This is a careful and insightful case study of how the Toyota Production System manages the paradox of efficiency and flexibility, which arises periodically in connection with model changeovers. The authors detail the functioning of four organizational mechanisms—metaroutines, partitioning, switching, and ambidexterity. However, of particular interest is the contextual reinforcing role of training and trust in administrative structures, procedures, and rules.

Foresight activities have often provided support for objectives such as priority-setting, networking and consensual vision-building. In this paper, we draw upon complementary evolutionary perspectives and discuss these objectives from the viewpoint of diversity which may be vital in contexts characterized by technological discontinuities and high uncertainties. We also argue that although the scanning of weak signals has been widely advocated in such contexts, the solicitation of ideas for prospective innovations may provide more focused, action-oriented, and comparable reflections of future developments. For the analysis of such ideas, we develop a collaborative foresight method RPM Screening which consists of phases for the generation, revision, multi-criteria evaluation, and portfolio analysis of innovation ideas. We also report experiences from a pilot project where this method was employed to enhance the work of the Foresight Forum of the Ministry of Trade and Industry in Finland. Encouraging results from this project and other recent applications suggest that RPM Screening can be helpful in foresight processes and the development of shared research agendas.

The successful timing of organizational activities depends not only on effective planning and coordination, but also temporal responsiveness – the ability of organizational actors to adapt the timing of their activities to unanticipated events. In this paper, we examine the individuallevel dynamics underlying temporal responsiveness: we examine how organizational actors evaluate timing changes; e.g., changes from existing organizational schedules, routines, expectations, and plans. We review a broad body of psychological, economic, sociological, anthropological and organizational research on time to introduce a reference point model of how people perceive and evaluate time in organizations. We extend these findings to examine the psychology of how changes in timing are valued. Several propositions are presented about personal schedule changes and how individual actors evaluate them. When Plans Change 3

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Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Many studies highlight the challenges facing incumbent firms in responding effectively to major technological transitions. While some authors argue that these challenges can be overcome by firms possessing what have been called “dynamic capabilities, ” little work has described in detail the critical resources that these capabilities leverage, or the processes through which these resources accumulate and evolve. This paper explores these issues through an in-depth exploratory case study of one firm that has demonstrated consistently strong performance in an industry that is highly dynamic and uncertain. The focus for our study is Microsoft, the leading firm in the software industry. We motivate our focus on Microsoft by providing evidence that the firm’s product performance has been consistently strong over a period of time in which there have been several major technological transitions – one indicator that a firm possesses dynamic

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Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis and participants in seminars at Wharton, Harvard and NYU for helpful comments. We also thank Eileen McCarthy, Samson Lo, Narayan Raj and Preetam Rao for able research assistance. 1 BEYOND LOCAL SEARCH: BOUNDARY-SPANNING, EXPLORATION AND IMPACT

Review of the strategy literature indicates there has been five phases in the evolution of the field since World War II. The paradigm was at its peak in the 1970s with the strategic planning phase, however, prescriptive approaches to strategy formulation and implementation were demonstrated to be inadequate in this period in the face of environmental uncertainty. In the 1980s the field evolved into the strategic management phase with a focus on the combination of the firm’s resources to achieve competitive advantage. The prescriptive literature progressed further in this decade with Porter’s strong contribution in understanding the external context confronting organisations. The resource-based view of the firm, grounded in the descriptive literature, also enhanced the paradigm’s knowledge of the firm’s internal processes. However, despite these developments by the mid-1980s it was evident that the strategic management phase was not addressing shortcomings in strategy implementation. At this time a greater sense of the importance of organisational culture and internal politics developed in the strategy process. The ineffectiveness of strategic management in this decade led many experts to emphasise the need for strategic thinking. In the 1990s a debate has evolved as to whether strategy should be practiced as art, science or a combination of both. 1

The concept of dynamic capabilities is both extremely popular and poorly understood, because researchers approach it from the “outside in. ” This perspective obscures the social processes through which people enact the capability, and black boxes the dynamics through which they combine exploitation with exploration. We explore the dynamic capability for sustained product innovation from the “inside out. ” We find that innovative organizations structure everyday work around a conceptual, physical, and temporal space based on the overlap of manufacturing, marketing, and R&D knowledge systems. This structuring of everyday work is the capability, and it becomes dynamic because three sets of rules and resources animate it: 1) taking responsibility for the entire process, which provides people with the resource of time; 2) valuing knowledge and expertise, which provides the authority to act; and 3) searching for opportunities, which provides options to address the inevitable surprises of innovation work. These rules and resources invoke routines that enable people to map out innovation work in time, generalize specialized knowledge to make it accessible to others, and keep open a variety of options to solve design problems. We illustrate this new theory and discuss its implications for how managers can actually use their dynamic capabilities.

Response to environmental change is at the heart of firm sustainability. In the case of disruptive technology, previous research describes this challenge as a problem of commitment. Because disruptive proposals do not fit the criteria considered in the existing resource allocation process, they are denied organizational commitment. The following research seeks to address the phenomenon where incumbents do commit substantial resources, but then force those commitments around their existing business rather than find new markets. The analysis draws on extensive multi-level, longitudinal field data collected from a single revelatory case of a newspaper company as its management responded to the Internet. The conceptual framework for the study links the resource allocation and threat rigidity literatures. The data show that threat framing helps build impetus and commitment for disruptive projects that would otherwise stall. However, this same threat-induced action invokes a set of rigidities that prove maladaptive in the face of disruptive change. The research suggests that the role of structure goes beyond resource allocation. Structural independence creates strategic de-coupling of threat and opportunity framing, allowing the simultaneous management of otherwise inconsistent frames. Keywords: Strategic change, threat, opportunity, resource allocation, framing,