The purpose of this paper is to gain deeper insight into the practical judgements we are making together in ongoing organizational life when realizing a complex innovative technical project for a customer and so enrich the understanding of how customer orientation emerges in an organization. The outcome contributes to the knowledge of implementing customer orientation in an organization as according to literature (Saarijärvi, Neilimo, Närvänen, 2014 and Van Raaij and Stoelhorst, 2008) the actual implementation process of customer orientation is not that well understood. Saarijärvi, Neilimo and Närvänen (2014) noticed a shift from measuring the antecedents of customer orientation and impact on company performance, towards a better understanding how customer orientation is becoming in organizations. A different way of putting the customer at the center of attention can be found in taking our day-to-day commercial experience seriously, according to the complex responsive process approach, a theory developed by Stacey, Griffin and Shaw (2000). The complex responsive processes approach differs from a systems thinking approach, because it focuses on human behavior and interaction. This means that the only agents in a process are people and they are not thought of as constituting a system (Groot, 2007). Based on a narrative inquiry, the objective is to convey an understanding of how customer orientation is emerging in daily organizational life. Patterns of interaction between people are investigated, who work in different departments of an organization and who have to fulfill customer requirements. This implies that attention is focused towards an understanding in action, which is quite distinct from the kind of cognitive and intellectual understanding that dominates organisational thought. The reflection process resulting from this analysis is located in a broader discourse of management theory.
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Like a marker pen on a map, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically highlighted the persisting existence of borders that used to play an ever decreasing role in people´s perception and behavior over the last decades. Yes, inner European borders are open in normal times. Yes, people, goods, services and ideas are crossing the border between Germany and the Netherlands freely. Yet we see that the border can turn into a barrier again quickly and effectively and it does so in many dimensions, some of them being not easily visible. Barriers hinder growth, development and exchange and in spite of our progress in creating a borderless Europe, borders still create barriers in many domains. Differing labor law, social security and tax systems, heterogeneous education models, small and big cultural differences, language barriers and more can impose severe limitations on people and businesses as they cross the border to travel, shop, work, hire, produce, buy, sell, study and research. Borders are of all times and will therefore always exist. But as they did so for a long time, huge opportunities can be found in overcoming the barriers they create. The border must not necessarily be a dividing line between two systems. It has the potential to become a center of growth and progress that build on joint efforts, cross-border cooperation, mutual learning and healthy competition. Developing this inherent potential of border regions asks for politics, businesses and research & education on both sides of the border to work together. The research group Cross-Border Business Development at Fontys University of Applied Science in Venlo conducts applied research on the impact of the national border on people and businesses in the Dutch-German border area. Students, employees, border commuters, entrepreneurs and employers all face opportunities as well as challenges due to the border. In collaboration with these stakeholders, the research chair aims to create knowledge and provide solutions towards a Dutch-German labor market, an innovative Dutch-German borderland and a futureproof Cross-Border economic ecosystem. This collection is not about the borderland in times of COVID-19. Giving meaning to the borderland is an ongoing process that started long before the pandemic and will continue far beyond. The links that have been established across the border and those that will in the future are multifaceted and so are the topics in this collection. Vincent Pijnenburg outlines a broader and introductory perspective on the dynamics in the Dutch-German borderland.. Carla Arts observes shopping behavior of cross-border consumers in the Euregion Rhine-Meuse-North. Jan Lucas explores the interdependencies of the Dutch and German economies. Jean Louis Steevensz presents a cross-border co-creation servitization project between a Dutch supplier and a German customer. Vincent Pijnenburg and Patrick Szillat analyze the exitence of clusters in the Dutch-German borderland. Christina Masch and Janina Ulrich provide research on students job search preferences with a focus on the cross-border labor market. Sonja Floto-Stammen and Natalia Naranjo-Guevara contribute a study of the market for insect-based food in Germany and the Netherlands. Niklas Meisel investigates the differences in the German and Dutch response to the Covid-19 crisis. Finally, Tolga Yildiz and Patrick Szillat show differences in product-orientation and customer-orientation between Dutch and German small and medium sized companies. This collection shows how rich and different the links across the border are and how manifold the perspectives and fields for a cross-border approach to regional development can be. This publication is as well an invitation. Grasping the opportunities that the border location entails requires cooperation across professional fields and scientific disciplines, between politics, business and researchers. It needs the contact with and the contribution of the people in the region. So do what we strive for with our cross-border research agenda: connect!
