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The Power of Customer Misbehavior explores the importance of customer driven innovation for top line and bottom line growth. It shows how companies should not only learn to identify how their products are being misused, but also how to use this knowledge to innovate new products and services that better meet customer needs and promote viral growth. These techniques also promote long-term customer loyalty and growth even in hypercompetitive environments. This unique new book is the first to explore the idea of 'customer misuse': when customers modify features or expand the usage of products and services in ways that were never intended. Reacting appropriately to customer misuse will allow companies to enter new markets, create more loyal customers, and encourage customers to tell others about the company's products, all of which foster faster growth. These compelling concepts are presented in the form of simple actionable principles and illustrated with rich case studies from successful companies such as Twitter, Intuit, eBay and Coca-Cola, to offer the first practical guide to harnessing this new source of strategic innovation.

In this special issue, we review 14 articles published in Organization Science over the past 25 years examining large-scale collaborations (LSCs) tasked with knowledge dissemination and innovation. LSCs involve sizeable pools of participants carrying out a common mission such as developing open-source software, detector technologies, complex architecture, encyclopedias, medical cures, or responses to climate change. LSCs depend on technologies because they are often geographically distributed, incorporate multiple and diverse epistemic perspectives. How such technologies need to be structured and appropriated for effective LSC collaborations has been researched in piecemeal fashion by examining a single technology used in a single collaboration context with little opportunity for generalization. Studies have tended to black box technology use even though they acknowledge such uses to be critical to the LSC operation. We unveil the black box surrounding LSC collaboration technologies by identifying three challenges that LSCs face when they pursue an LSC effort: (1) knowledge exchange challenges, (2) knowledge deliberation challenges, and (3) knowledge combination challenges. We examine how technology was used in responding to these challenges, synthesizing their use into three socio-technical affordances to improve knowledge dissemination efficiency and innovation effectiveness: knowledge collaging, purposeful deliberating, and knowledge interlacing. We demonstrate the intellectual benefit of incorporating socio-technical affordances in studies of LSCs including what small group collaboration research can learn from LSCs.

PurposeDuring hyper‐competition, disruptive technological innovations germinate causing significant changes in software development organizations' (SDOs) knowledge. The scope and flexibility of the SDO's knowledge base increases; its volatility and the demand for efficiency grows. This creates germane needs to translate abstract knowledge into workable knowledge fast while delivering solutions. The aim of this article is to examine SDOs' responses to such learning challenges through an inductive, theory‐generating study which addresses the question: how did some SDOs successfully learn under these circumstances?Design/methodology/approachThe article takes the form of an exploratory, theory‐building case study investigating seven SDOs' web‐development activities and associated changes in their learning routines during the dot‐com boom.FindingsThe SDOs increased their ability to learn broadly, deeply, and quickly – a learning contingency referred as "hyper‐learning" – by inventing, selecting and configuring learning routines. Two sets of learning routines enabled broad and flexible exploratory‐knowledge identification and exploratory‐knowledge assimilation: distributed gate‐keeping; and brokering of external knowledge. Likewise, two sets of learning routines enabled fast and efficient exploitative‐knowledge transformation and exploitation: simple design rules; and peer networks. The authors further observed that SDOs created systemic connections between these routines allowing for fast switching and dynamic interlacing concurrently within the same organizational sub‐units. The authors refer to this previously unidentified form of organizational learning as parallel ambidexterity.Originality/valueThe study contributes to organizational learning theories as applied to SDOs by recognizing a condition where knowledge scope, flexibility, efficiency and volatility increase. It also argues a new form of ambidexterity, parallel ambidexterity, was created and implemented in response to this set of requirements. Parallel ambidexterity differs from traditional exploitative forms where SDOs focus on improving and formalizing their operational knowledge and improving efficiency. It also differs from traditional explorative forms where SDOs focus on identifying and grafting and distributing external abstract knowledge by expanding knowledge scope, flexibility. Most importantly, parallel ambidexterity differs from the widely recognized forms of sequential and structural ambidexterity because exploration and exploitation take place at the same time within the same unit in holographic ways to address volatility. Here learning outcome are applied directly and fast to the tasks for which the learning was initiated.

