Organization design and effectiveness over the innovation life cycle

摘要

To examine how firms address conflicts in strategic contingencies, how managers adjust to misfits, and how organizations adapt their designs. The adoption of e-commerce is a good setting to study organization design for innovations, Many firms created autonomous e-commerce 'spinouts' to meet the challenges, while others used much more integrated approaches. The study uses a paired case study design where pairs of industry leaders were chosen who competed in e-commerce, but used different organizational designs. Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch were the leading discount and full-service brokers, respectively. CVS and Walgreens were two of the largest drug stores and were similar in terms of volume, stores and mail-service pharmacy resources. Information was collected from both group's executives and others through personal interviews. Also, information from published documents were also used as additional data source. Qualitative techniques given in various published works on organizational design were used for the analysis. To develop generalizable findings built on well-accepted theoretical constructs, the data was repeated by examined, identified patterns, and compared with existing literature.