Projects

1. Product Innovation and Technology Commercialization

We apply an industry infrastructure framework to explore how the interaction of health care industry players
shapes the design, development, and commercialization of an electronic personal health record (ePHR) based
application. The in-depth longitudinal case study adopts a process oriented view of change to cover a multi-year
period ranging from the early stage design and development to the commercialization and attempted diffusion of
the ePHR system. We employ an engaged scholarship approach by following a key insider of the developing
organization through intense interactions over the multi-year period. Further follow-up and corroboration is
conducted with other employees and customers of the organization, combined with the collection of objective
system level data to triangulate key findings.

2. Business Model Innovation and Strategic Change

A large package delivery company's core business of delivering packages around the globe led to many years of
profitability and competitive advantage. However, in the early 1990's, as competitive forces and general
environmental trends continued to push margins lower, executives searched for innovative ways to generate new
business. In doing so and in following the lead of other major companies like IBM, they decided to enter the world
of services. Leveraging their vast global logistics network enabled by huge investments in information technology
and their organizational knowledge around supply chain management and logistics, they started a separate
services business. Though the initial business was an early success in many respects (particularly revenue, as it
was strong early and continued to grow), they were challenged early on by their inability to develop the scale in
their services business that they had become so accustomed to in their package business. In short, they were
struggling with the need to continuously discover service innovations that would meet the idiosyncratic needs of
individual customers, with their own desire to develop standardized service offerings that could be easily
replicated across many customer accounts. In our collaborations with this company we are investigating how they
attempted to create a scalable service infrastructure through three distinct, sequential organizational design
strategies. By adopting a social cognitive theory as a lens to interpret our data, we are uncovering key factors that
challenged the efficacy of each strategic initiative.

3. Sustainable Innovation in Long-term IORs

In early stages of an interorganizational relationship (IOR) it is often easy to innovate, but sustaining this innovation
over time can be difficult as objectives change and inertia sets in. The purpose of this project is to contribute to
research on organizational innovation in IOR settings by exploring the impact of relational governance structures
on innovativeness outcomes over time. In doing so, we seek to answer the following research question: How can
IOR governance mechanisms be created to support ongoing innovation in IOR relationships? To explore our
research question we conducted a multi-case study of two large scale business process outsourcing
relationships in the automotive and high-tech industries. We collect multiple sources of data; including over thirty
interviews with individual managers responsible for architecting and steering large scale IORS in these two
distinct industries. We leverage theory from social psychology to examine the dynamics of IOR governance and
to uncover key drivers that shape IOR innovation over time.

4. Strategic Sourcing Innovation

Competitive pressures continue to force global companies to seek new sources of value creation. As such,
strategic sourcing units are valuable components to global firms, focusing the enterprise on the continuous
improvement and re-evaluation of purchasing activities to support business innovation. The strategic sourcing
function helps enhance shareholder value through key cost reduction initiatives, improving capital allocations, and
uncovering new areas of potential revenue generation. Despite such opportunities, rapidly evolving technologies
and the emergence of new business models for sourcing goods cause strategic sourcing managers to pause,
forcing them to consider innovate ways to pursue cost-reduction strategies and revenue opportunities across the
enterprise. Given such rapid change, most businesses are challenged with meeting dual objectives that too often
seem to be at odds: reducing procurements costs while also maximizing value from supplier relationships. To
better understand how sourcing organizations can more effectively re-structure their supplier relationships to
support ongoing innovation, we investigate the behavioral and cognitive processes by which a firm enacts close
links with its suppliers, and how such entrenched links can then be readjusted to meet the needs of a changing
business. By applying the theories of enactment and path dependence we investigate the mechanisms by which
strategic sourcing units readjust existing links with key suppliers, to foster competition and to support business
process innovation in the focal firm.

5. IT-Enabled Process Innovation in Healthcare

In recent years, hospitals have begun to invest in RFID systems to control costs, reduce errors, and improve
quality of care. Despite the obvious benefits of RFID in healthcare settings, potential obstacles to effective
deployment also exist. The purpose of this study is to systematically understand how hospitals can apply RFID to
innovate work practices and address cost, safety, and quality of care issues. We leverage a human centric
cognitive framework to explore adoption and use of RFID in high intensity hospital settings in its relationship to
process innovation. Our study is expected to contribute to a growing body of research related to the enabling role
of IT for innovating work practices and enhancing process performance in a healthcare context.