The creation and management of temporary competitive advantages has emerged as an alternative to sustainable models of competitive advantage in the strategy literature. We review the literature and discuss questions related to the antecedents, consequences and the management temporary advantage in the introduction of this special issue. The overall goal is to ask: What would the field of strategic management look like if sustainable advantages did not exist? We summarize the papers published in this special issue and highlight directions for future research.

Strategy research on inter-firm cooperation has been commonly affected by a collaborative bias, implicitly assuming that firms interact among each other on the basis of fully converging interests and goals. Yet, plenty of empirical evidence shows that cooperation is affected by the intrusion of competitive issues and that consequently results in a game structure that actually moves away from the ideal circumstance of complete convergent interests. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it proposes the notion of cooperation as a truly coopetitive game, where firms interact among each other on the basis of a partially convergent interest structure. Second, it develops a series of propositions linking the rise of coopetition to a set of, respectively, environment-related and firm-related factors in order to explain the drivers of the intrusion of competitive issues within a cooperative game structure. The study eventually provides relevant implications for strategy research that we discuss in the final section. 32

The hubris hypothesis complements the extant debate on how people make judgments and decisions in organizations. Drawing on the origin of hubris in Greek mythology, the psychological approach, and finance studies, this paper portrays an informed picture of the current status of managerial hubris literature that develops a more advanced understanding of what is known about hubris. We present a conceptual map that provides a comprehensive appreciation of hubris antecedents-symptoms-strategic choices-feedback performance main cause effect relationships. Our proposed conceptual map draws on the idea that managerial hubris is one of the determinants of CEO judgments, strategic choices, and organizational performance. We also show that managerial hubris has a good side and a bad side and identify the implications for strategy formulation and implementation. By doing so, the study not only provides a multidisciplinary introduction to hubris that is tailored to scholars, but also distills a suite of suggestions for managing hubris symptoms and traps that may prove valuable to practitioners.

No abstract

The metaphor "entrepreneurial ecosystem" has captured the attentions in academia, industry, and government in the past recent. It is used in corporate, national, or local contexts, and has grown in prominence give the vital need to transform economies around the creation of innovative ideas, products, services, and technologies. Entrepreneurial ecosystems involve a network, a system, of interactions of individuals and organizations, like financial intermediaries, universities and research institutions, suppliers and customers, multinational companies or the government. The entrepreneurial ecosystem literature has thus mainly focused on identifying the relevant stakeholders like entrepreneurial firms and entrepreneurs and how they interact with other stakeholders within a more or less defined system. Despite the popularity of entrepreneurial ecosystems, the literature has almost overlooked and largely ignored the governance of entrepreneurial ecosystems. This special Issue of Small Business Economics critically examines issues concerning the governance of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This article aims to shed light on the drivers underlying the role and scope of intentional governance of the structural dynamics of whole interorganizational networks. Prior research has distinguished networks that are emergent from networks that are orchestrated. While empirical studies have shown situations in which the role and scope of intentional governance of whole interorganizational networks has changed in time, and there is a growing interest regarding the endogenous drivers of network dynamics, the dimensions that influence intentional governance of network structure dynamics and the way this is carried out remain still to be elucidated. In order to pinpoint these drivers, we leverage the models of network structure dynamics elaborated within studies conducted at the intersection between network research and complexity science to propose a multilevel interpretive framework that clarifies the role and scope of intentional agency at different structural levels of interorganizational networks. Our framework advances a twofold conceptual contribution: on one hand, we tackle the change in the role and scope of intentional governance of network structures in both the early stages and the later stages of network evolution. On the other, we interpret the network of formal ties as resembling the accelerating network model, with the network of informal ties being akin to the scale-free (or truncated scale-free) network model of complex networks theory.

Abstract\ud Purpose – This paper aims to explore the latent structure of the literature on interorganizational network and innovation as well as to map the\ud main themes and empirical advances in this research stream.\ud Design/methodology/approach – Using bibliometric coupling, the authors analyze the citation patterns in 67 management studies regarding\ud innovation networks, published in ISI-journals from January 1996 to October 2012.\ud Findings – The authors identify the conceptual orientations that studies share. Bibliometric analysis allows us to draw an overview of how this field\ud of research has developed, recognizing in essence six main clustered research themes: networks as a framework that sustains firm innovativeness\ud in specific contexts; network dimensions and knowledge processes; networks as a means to access and share resources/knowledge; the interplay\ud between firm and network characteristics and its effects on innovative processes; empirical research on networks in highly dynamic industries; and\ud the influence of industry knowledge domain’s peculiarities on network dimensions and characteristics.\ud Research limitations/implications – By providing a comprehensive survey of current trends in the literature on interorganizational network and\ud innovation, the authors eventually identify the major gaps in our knowledge and help refocusing the current research agenda in this increasingly\ud relevant research stream.\ud Practical implications – The systematic introduction to the field of innovation networks is of notable interest to scholars and practitioners, who\ud have (or desire to have) some awareness in the topic. Here, practitioners may find their compass to acquire some knowledge on innovation networks\ud and orient their choices.\ud Originality/value – First, the spatially organized picture of the intellectual structure of the literature the authors offer is the initial thought-out\ud comprehensive introduction to the field of on interorganizational network and innovation. Second, by developing a thorough bibliometric analysis\ud of the extant bulk of the innovation networks literature, the authors develop specific methodological contribution. Third, we are able to map the\ud intellectual structure in a two-dimensional space to visualize spatial distances between intellectual themes

The diffusion of digital technologies has enabled a notable transformation in the firms’ boundaries, processes, structures, roles, and interactions. It is now clear that digital transformation is not just a traditional IT back-end process; rather it affects the organization as a whole, redefining strategies, entrepreneurial processes, innovation, and governance mechanisms. This permeation has led to the emergence of new ways of organizing firms’ value chains and interfirm relationships, which now increasingly occur in digital ecosystems and marketplaces. The scope of transformation as well as the modalities of value co-generation and delivery are here used to introduce the content of this Special Issue of California Management Review on Digital Transformation.