Blockchain technology has been receiving much public attention recently, promising to disintermediate transactions through a decentralized governance and a distributed datainfrastructure. However, the majority of the previous studies have focused on the technical aspects, and overlooked blockchain investigation from a managerial perspective. In this paper, based on platform-ecosystem, transaction cost economics, and open-source literature, we contrast and compare blockchain-based platforms and centralized platforms; in other words, decentralized versus centralized governance of the platform. We base our conceptual analysis on three dimensions-transaction cost, cost of technology, and community involvement-, exploring the conditions under which blockchain-based platforms are more advantageous than centralized platforms. We, first, compare gains from lower opportunism and uncertainty thanks to protocols and smart contracts in blockchain technology versus costs of higher coordination and complexity of (re)writing those contracts. Second, we compare gains from immutability and transparency in blockchain-based platforms versus the technological cost of verification and distributed ledger infrastructure. Finally, we compare intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of community around centralized and blockchain-based platforms to participate and different mechanism involved, i.e. pricing mechanism in the former and crypto-incentives in the latter.

This paper explores the imprinting of entrepreneurs' motivations on the practices and processes of enterprises. We investigate the question in the context of creative industries (CIs) as an extreme case of entrepreneurial motivations (EMs) prevalence. We analyse the EM of 14 founders of design consultancies. Three EMs emerge: self‐fulfilment, freedom and financial motivation. The qualitative analysis reveals that the founders' EMs at the time of a venture's founding has a lasting impact on the characteristics of the venture (name, processes formalization, decision‐making processes, performance measures and growth strategies). Specifically, founders driven by self‐fulfilment tend to build ventures named after them. In these ventures, processes are informal, decision‐making is centralized, performance measures are based on personal satisfaction and recognition and enterprise growth is restrained. Founders who seek freedom tend to run enterprises with semiformal processes, semicentralized decision‐making, a client satisfaction focus, and slow growth strategies. In contrast, founders with financial motivations tend to create enterprises with formal processes, decentralized decision‐making, financial performance metrics and growth ambitions. By focusing on EM and adopting a holistic approach beyond some characteristics of the venture, we complement the imprinting literature.

This paper analyses why and how design‐centred industrial firms with internal design teams contract external designers. This research is based on an exploratory multiple case study methodology, with a sample of five highly reputable design‐centred industrial firms, operating in hypercompetitive industries. While some results challenge the mainstream literature on design management, others expand the existing literature, highlighting that not all firms extract the same benefits from external designers; neither do all external designers bring the same benefits to firms. The paper shows that firms with internal design teams contract external design for (1) reputation (external designers sign products and bring their reputation to the product and to the firm), (2) perspective (external designers bring a different perspective, especially when they come from a different industry from the firm), and (3) exposure (external designers bring exposure that enriches internal design teams).

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