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It was July 2022, and Isaac Morgado, one of the founders of MVMT Strength Inc., wanted to create a comprehensive marketing plan for the fall season. The gym had recently moved to a new location and Morgado wanted to continue growth through promotional campaigns.

It might seem that success at an initial creative endeavor should give someone the confidence to pursue their next project, but that isn't necessarily so. New research indicates that first-time innovators who receive high praise often see the potential failure of follow-up projects as threats to their creative identity, leading to creative inertia. The authors explain the psychology behind this mindset and suggest strategies to help creative professionals sustain their innovative drive.

The co-founders of The Graph Foundation had experienced first-hand how difficult it was to create new Web3 applications without easy access to blockchain data: There was no indexing and querying software for blockchain, and developers had to find their own method for collecting and transforming data from different sources. The Graph was an indexing protocol designed to solve this issue and become the nascent "Google Search" for the metaverse. With a recent investment giving it an opportunity to increase its revenue while improving the value proposition, The Graph had to decide which business model to adopt: Should The Graph implement a protocol-to-user model to attract everyday users, or stay with its current protocol-to-developer model? If it implemented a the former, should it develop its own search feature, or collaborate with a partner (or set of partners) to this achieve this goal? What role should this feature play in The Graph’s broader strategy and within the wider Web3 ecosystem?

The co-founders of The Graph Foundation had experienced first-hand how difficult it was to create new Web3 applications without easy access to blockchain data: There was no indexing and querying software for blockchain, and developers had to find their own method for collecting and transforming data from different sources. The Graph was an indexing protocol designed to solve this issue and become the nascent "Google Search" for the metaverse. With a recent investment giving it an opportunity to increase its revenue while improving the value proposition, The Graph had to decide which business model to adopt: Should The Graph implement a protocol-to-user model to attract everyday users, or stay with its current protocol-to-developer model? If it implemented a the former, should it develop its own search feature, or collaborate with a partner (or set of partners) to this achieve this goal? What role should this feature play in The Graph's broader strategy and within the wider Web3 ecosystem?

In late 2019, Nicole Haney was considering the next strategic step for her business, Boho Bars Bake Shop, based in London, Ontario. Boho Bars Bake Shop produced energy bars made with simple ingredients and whole foods. Haney, who had left her corporate job with the goal of achieving a more flexible lifestyle that would allow her to live in Hawaii for six months of the year, had successfully scaled the business to distribute her product across major retailers in Canada in just four years of operation. She had a supportive partner and no children, allowing her to focus on her business and career. She was considering several alternatives, including implementing automated production and commercializing with a co-manufacturer. If she chose not to pursue one of these opportunities, Haney could also consider maintaining the status quo or selling the business, possibly maintaining an income stream through a royalty deal.

In the context of platforms, an open architecture is instrumental in enabling innovation by complementors. But as complementors increasingly deplete the innovation opportunities that the platform architecture affords, the platform architecture must evolve to reinvigorate the platform's generative capacity. This article underscores the role of complementors in the process of platform architecture evolution by introducing the notion of architectural generativity. Architectural generativity involves actively soliciting and selectively incorporating contributions from complementors to help evolve the platform in unforeseen ways. In the case of the Mozilla Firefox web browser platform, complementors contributed new ways to facilitate access to the platform's technological components and suggested better ways to control the platform and its architecture.

Orchestrating an ecosystem requires coordination to create value, but prior research has tended to emphasize centralized ecosystem control over solutions involving distributed governance. By studying multilateral public-private collaborations to develop scientific knowledge to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, we identify a new model of ecosystem control - indirect and distributed governance using R&D consortia. We report archival and interview data on 46 consortia with overlapping corporate, nonprofit, and governmental membership. We find three models of consortia that allow member organizations to jointly orchestrate an ecosystem without centralized control. We discuss the broader implications of this model for orchestrating ecosystems.

