Browsing by Author "Rajala, Risto, Assoc. Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland"

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    Creating value through inter-organizational collaboration: A collective action perspective
    (Aalto University, 2019) Matinheikki, Juri; Rajala, Risto, Assoc. Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland; Tuotantotalouden laitos; Department of Industrial Engineering and Management; Project Business Research Group; Perustieteiden korkeakoulu; School of Science; Artto, Karlos, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland
    Inter-organizational collaboration plays a pivotal role not just in creating business value but solving contemporary grand challenges on the societal level. However, collaboration has many barriers which are often social rather than technological. Existing practices, regulative pressures, social norms, beliefs, and other institutional mechanisms may come to hinder collective action among organizations. Thus, collaboration and collective action often require institutional change. The purpose of this dissertation project was to examine the empirical challenge of how multiple diverse organizations can jointly create value. The four published empirical articles form the basis of this dissertation by providing different conceptualizations of the empirically-grounded development processes towards inter-organizational value creation. To integrate and synthesize the findings of the four articles, the compiling part then adopts a collective action perspective, which is developed by combining the literatures of behavioral theory of collective action and neo-institutional theory of organization. The collective action perspective suggests that institutional change towards inter-organizational value creation requires actors to solve the second-order collective action problem, which means that establishing institutions that support collective action in fact requires collective action. As the outcome of the synthesis, this dissertation delineates the developmental process of collective action systems showing that solving this paradox requires strategic actions from elite actors with high social positions that grant them the reflexive capacity to deviate from existing institutional constraints. These actors act as mobilizers by forming the initial frame or vision of change, which is then, through a process of negotiations among multiple actors, refined into a system-level goal having a practical task-specific dimension coupled with symbolic representation of the more abstract, yet adherable, vision. The system-level goal becomes then to drive task-specific actions overcoming the second-order collective action problem by motivating actors to jointly change the localized socio-material environment (e.g. by developing a new technology or a physical asset). These changes connect informal rules with technological environment, redefining mundane patterns of organizing and setting governance mechanisms that further support collective action, thus solving the first-order collective action problem. The new settlement can then be sustained through active institutional maintenance. Findings also indicate that collective action systems are vulnerable to endogenous or exogenous shocks. However, such disruptions are necessary evils, permitting renewal and thus institutional change. Overall, the model provides new insights to a theoretical dilemma of the second-order collective action problem as well as to the important practical question of how organizations can engage in joint value creation.   
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    External stakeholder engagement in complex projects
    (Aalto University, 2021) Lehtinen, Jere; Rajala, Risto, Assoc. Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland; Tuotantotalouden laitos; Department of Industrial Engineering and Management; Project Business Research Group; Perustieteiden korkeakoulu; School of Science; Artto, Karlos, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland
    Engaging external stakeholders, like authorities, communities, and non-governmental organizations, is an essential part of complex project management. The objective of this dissertation is to examine how project organizations engage external stakeholders in complex projects.The objective is approached with three research questions. (1) How do project organizations organize external stakeholder engagement in complex projects? (2) How do project organizations engage and disengage external stakeholders over project's lifecycle, and why? (3) How do project organizations communicate effectively in social media to engage external stakeholders? The overall research strategy is case research, and each research question is addressed with an empirical case study. The first study is a qualitative, multiple-case study, the second study is a qualitative, longitudinal single-case study, and the third study is a quantitative, embedded single-case study. Each case study forms an individual and original research article. The empirical data includes semi-structured interviews, project and organization reports, public documents, news articles, and social media messages from three infrastructure projects. The findings of this dissertation provide new understanding regarding stakeholder engagement in the following three ways. First, the findings indicate that three organizing solutions, governance-based, value-based, and dynamism-based solutions, facilitate organizing external stakeholder engagement. The three solutions divide external stakeholder engagement into appropriate activities, allocate the activities to relevant project personnel, and offer the required information and motivation to execute the activities. Second, the findings show that a project organization manages the interaction with external stakeholders based on four rationales: framing the project, legitimizing governance, maintaining interaction, and expanding governance, bound to project lifecycle phases and changing stakeholder environment. The rationales highlight the essential role of disengagement in value creation as the project organization constantly balances between activities to engage external stakeholders and activities to disengage external stakeholders over the project lifecycle. Third, the findings demonstrate that engagement effectiveness depends on a project organization's understanding of the target stakeholder, suitable discussion topics, and communication modes. A project organization's communication that offers information about sustainability issues, or is cooperative or entertaining, engages external stakeholders effectively in social media. Overall, the above-described findings offer novel insights into how project organizations engage external stakeholders in complex projects, contributing to stakeholder theory and complex project management research.
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    Platform-based exchange: New business models in technology industries
    (Aalto University, 2018) Hakanen, Esko; Eloranta, Ville, Dr., Aalto University, Department of Management Studies, Finland; Töytäri, Pekka, Dr., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland; Tuotantotalouden laitos; Department of Industrial Engineering and Management; Service Engineering and Management Research Group; Perustieteiden korkeakoulu; School of Science; Rajala, Risto, Assoc. Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland
    Platform-based information exchange has triggered new forms of value creation across technology industries. The increasing role of digital technologies and platforms has led the way toward service-centric and digitally enhanced value creation, but also provided the firms with an abundance of resource-related information. In addition, firms that operate in traditional industries, such as primary production and manufacturing, have access to extensive amounts of data related to their material resources. This study explores how technology firms capitalize on their material-related data for value creation. This dissertation includes five original research articles on the topic. To capture the companies' operational-level choices and activities, and their impacts on a larger scale, this research utilizes the business model of a firm as the primary unit of analysis. In the process, the uses of material-related data are investigated at different levels of industrial operation, ranging from single firms to business networks. The study takes a critical realist perspective to the phenomenon and follows an abductive process of data analysis. The study insights draw from qualitative case studies among 16 technology industry firms. The findings show that companies adapt their business models to enable platforms for brokering the available information to increase its relevance, applicability, and impact. The main finding of the study is that, along with the increasing use of data in their operations, the investigated firms are shifting toward more collaborative forms of value creation and sharing, which has started to affect their existing business models. These changes indicate a shift in technology firms' compe-titive landscape, from the emphasis of individual firms' business models to ecosystem-level competition. The study theorizes the role of brokerage processes as an explanation of this change and as the basis of value creation and sharing mechanisms on platform-enabled collaboration. The study contributes to existing knowledge of industrial firms' business models by conceptual development and concludes with theoretical propositions. The thesis presents the concepts of intelligent materials and material intelligence to denote the use of material-related information in the business operations. Also, it contemplates platforms as an enabler of inter-firm brokerage in industrial operations. In addition, it clarifies the anatomy of business models by dissecting them to three components: value proposition, value constellation, and value sharing. Building on this conceptual background, the study provides three propositions, which delineate the use of digital platforms manifest in the technology firms' business models: (1) Technology firms can renew their business models by identifying and bridging the structural holes in their networks. (2) Value creation potential of shared information drives firms toward ecosystem-level business model development. (3) The principles of brokerage define value creation and sharing mechanisms in digital platforms, and, thereby, business model design.