowledge, resources and identifying

distinctions in work across time, tacit knowledge

required, and resources needed

Decomposing tasks

Some decisions handled hierarchically, some

handled by default from lack of resources; division

of returns handled contractually in layers

Lateral nature of decisions regarding

projects to pursue, resources to share

and division of returns

Broad purpose with opportunities driving

dynamically created objectives

Singular specific objectives

Infrastructures that encourage actors to bring own

information, knowledge, and other resources

which are only shared in layers with rarely a single

shared situational awareness

Infrastructures of commons for

allowing “actors to access the same

information, knowledge and other

resources” for “shared situational

awareness” p. 739

Range of actor competencies with many not

setting their own goals but simply responding to

others’ calls for action.

“competent actors who have the

knowledge, information, tools and

values needed to set goals, and

assess the consequences of potential

actions for the achievement of those

goals” p. 739

Guardrails not as a code but as encouragement to

take measured initiative

“Protocols are codes of conduct used

by actors in exchange and

coordination activities” p. 739

No centralized investment in contributors but

expectation that contributors will only stay if they

Significant centralized

organizational investment by

Page 46 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

engage in learning-oriented conversations organization in long-term

development of consultants (e.g.,

Accenture)

Page 47 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

Figure 1:

Artists’ Hyperloop Renditions

Hyperloop pod traveling through vacuum tube (actual tubes are not transparent)

Hyperloop pod with augmented windows simulating external environment

Page 48 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

Figure 2:

HTT Organization Chart

Page 49 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

Figure 3

Screenshot from Facebook at Work

Page 50 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

Figure 4

Culture Statement from HTT Onboarding Documents

Vision:

We move humanity forward

Mission: Deliver the next breakthrough in transportation

Core Values:

1) We are champions of tomorrow: From the way we work to what we create, we are fervent

champions of new and better ways to deliver tomorrow’s innovations today

2) We are better together. We are a global community of problem-solvers who believe that all

of us is better than one of us

3) We are passionate. We are a movement, not just a company

4) We are dreamers and doers. The only way to change the world is to dream big; the only way

to make a lasting impact is to make those big dreams reality

5) We are dedicated to the details. Care for our passengers and communities requires absolute

precision of every task

6) We are “hand raisers”. We are the ones who step forward to make things happen

Page 51 of 56 Academy of Management Discoveries

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Bios:

Ann Majchrzak (majchrza@usc.edu) is The USC Associates’ Endowed Professor Chair of

Business Administration at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

She obtained her PhD a very long time ago. Her research focuses on how organizations and

technology are increasingly intertwined and developing relevant theory.

Terri L. Griffith (tgriffith@scu.edu) is Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at Santa

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integration of technology and work. Her Ph.D., not quite so long ago as Ann’s, is from Carnegie

Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

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studies search under high uncertainty and the emergence of organizational structure.

Oliver Alexy (o.alexy@tum.de) is professor of strategic entrepreneurship at TUM School of

Management, Technische Universität München, where he was also awarded his Ph.D. His

current research focuses on effective organization designs for high-uncertainty environments.

Page 56 of 56Academy of Management Discoveries

Disorganization Management: What Is It, How Does It Work, and Why Does It Matter?

Article

Jan 2025
The Academy of Management annals

“Disorganization” also referred to as “mess,” “deviation,” or “disorder” is a concept that is embedded in the view of organizations as complex human systems. The word denotes organizational phenomena that deviate from organizational schema and procedures in an unplanned and unstructured manner. This concept is yet to be given full attention by management scholars, despite its continuous appearance, partially under different labels, throughout the history of the discipline for over five decades. Currently, there is a need for contributions that synthesize these scattered conversations into a coherent narrative. In addressing this gap, this article integrates these various strands of literature on disorganization. Thus, we systematically gather, review, organize, and integrate the extant literature (n= 192) on disorganization to map its evolution. Accordingly, we lay out a foundational body of literature that highlights the importance of enhancing our understanding of management through the integration of disorganization into our conversations about modern business. Accordingly, we present the theoretical infrastructure for the definition, analysis, and treatment of disorganization management. Through this review, we propose new conceptualizations while mapping out the development of the concept over time, followed by exploring the implications these developments present to both management theory and practice.