Entrepreneur François Randin was successful, but searching for his next venture, wanting to build something sustainable. Suddenly he sees an all-electric sports car and decides to create an electric vehicle (EV) charging station company, even though the number of EVs on the road at the time is minuscule. He starts with software, moves to hardware, and launches... And then grows slowly until the day he discovers a new business model. He is successful in funding the start of the scaleup, but realizes that to really get to hyperscale (and fund his next idea), an adjacency, he needs really deep pockets. Raise more money, go for an IPO or accept one of the three acquisition offers he has in front of him?

Student spreadsheet for product W34754.

Going through a dynamic market change with increased user growth and competition, the digital fitness scale-up Freeletics GmbH (Freeletics) found itself at a crossroads in September 2020. Equipped with fresh funding of US$25 million, the chief executive officer and the business development lead discussed the path forward for the company. Its current successful offering, a digital fitness coaching app, promised continuous growth. However, changing market conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic, new user behaviours, and emerging technologies offered new opportunities-and new competition. Consequently, Freeletics had to diversify its business model with new offerings to strategically renew its competitive advantages while keeping the existing successful business growing. The chief executive officer and business development lead had to find an organizational approach that would allow them to start a new entrepreneurial journey without neglecting what they had already built.

In early 2022, Rajendra Jaiswal was in a quandary about the future of the collective enterprise Diwak Mata Farmer Producer Company Limited (Diwak Mata), which his organization, Prakriti Foundation for Natural Resources Regeneration (Prakriti), had helped incubate and grow. Since Diwak Mata’s registration in 2018, Prakriti had helped it develop connections with various value chain participants and overcome the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. With a supportive Board of Directors (BoD) and an able chief executive officer (CEO) in Rakesh Sen, Diwak Mata was recognized as one of the better-performing producer companies in the region and had growing revenues with fluctuating profits. Looking at the figures of the audited balance sheet, Jaiswal wondered whether Prakriti should withdraw its support to the producer company. Were Diwak Mata’s BoD of farmers and the CEO strong enough to chart the organization’s own path? Could they create sufficient ownership from the stakeholders for sustained growth in Prakriti’s absence? Should Prakriti remain loyal to Diwak Mata or exit and continue its core activities with other communities?

Udaan was an Indian business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce start-up founded in 2016. Initially, it grew at a brisk pace, achieving unicorn status in record time. For the small retailers Udaan targeted, the pre-existing product distribution chain was long, inefficient, and highly fractured. With the arrival of e-commerce, deepening cell phone penetration, and the government's increased interest in digitization, many start-ups emerged in the B2B e-commerce space. While most players adopted a vertical-based business model focused on specific product categories, Udaan pursued top-line growth and attacked the sector's inefficiencies with a horizontal, cross-category business model. As of 2021, the valuation of Udaan's competitors have grown much faster than its own. In face of this pressure, Udaan's founders had to consider revisiting their strategy and exploring other options.

Levels is a highly innovative startup in the health care space. They intend to revolutionize health by linking behavior-eating, exercise, sleeping, etc.-to changes in metabolism. They believe metabolic health can be managed through careful monitoring of changes in variables like blood glucose levels using digital monitors. The company is, however, more interesting for its management model and organization structure. Founded prior to Covid, Levels is a 'native remote' company. All the management processes are designed to function without employees regularly interacting face-to-face. There is a great emphasis on information being prepared to support asynchronously. The company makes extensive use of tools that allow employees to generate effective content. It also practices radical transparency internally and externally, with the vast majority of its strategic documents, research agenda and product development agenda accessible freely to outsiders. Even more interestingly, the work process are designed to maximize employees' opportunity to engage in 'deep work.' Deep work is a concept associated with the writing of Georgetown computer scientist, Cal Newport. It is based on the premise that humans are singularly bad at context shifting and that they require extended period during which they can apply themselves to difficult tasks without interruption or distraction. The Levels management model minimizes the number of meetings (i.e., no more than two a week for most people, many of those optional), real time communities, etc. Levels adherence to a native remote/deep work model provides a fascinating basis for evaluating innovative management structures and the challenges in running a distributed workforce.

