Agile-Stage-Gate is a hybrid product development model that integrates elements of both Agile and Stage-Gate to help companies realize the strengths of both. Recent studies show positive results in manufacturing companies, although SMEs are notably absent despite being the majority. This paper reports results of a test of the model in three deliberately chosen manufacturing SMEs. Results were improved: time to market, overall new product process, higher success rate. Agile required adaptations, and novel solutions were found by the test firms. The positive results suggest that Agile-Stage-Gate must be considered as a recommended product development approach in SME manufacturers.

Mental health is the "foundation of wellbeing and effective functioning for both the individual and the community" [read: team or organisation]( WHO, 2005) and is central to human behaviour across all domains, including the workplace. Organisational performance is a compound concept that reflects the function and outputs of an organisation, from its profitability and productivity to its competitive advantage (Neely, 2005). By definition, an organisation's output depends on how effectively it functions, including how effectively its people, or human capital, functions. This means that mental health and organisational performance are inherently interconnected (Peccei & Van de Voorde, 2016).Despite a widespread understanding that "good health is good for business," organisations and managers still tend to think of mental health and organisational performance as disconnected (Van De Voorde, Paauwe, & Van Veldhoven, 2012). While businesses and governments treat organisational performance as an established priority, especially during economically challenging times, they give lower priority to mental health and address it in an ad hoc manner (Hasle, Seim, & Refslund, 2019;Jensen, 2000). However, scholars increasingly agree that health and wellbeing play a role in both individual performance and broader organisational performance and vice versa (Guest, 2018;Pfeffer, 2019). We also see persuasive calls to explore whether wellbeing is of benefit to, or comes into conflict with, achieving positive organisational performance. Most recently, experts have stressed the need to develop research and models that integrate mental health and organisational performance concerns into human resources management (HRM) practices. Overall, theory recognizes mental health and organisational performance goals as connected, but practice disjoints them, and businesses and governments tend to prioritize organisational performance at the expense of mental health.This guest editorial aims to articulate the increasingly relevant issue of the interconnection between mental health and organisational performance, to discuss the possible forces behind it, and to incentivize the reader to explore potential solutions to it. We discuss how mental health interconnects with organisational performance in both research and practice, and present examples of healthy workplaces that integrate the concern for mental health and organisational performance into their structures, processes, and mental models. Our core proposition is that organisations have the power and responsibility to enable inherently healthy workplaces by supporting mental health and organisational performance in tandem, instead of in a disjointed manner.To understand how mental health interconnects with organisational performance, we examine organisational behavior at a micro level and organisational structures on a broader level. For example, a recent analysis of sickness presenteeism describes it as an individual act that aims to balance the limitations of a health condition against an emp...

Services are characterized by the involvement of customers and other interest groups in the innovation process. The aim of this study is to understand how and why, in the service context, tensions and potential conflicts between heterogeneous interest groups unfold during processes of innovation. The empirical field in which the investigation was set is facility services, a type of business-to-business support services. The findings were extracted from a longitudinal, in-depth case study of a Danish, multinational organisation over 13 years, complemented with an explorative study in the Danish facility service context. The findings suggest that tensions and conflicts between heterogeneous interest groups are an intrinsic element of innovation processes in services, and that emphasizing them might actually support a clearer understanding of processes of innovation in services. The outcome of the analysis is a process model, which proposes innovation dialectics as one of the driving mechanisms of innovation in services.

Organizations worldwide have shifted to working from home, requiring managers to engage in distance management using information and communication technologies (ICT). Studies show that managers experience high job demands and inadequate guidance during COVID-19; therefore, the transition to distance management raises questions about the increase in managerial job demands and the impact on managers’ well-being. This study aims to explore first-line managers’ perceptions of job demands and available resources during the first year of the pandemic and understand the implications for first-line managers’ well-being. First-line managers face complex and conflicting demands, making them more challenged in their management task than other management levels. We used the job demands–resources model in this qualitative, longitudinal empirical study. The study draws on 49 semi-structured interviews with seven first-line managers from a large pharmaceutical company in Denmark, whom we followed throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, from May 2020 to May 2021. Our findings suggest that the first-line managers perceived increased emotional and practical demands. While the managers appreciated the initial guidance provided by the organization, they perceived the organizational support as outdated and superficial. As a result, to cope with the uncertainty caused by the pandemic and the shift to distance management, the managers relied on work engagement enablers such as social support. Even though the COVID-19 pandemic portrays unique circumstances in transitioning to distance management that require further exploration outside the COVID-19 context, the insights from this study can assist organizations in developing awareness about transitions to better support first-line management to embrace changes in the future.

Value co-creation is a specific type of collaboration that is considered to be an innovative and interactive process between end users and organizations; it aims to increase the value of a product or service. This study investigates how a network of stakeholders collaborating to manage innovation openly co-creates value over time; it contributes to the existing literature on value co-creation by taking the perspective of the network as a whole. The study follows a case in which value co-creation unfolds over time across a network of stakeholders within the business-to-business facility service context. The in-depth longitudinal investigation of a network composed of a corporate customer and its external facility service providers revealed that a network of stakeholders co-creates value over time by (i) offering an adaptable structure for the network to organize innovation activities and establish support routines, (ii) facilitating interactions to support stakeholder relation development and (iii) allowing participants to achieve self-empowerment. Therefore, stakeholder value co-creation entails the combination of single value co-creation activities and overarching network progressions that allow for learning and inter-organizational trust among stakeholders.