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Business innovation is a multidisciplinary area of expertise that bridges the gap between traditional areas of study such as business administration, organizational studies, marketing, design, engineering and entrepreneurship. Business innovation focuses on creating, accelerating and managing new and sustainable business models through innovation (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010; Keeley, Walters, Pikkel, and Quinn, 2013).
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Design educators and industry partners are critical knowledge managers and co-drivers of change, and design graduate and post-graduate students can act as catalysts for new ideas, energy, and perspectives. In this article, we will explore how design advances industry development through the lens of a longitudinal inquiry into activities carried out as part of a Dutch design faculty-industry collaboration. We analyze seventy-five (75) Master of Science (MSc) thesis outcomes and seven (7) Doctorate (PhD) thesis outcomes (five in progress) to identify ways that design activities have influenced advances in the Dutch aviation industry over time. Based on these findings, we then introduce an Industry Design Framework, which organizes the industry/design relationship as a three-layered system. This novel approach to engaging industry in design research and design education has immediate practical value and theoretical significance, both in the present and for future research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.07.003 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-de-lille-8039372/
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The digital age has brought significant changes in the way organizations operate and compete. As a result of rapid technology development, many organizations are undergoing a digital transformation to stay relevant and competitive in the marketplace. This literature review aims to find future research topics by providing an overview of the current state of research on organizations in digital transformation (ODT), especially on malleable organization design and HRM aspects. The article begins by defining digital transformation (DT), and then examines how organizations change during DT, before delving into the perspectives of malleable organization design and HRM. Finally, it concludes by identifying gaps in the literature and suggesting a research agenda for future. Overall, organizational factors that need more investigation are highlighted to tackle complexities of ODT for further research
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The digital age has brought significant changes in the way organizations operate and compete. As a result of rapid technology development, many organizations are undergoing a digital transformation to stay relevant and competitive in the marketplace. This literature review aims to find future research topics by providing an overview of the current state of research on organizations in digital transformation (ODT), especially on malleable organization design and HRM aspects. The article begins by defining digital transformation (DT), and then examines how organizations change during DT, before delving into the perspectives of malleable organization design and HRM. Finally, it concludes by identifying gaps in the literature and suggesting a research agenda for future. Overall, organizational factors that need more investigation are highlighted to tackle complexities of ODT for further research.
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In Proceedings of the first CARPE conference november 2011
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The Utrecht School of Journalism has a long tradition in international higher education. The School’s European Culture & European Journalism (ED&EJ) programme is an example of a pedagogical practice in higher education where advanced students learn how to perform in an international context. Journalism students from Moscow to Ottawa and from Helsinki to Bilbao learn alongside Dutch students. It is not only the content of the programme and the reporting for the Web Magazine that makes the EC&EJ programme an inspirational educational experience. The programme demonstrates the importance of sharing different professional and cultural values. This sharing and confronting of professional standards contributes to an important new qualification for all higher educated professionals: awareness of cultural differences and similarities
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This study explores how non-executive directors are challenged by management while they seek to improve the effectiveness of supervisory boards in the Netherlands. A combination of semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire among non-executive directors indicates that supervisory board members mainly experience boardroom challenges in three core areas: the ability of non-executive directors to ask management critical questions, information asymmetries between the management and supervisory boards and the management of the relationship between individual executive and non-executive directors. The qualitative in-depth analysis reveals the complexity of the main contributing factors to problems in the boardroom as well as the range of process and social interventions non-executive directors use to address boardroom issues. The findings highlight the need to better understand boardroom processes and the need of non-executive directors to carefully manage relationships in and around the boardroom.
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Competitive advantage is probably the most popular business concept today (Mooney, 2007). This article aims to investigate critically the discourse on competitive advantage, as expressed by business literature, by locating its meanings in the public higher education sector. This research reveals that people working within the HEIs have given broader and more diversified meanings to this concept, which are partly due to the message received from external environment, and partly because of the influence of professional settings in which they function. By studying these diversified meanings, 13 elements are identified in constructing the competitive advantages of higher education institutions. Furthermore, the importance of each element is rated and ranked which enables us to assess the quantitative significance. The clarification of this container concept “competitive advantage” leads to the conclusion that the business way of defining of competitive advantage should be critically reviewed and verified in the context of public higher education sector, because the competition in the public education market is different from the normal market competition defined by the business literature.
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