International Business

Ferran Adrià is one of the most recognized chefs in the world. His restaurant, elBulli, was awarded five times the title of the Best Restaurant in the World. Through an analysis of the last 30 years of the creative journey of elBulli, this contribution highlights that Adrià and his team of chefs succeeded in articulating two different processes: i) a process of creativity that aimed at defining a new “school” of high cuisine and ii) a process of innovation that was expressed by the new gastronomic experiences offered to the (happy few) customers of the restaurant until its closure in 2011. A careful examination of the coupling and decoupling of these two processes shows how they fueled each other, and how the management of the organization (through a specific type of ambidexterity) was conducive to the adequate articulation of the two processes.

Downloadable! The traditional perception of patents puts the emphasis on their importance to exclude imitators and to restore incentives to invent. This view is far too restrictive and at variance with many empirical and theoretical works. We show that these contradictions can be overcome ...

The objective of the present contribution is to characterise the nature and role of entrepreneurs in nanotechnologies. The analysis is conducted with regards to specific contexts of emergence of nanotechnologies that we characterise by a two-stage process of development. We show that the risk-taking entrepreneur who transforms externalities into new activities by combining existing resources is likely to be more present in the on-going phase characterised by the deepening of the microscopic control of matter. The phase of convergence between ICT and biotechnologies should be associated to a more cognitive type of entrepreneur who combines knowledge by bridging communities together.

This article aims to clarify how epistemic communities dynamically shape the process of knowledge creation in a localized context and how the evolving interaction between
different members of these communities enables knowledge to transit from its locus of emergence to the global market. It is argued that these dynamics rest on a series of clashes between different frames of reference, which enables bits of knowledge to be progressively revealed, enhanced, nurtured, interpreted and enacted collectively.

A large crowdsourcing project managed by Fiat Brazil involved more than 17,000 participants from 160 different nationalities over 15 months. Fiat promoted a dialogue with an enthusiastic community by linking car experts, professionals, and lay people, through which more than 11,000 ideas were selected and developed to create a concept car using a collaborative process. Through an in-depth case study of this crowdsourcing project, we propose a new approach – the accordion model – which uses project management to help maximize the beneficial inputs of the crowd. Whereas the stage-gate process relies on a “funnel” of articulated sequences expressing a progressive reduction from an initial stock of potential ideas and concepts, in this article, we suggest that crowdsourced projects are more akin to a process that articulates a succession of broadening and funnelling periods that represent information requests and deliveries. We use the metaphorical terminology of “the sacred and the profane” to illustrate the interaction of sophisticated and ordinary ideas between the “sacred” experts from Fiat and the “profane” lay people associated with the project. Lessons learned from the Fiat Mio case suggest how both organizations and Internet users may benefit from successful crowdsourcing projects.