By applying formalized innovation portfolio management systems, firms seek to ensure an alignment of their goals and strategy with their employees' different abilities, actions, and outcomes. However, research indicates that nonrational, political behavior also determines formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. Research on political behavior in respect of innovation portfolio management usually conceptualizes political behavior as a set of self‐serving activities, such as negotiation, bargaining, coalition building, and acquiring power, aimed at protecting, maintaining, or promoting an actor's self‐interest and power. Consequently, extant research tends to focus on political behavior's dysfunctional impacts on decision‐making processes and their subsequent outcomes. This paper challenges this negativity bias by exploring a novel, neutral specification of political behavior and its relation to innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. By conducting an automotive industry case study focusing on the innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes, the paper analyzed the data from 43 interviewees. The conceptual model shows that managers' political capabilities determine their ability to behave politically. According to the results, political behavior comprises the activities that prepare the stage and orchestrate others in order to form a political coalition. Furthermore, results show that political behavior functions as a sensegiving and a sensebreaking process, with managers seeking to shape an innovation project's understanding according to their interests and to influence portfolio decisions. The resulting novel specification of political behavior extends the construct's scope and validity by investigating their functional and dysfunctional aspects, and by indicating that a political sensemaking process complements formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes.

Digital technologies fuel technological change that generates substantial uncertainty and complexity. Corporate actors rely on their technological frames to cope with these challenges. Technological frames determine how actors interpret, assess, and shape a technology’s development, usage, and trajectory. However, the research fails to provide insights into the microfoundations that can explain the consequences of heterogeneity in technological frames. We argue that this research gap is due to a lack of a proper measurement instruments. To address this gap, we theorize on the antecedent of technological frames on the individual level and undertook a rigorous scale‐development process encompassing five steps and samples. The resulting measurement instrument assesses five distinct but interrelated dimensions of an actor’s technological frame (personal attitude, application value, organizational influence, industrial influence, and supervisor influence). This instrument provides a theoretical and methodological foundation for future research on technological frames and corporate strategizing in the digital age.

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ZusammenfassungDas BMBF/ESF Projekt FachWerk entwickelte während der dreijährigen Projektlaufzeit ein multimediales Lehr- und Lernarrangement zur Adoption von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien im deutschen Handwerk. Ziel ist die digitalisierte Fachkräftequalifizierung für die zukünftige Arbeitswelt. Im Rahmen des Projekts wurden verschiedene Mega- und Technologietrends sowie Erfolgsfaktoren identifiziert, Bedarfe für zukünftige Qualifikationen definiert, ein konkretes Lehrkonzept gestaltet und darauf basierend die digitale Lehr- und Lernplattform entwickelt, getestet und evaluiert. Die nachhaltige Verwertung der Plattform wird durch assoziierte Partner langfristig sichergestellt. Die Plattform dient somit als ein wichtiger Schritt zur digitalen Transformation des Handwerks.