From Boundary Objects to Boundary Infrastructure: A Process Study of Collaboration between Big Science and Big Business

Article

Oct 2024
J MANAGE STUD

The development of a novel boundary infrastructure for large-scale interorganiza-tional collaboration presents a challenge that is ill-understood: how can individual boundary objects, which do not suffice for large-scale collaboration and might even engender conflict, be developed into a coherent boundary infrastructure that facilitates the crossing of multiple boundaries? In a longitudinal study, we investigated how Helix Nebula-a collaboration among Europe's big science and big business organizations-developed a cloud computing infrastructure for scientific research. Our findings show that the process involves two recursive mechanisms. The scaffolding of boundary objects helps organizations to iteratively create various technical and organizational objects that support each other's development. The reconfiguring of coalitions involves organizations constantly rearranging into subgroups, which enables them to accommodate their differences and common needs. Our study contributes a process model of how organizations develop boundary objects into a coherent boundary infrastructure and shines light on the role of scaffolding and the political dynamics of coalitions as a driving force for large-scale interorganizational collaboration.

Firm-Sponsored Online Communities: Building Alignment Capabilities for Participatory Governance

Article

Full-text available

May 2024

Practice- and Policy-Oriented Abstract Many organizations recognize the capacity of online communities to generate knowledge and create value. However, firm-sponsored online communities are composed of both community and firm stakeholders, where the goals and desires of each side can differ. This dichotomy of goals can create challenges when determining how best to govern a firm-sponsored online community, such as how much control the firm should exert on community behavior. Our work shows that community governance need not stem solely from the firm or the community. Rather, a successful and vibrant community that achieves the goals of all its stakeholders is achieved through participatory governance, which adopts both firm- and community-based governance modes. Drawing from a case study from Mayo Clinic Connect, a successful firm-sponsored online community that employs a participatory governance model, we discovered governance alignment as a capability that improves participatory governance. Governance alignment is an adaptive process that effectively balances the sponsoring firm’s goals with the community members’ needs and participation. In this paper, we present specific practices and actionable examples for governance alignment, such as standardizing organic community content, training community super users, and more. These actionable insights can enhance the value that firms hope to achieve when leveraging online communities.

From a Portfolio of Journals to a System of Knowledge Production

Article

Mar 2025
ACAD MANAG LEARN EDU

From a Portfolio of Journals to a System of Knowledge Production

Article

Feb 2025
ACAD MANAGE J

From a Portfolio of Journals to a System of Knowledge Production

Article

Jan 2025
The Academy of Management annals

From a Portfolio of Journals to a System of Knowledge Production

Article

Dec 2024

Are industry associations conducive to radical innovation in biopharmaceutical companies?—The dual effect of absorptive capacity and digital investment

Article

Aug 2024
TECHNOL FORECAST SOC

Biopharmaceutical companies today view R&D innovation as crucial for gaining a competitive edge. Consequently, achieving radical innovation in biotechnology has become a major concern. While researchers have identified various drivers of radical innovation within firms, they often overlook the significant role that heterogeneous resources in network alliances play. This study addresses this gap by examining industry association embeddedness through the lens of social networking. Focusing on China's listed pharmaceutical manufacturing companies from Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets between 2007 and 2021, we find a positive relationship between industry-association embeddedness and radical innovation. Our findings indicate that this positive effect is significantly enhanced by firms' absorptive capacity. Moreover, increased digital investment further strengthens the effect of absorptive capacity on the relationship between industry-association embeddedness and radical innovation. This study offers theoretical insights into the role of intermediary bodies, such as industry associations, in fostering radical innovation. It also provides valuable lessons for biopharmaceutical companies in transitioning economies seeking to explore innovative pathways.

Strategic Openness and Open Strategy

Chapter

Jul 2019

Open Strategy for Digital Business: Managing in ICT-Driven Environments

Book

May 2024

Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Organizations

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2010

Something Old, Something New: A Longitudinal Study of Search Behavior and New Product Introduction

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2002

Maneuvering in Poor Visibility: How Firms Play the Ecosystem Game when Uncertainty is High

Article

Full-text available

May 2017

Innovation ecosystems are increasingly regarded as important vehicles to create and capture value from complex value propositions. While current literature assumes these value propositions can be known ex-ante and an appropriate ecosystem design derived from them, we focus instead on generative technological innovations that enable an unbounded range of potential value propositions, hence offering no clear guidance to firms. To illustrate our arguments, we inductively study two organizations, each attempting to create two novel ecosystems around new technological enablers deep in their industry architecture. We highlight how ecosystem creation in such conditions is a systemic process driven by coupled feedback loops, which organizations must try to control dynamically: firms first make the switch to creating the ecosystem following an external pull to narrow down the range of potential applications; then need to learn to keep up with ecosystem dynamics by roadmapping and preempting, while simultaneously enacting resonance. Dynamic control further entails counteracting the drifting away of the nascent ecosystem from the firm's idea of future value creation and the sliding of its intended control points for value capture. Our findings shed new light on strategy and control in emerging ecosystems, and provide guidance to managers on playing the ecosystem game.

