Contemporary business organizations are increasingly turning their attention to jointly creating value with a variety of stakeholders, such as individual customers and other business organizations. However, a review of the literature reveals that very few studies have systematically examined value cocreation within business-to-business (B2B) contexts. Using a revelatory case study of the relationship between an ERP vendor with a global reputation and its partners, and informed by the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and related theoretical perspectives, we develop an understanding of value cocreation in B2B alliances associated with selling, extending, and implementing packaged software, specifically ERP systems. Our study reveals that there are different mechanisms underlying value cocreation within B2B alliances, and also points to several categories of contingency factors that influence these mechanisms. In addition to providing insights about the phenomenon of cocreation itself, the study contributes to the stream of packaged software literature, where the implications of value cocreation in alliances between packaged software vendors and their partners for the client organizations have not been sufficiently explored.

No abstract

In June 2011, I stood in Kastrup Airport with my three daughters, coming to Denmark to stay. My husband had already arrived; my dog was on the way. Both my husband and I had left good careers and a great life in order to allow me to fulfill my dream of pursuing a PhD. I have to say, I was very apprehensive at this moment. My (then) 16year-old daughter had decided to stay with her father and continue her education in Iceland, and the prospect of being separated from her was next to unbearable. Moreover, I had absolutely no idea how to get into a PhD program. Prior to coming to Denmark, I had sent a couple of emails and gotten quite unenthusiastic responses. Fortunately, a few days before leaving I happened to run into a former colleague, Agnar Hanson. Agnar offered to introduce me to a professor he had collaborated with at CBS, Niels Bjørn-Andersen.To get an opportunity to meet with Niels Bjørn was truly a turning event for me. Without his kind nature, willingness to help, great network and clear insight into interesting research areas I suppose I would never even have started. After meeting him, it only took a couple of meetings before we had ensured the financial support of a large IT vendor in Denmark, KMD. We resolved that I would study a very interesting e-Government program in Denmark, the Basic Data Program (BDP). The BDP is an Open Data Initiative, led by the Danish Agency for Digitization, which also agreed to participate as a third party. After "only" a couple of hundreds of emails, everything was in place, and we sent an application to the Industrial PhD fund. The (second) application was approved in June 2012, exactly a year after my arrival in Denmark. July 1 st 2012, I started to work on my dissertation called The Sustainable Value of Open Government Data. These last three years have been the most challenging but also most rewarding years of my carrier. It is a bit like running an intellectual marathon, and I did hit some walls on the way. Suffice to say, this is not a tale of one woman's journey. I have so many people to thank who have helped me on the way, and all of them have provided something unique to this project. Thus, I will go through my list of acknowledgements in no particular order.The only one who will get a special place is Professor Niels Bjørn-Andersen, as without him this project would never have been born. He spent an incredible amount of energy and time to get me to the starting line, which is not a very rewarding process. I hope he knows that I have not, and never will, forget his help and his kindness. He also To all of you, THANK YOU! If not for all these wonderful people, I doubt I would have managed to finish this journey successfully.

Extant organizational learning theory conceptualizes organizational learning as an internal, member-based process, sometimes supported by, yet often independent of, IT. Recently, however, several organizations have begun to involve non-members systematically in their learning by using crowdsourcing, a form of open innovation enabled by state-of-the-art IT. We examine the phenomenon of IT-enabled organizational learning with crowdsourcing in a longitudinal revelatory case study of one such organization, LEGO (2010-14). We studied the LEGO Cuusoo crowdsourcing platform's secret test in Japan, its widely recognized global launch, and its success in generating top-selling LEGO models. Based on an analysis of how crowdsourcing contributes to the organizational learning at LEGO, we propose the "ambient organizational learning" framework. The framework accommodates both traditional, member-based organizational learning and IT-enabled, nonmember-based organizational learning with crowdsourcing.

No abstract