Purpose
– Social innovations are defined as innovative products or services motivated by the goal of meeting a social need, with the opportunity to create new social relationships or collaborations. Although developing social innovations has been the primary concern of non-profit organizations so far, there are signs of an increasing involvement in this type of innovations of for-profit firms, in an attempt to accomplish their corporate social responsibility strategies. This notwithstanding, there is very limited knowledge on how for-profit organizations can develop a capability to manage social innovation projects. The purpose of this paper is to provide exploratory evidence to fill this gap.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper presents and discusses a case study of a firm that has been involved in social innovation for years. It is Intesa Sanpaolo, a for-profit organization that leads the Italian banking sector.
Findings
– The case study points to the existence of three managerial antecedents of a superior ability in social innovation: integrating CSR in its business strategy with a strong commitment from the top management; separating the activities concerned with the development of social innovations from the rest of the organization, following to the structural ambidexterity model; applying the principles of open innovation to the development of social innovations, by involving in particular non-profit organizations as a source of ideas for new social innovation projects and leveraging them to enable adoption of the new products and services.
Originality/value
– So far there is very limited knowledge on how for-profit organizations can develop a capability to manage social innovation projects. This paper provides exploratory evidence to fill this gap.
The Relationship Regulator: a buyer-supplier collaborative performance measurement system 1. Introduction Over the years there has been a generalized tendency to increase management vision and control, with companies seeking to control over inter-firm processes and relationships. Several authors have therefore suggested that traditional intra-organizational performance measurement systems (PMSs) need to be broadened, with the development of external supply chain PMSs (SCPMSs), crossing company boundaries (Gunasekaran et al. 2004; Chae et al. 2009; Gunasekaran and Kobu, 2007). Easier said than done. Three factors need to be considered in nowadays business environment. First, supply chains (SCs) are becoming more and more fuzzy: rather than being mutually exclusive chains, they appear as interconnected and overlapping networks, where companies are immersed and linked through diverse types of relationship (Lambert and Pohlen, 2001; Rice and Hoppe, 2001). Focus and choice is essential when extending the measurement process beyond company boundaries, yet often complex. Always bear in mind the following question: "which are the key performance that matters for this specific SC partner?" Second, organizational skills are critical to design and take full advantage of a SCPMS. Although purchasing, supply chain and customer service functions have increased their managerial capabilities in recent times (Luzzini and Ronchi, 2016), they still rarely display and follow formal strategies (Hesping and Shiele, 2015). Third, a reliable and robust information system infrastructure is critical for a successful implementation of an external SCPMSs (Nudurupati et al., 2011). This requires technological knowledge, resources and investments in order to tailor the ICT systems to the company specificities. In the last fifteen years, internal PMS literature has progressively moved from measurement system design to its implementation (
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