FROM THE EDITORS: The Changing Nature of Work: Careers, Identities, and Work Lives in the 21st Century

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2017

Millennials: who are they, how are they different, and why should we care?

Chapter

Jul 2015

Dynamic capabilities: what are they?

Article

Oct 2000
STRATEGIC MANAGE J

This paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and, more generally, the resource‐based view of the firm. We argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development, strategic decision making, and alliancing. They are neither vague nor tautological. Although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence, they have significant commonalities across firms (popularly termed ‘best practice’). This suggests that they are more homogeneous, fungible, equifinal, and substitutable than is usually assumed. In moderately dynamic markets, dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines. They are detailed, analytic, stable processes with predictable outcomes. In contrast, in high‐velocity markets, they are simple, highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes. Finally, well‐known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities. In moderately dynamic markets, the evolutionary emphasis is on variation. In high‐velocity markets, it is on selection. At the level of RBV, we conclude that traditional RBV misidentifies the locus of long‐term competitive advantage in dynamic markets, overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage, and reaches a boundary condition in high‐velocity markets. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Continuous “Morphing”: Competing Through Dynamic Capabilities, Form, and Function

Article

Dec 2001

Searching for Structure: Formal Organization Design as a Guide to Network Evolution

Article

Aug 2017

Is top-down organization design worth attempting at all, or should organizations simply let their members learn which patterns of interaction are valuable by themselves, through a bottom-up process? Our analysis of an agent-based computational model shows that weak enforcement of even a randomly selected formal structure in a top-down manner can usefully guide the bottom-up emergence of networks of intraorganizational interactions between agents. In the absence of formal structure, interactions are prone to decline within organizations, because maintaining interactions requires coordination but breaking them does not. Formal structure regenerates the network of interactions between agents, who can then learn which interactions to keep or discard. This “network regeneration effect” of formal structure offers a rationale for the importance of top-down organization design, even if the design is limited in accuracy and enforcement. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2807 . This paper was accepted by Sendil Ethiraj, organizations.

An Aspirational View of Organizational Control Research: Re-invigorating Empirical Work to Better Meet the Challenges of 21st Century Organizations

Article

Mar 2017

Organizational control is a key managerial function, and the focus of a great deal of research in the management and organizations field. Our concern is that research has not kept pace with changes in contemporary organizations and the external environment. In response to this concern, we review extant empirical work on organizational control with an emphasis on the consequences of control (i.e., the control-outcome linkage). As part of our analytical process, we surface theories underlying existing control frameworks used in empirical research and identify key dimensions implied by the frameworks. The three dimensions of control formality, control coerciveness, and control singularity map onto traditional vs. more current issues in and around organizations, and therefore prove helpful in assessing the existing research stream. Based on our review, we show how control-outcome research has in fact reached a troublesome point in its evolution, particularly concerning quantitative research. Older frameworks, theories, and issues seem to have limited theorizing that better fits today's realities, and several empirical tactics appear to be negatively affecting quantitative work. We close with actionable suggestions for an area of scholarship that continues to have great potential.

Scaling: Organizing and Growth in Entrepreneurial Ventures

Article

Feb 2017

Entrepreneurial ventures face unique challenges related to growth, particularly in managing their internal organizations. Progress on understanding these dynamics has been constrained by fragmentation within relevant management research. In this paper, we clarify and describe two narratives that have emerged within past and current research on growth and the internal organization. The first narrative draws attention to the surprising endurance of organizational features during growth; the second, their dramatic change. We juxtapose the two narratives to reveal ongoing gaps in the study of how growth can effect change along three dimensions: organizational design, team composition, and organizational culture. We conclude with recommendations on how future research can be enriched through a systematic examination of how entrepreneurial ventures navigate the organizational dilemmas growth presents.

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