Hudson Nordic cooperating with Scientists, Consultants and Researchers

In collaboration and dialogue with scientists, researchers and innovative business leaders within IT, Digital Innovation across various industries, we strive to push relevant topics, sharing research and business insights for your organizational development and your next level of leadership.

Dulce Gonçalves.

Industrial M.Sc., Ph.D Student in her last PhD year at Information Technology (ITE), Halmstad University, Sweden.
Dulce holds a M.Sc., Lic. Informatics and has substantial industrial experience in global R&D software product development. She has held several strategic and leading roles (e.g., R&D manager, Agile thought leader, business area manager, board member and senior management consultant) since the beginning of 2000, supporting large incumbents within different industries through their all-in agile transformation journeys. Her work as a Consultant and her research centres on organizational agility; and how it enables and drives continuous digital innovation growth.

Cultural aspects of organizational agility affecting digital innovation…

… were published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, 16(4), 13-46 in Autumn 2020, by Goncalves, D., Bergquist, M., Bunk, R., & Alänge, S. (2020).

The purpose of this particular study is to understand the influence of cultural values on organizational agility capability. The paper reports on a comparative study of startups and incumbent firms in the automotive industry; and how they work with enabling organizational agility to enhance digital innovation.

The Competing Values Framework by Cameron and Quinn (2011) was used as a tool to categorize different cultures that affect organizational agility but also to identify how and when tensions between values either supported or hampered the organizations’ ability to innovate.

Competing Values Framework (CVF) by Cameron and Quinn (2011) as a theoretical lens

While the role of organizational agility has been approached from different academic strands since the beginning 1990s, the influence of cultural values on organizational agility and innovation capability in firms has recently gained attention. However, only a few qualitative studies have focused on how cultural values drive organizational innovation. Crocitto and Youseef (2003) noted that research has mainly focused on the technical and/or quantitative side of organizational agility and has had little focus on the qualitative side of how organizations achieve the agility that is crucial to their success. Here, we have chosen a qualitative study for a better understanding of how cultural values impact organizational agility and enable innovation.

Cultural aspects are especially crucial as enablers for organizational agility in digital innovation.

Fast-paced digital innovation, organizational agility becomes strategically crucial for large incumbent companies to increase their competitiveness. Literature shows that incumbents, with their vast access to resources, still can have limited ability to innovate and respond to change. This is in contrast to startups, who sometimes are impressively innovative with limited resources. The most successful startups were even able to create a combination of cultures — a concept we here term ‘Agile culture.’ This combination of cultures allowed them to reach a beneficial state of digital innovation growth, using all competence capacity.
(Cultural aspects of organizational agility affecting digital innovation, Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation 2020, 16(4), 13-46)

Read more about the research here