Traditionally, Systems Analysis and Design (SAD) research has focused on ways of working and ways of modeling. Design ecology – the task, organizational and political context surrounding design – is less well understood. In particular, relationships between design routines and products within ecologies have not received sufficient attention. In this paper, we theorize about design product and ecology relationships and deliberate on how design products – viewed as boundary objects – bridge functional knowledge and stakeholder power gaps across different social worlds. We identify four essential features of design boundary objects: capability to promote shared representation, capability to transform design knowledge, capability to mobilize for action, and capability to legitimize design knowledge. We show how these features help align, integrate, and transform heterogeneous technical and domain knowledge across social worlds as well as mobilize, coordinate, and align stakeholder power. We illustrate through an ethnography of a large aerospace laboratory how two design artifacts – early proto-architectures and project plans – shared these four features to coalesce design processes and propel successful movement of designs across social worlds. These artifacts resolved uncertainty associated with functional requirements and garnered political momentum to choose among design solutions. Altogether, the study highlights the importance of design boundary objects in multi-stakeholder designs and stresses the need to formulate sociology-based design theories on how knowledge is produced and consumed in complex SAD tasks.

PurposeTo give an overview of the papers contained in this Special Issue.Design/methodology/approachLooks at how each of the papers reflects the theme of the Special Issue, "Complexity and IT design and evolution".FindingsThe collection of papers in this Special Issue addresses complexity, drawing on multi‐faceted, multi‐theoretical lines of inquiry.Originality/valueFrameworks from complexity science, institutional theory, social science, philosophy, and recent thinking in science and technology studies (STS) are used as theoretical lenses to conceptualize and analyze complexity in IS and to offer ways to mitigate it.

Advances in information technologies (IT) are creating unprecedented opportunities for interorganizational collaboration, particularly in large-scale distributed projects. The use of advanced IT in such projects can foster new forms of social exchange among organizations and change the way organizations view themselves in the context of their relationships. Despite a wealth of research on IT use, social exchange, and organizational identity, little is known about how new IT and the enactment of related IT affordances within interorganizational contexts enable social exchanges and organizational identity orientations. To address this gap, we conduct multiple case studies that describe the changing use of two-dimensional computer-aided design technology and new three-dimensional modeling technologies by a leading metal fabrication company in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. The case studies demonstrate that changes in the company's IT and the enactment of related IT affordances within variable interorganizational contexts enable new forms of social exchanges. These exchanges, in turn, provide the context for the rearticulation of the company's identity orientation. Based on these insights, we formulate a theoretical model to delineate the relationships between IT use, IT affordances, social exchanges, and identity orientation. We conclude by outlining the implications of our study and suggesting possible avenues for future research.

PurposeWith the rise in public awareness of corporate social responsibility, business leaders are increasingly expected to recognize the needs and demands of multiple stakeholders. There may, however, be unintended consequences of this expectation for organizational managers who engage these needs and demands with a high level of moral attentiveness. This study aims to investigate the indirect effect of managerial moral attentiveness on managerial turnover intent, serially mediated by moral dissonance and moral stress.Design/methodology/approachMulti-phase survey data were collected from 130 managers within a large sales organization regarding experiences of moral dissonance and moral stress. The authors analyzed the relation of these experiences to measures of moral attentiveness and turnover intent using structural equation modeling.FindingsResults support a serial mediation model, with a positive, indirect effect between moral attentiveness and turnover intent among managers through moral dissonance and moral stress. Overall, the results suggest that expecting business leaders to be morally attentive may result in greater moral dissonance and moral stress, potentially impacting their intentions to stay with the organization.Practical implicationsImplementing positive practices toward processing moral dissonance and reducing moral stress may be a mechanism toward retaining ethically inclined organizational leaders.Originality/valueThis study is the first to identify moral attentiveness as an antecedent to turnover intent within managers. It also establishes the serial mechanisms of moral dissonance and moral stress and provides suggestions on how to retain morally attentive managers by actively managing those mechanisms.

Changes in the technologies of representation in a heterogeneous, distributed sociotechnical system, such as a large construction project, can instigate a complex pattern of innovations in technologies, practices, structures, and strategies. We studied the adoption of digital three-dimensional (3-D) representations in the building projects of the architect Frank O. Gehry, and observed that multiple, heterogeneous firms in those projects produced diverse innovations, each of which created a wake of innovation. Together, these multiple wakes of innovation produce a complex landscape of innovations with unpredictable peaks and valleys. Gehry's adoption of digital 3-D representations disturbed the ecology of interactions and stimulated innovations in his project networks by: providing path-creating innovation trajectories in separate communities of practice, creating trading zones where communities could create knowledge about diverse innovations, and offering a means for intercalating innovations across heterogeneous communities. Our study suggests that changes in digital representations that are central to the functioning of a distributed system can engender multiple innovations in technologies, work practices, and knowledge across multiple communities, each of which is following its own distinctive tempo and trajectory.