Founded by two former Sequoia Capital partners, Columbus-Ohio-based Drive Capital's mission was to build a world-class venture capital firm in the middle of the U.S., an area historically overlooked by VCs. Drive faced early challenges of attracting investors, sourcing talent, and building entrepreneurial ecosystems, but by 2022, the firm had invested in over 90 portfolio companies and had assets under management of over $2 billion, making it the largest VC firm outside the coasts. In the Winter of 2022, cofounder and CEO Chris Olsen contemplated an investment into Forge Biologics, an Ohio-based gene therapy contract development and manufacturing company. The partnership weighed the pros and cons in the context of the fund's overall portfolio and macroeconomic headwinds facing the industry.

In September 2021, Adam Demuyakor (MBA 2017) was faced with decisions about how to launch his venture capital (VC) investment firm. His previous investment activities were a series of angel investments and special purpose vehicles alongside two part-time general partners (GPs). After hearing investor feedback that the firm was not institutional enough, Demuyakor created a successor firm on his own, Wilshire Lane Capital (WLC), and sold a GP stake to private equity firm Nile Capital to help with operational expenses, infrastructure support, and fundraising. Under WLC, Demuyakor sought to raise a $75 million fund mainly focused on Series A PropTech deals. However, he received conflicting advice on three strategic decision vectors-fund size, stage of deals, and subsector area of focus. Some potential investors were also concerned about Demuyakor running the fund as a solo GP instead of with a full-time partner. While the characteristics of the new fund were based on Demuyakor's background, preferences, and goals, he knew he had to align his strategy with the approach that would earn the confidence of investors. Thus, he had some decisions to make.

Pace Delivers at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY, is an on-campus student-run food delivery service launched as a pilot in April 2017. On a residential campus where many students did not own vehicles, Pace Delivers provided late-night food deliveries to students desiring off-campus restaurant food. As of November 2017, Pace Delivers had incurred heavy losses, in part due to its inability to accept Flex Dollars, a part of meal plan money students can use outside the campus dining services. The vendor the team hired to build an order-taking site for accepting Flex Dollars had not yet completed the site with the promised features. Therefore, the team had been able to accept only credit card payments through a Shopify e-commerce site. Believing that the business was losing sales with its inability to accept Flex Dollars, the student managers had to decide whether to wait for the vendor to come through or adopt some other online payment alternative. The team also needed to come up with other ideas to help the business survive and become profitable in the long term. Featuring an on-campus student-run business catering to students, the case offers a business setting that students can readily understand and will find engaging. In addition, it provides insights into the challenges of launching an online business.

In 2020, when everyone had been quarantined at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korea-based Eric Kim jumped onto YouTube, a video-sharing digital platform. Although his initial growth on the platform was relatively fast, it soon began to stagnate. Kim decided to consider four key strategies to overcome this situation, which included revealing his face in his videos, business expansion, strategic alliances through Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs), and internationalisation. Would Kim regain his rapid expansion of influence on YouTube? Could his subsequent growth efforts be sufficient to ensure his channel's continued success in an increasingly digital world?

By December 2018, Evie the digital personal assistant (PA) had gained quite a following from prominent clients such as Unilever and Airbus. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Evie was so good that clients believed 'she' was human, expecting to greet 'her' in the flesh at meetings. Jin Hian Lee, Evie.ai's co-founder, understood that gaining such high praise from clients was not enough. More needed to be done to jumpstart the fledgling start-up's growth to the next level. But where should his focus be? There were signs that Evie could perhaps benefit from specialising in specific domains or be bolder and venture beyond the shores of Singapore, where the start-up was based since it began in 2014. How should Lee chart the 'career path' of Evie? What should he do? Unbeknownst to him, Lee would face a similar dilemma in 2020 when the global COVID-19 pandemic plagued the world. How could he cope with the challenges awaiting Evie.ai?

The ability to commercialize products based on distributed innovation is one of the critical challenges of large-scale open innovation. While this issue has been largely investigated in relation to open-source software (OSS), the literature on commercialization strategies of open-source hardware (OSHW) is comparatively scarce, despite OSHW commercialization being more complex. Based on a multi-method exploratory study, this article shows that with OSHW, firms may strategically leverage a "gray area" between closeness and openness to take advantage of OSWH community innovations.