Join us for Manchester Institute of Innovation Research Seminar Series 20/21, webinar hosted by guest speaker, Joern Hoppmann, Full Professor and the Head of the Management Research Group at the University of Oldenburg.
To join this webinar, please sign up via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/manchester-institute-of-innovation-research-seminar-joern-hoppmann-tickets-141831414579
Running in Circles? Understanding the Formation of Industry Architectures in the German Beverage Industry
Abstract: By showing how firms can orchestrate and shape the industries they are located in, the literature on industry architectures provides a new perspective on competition and the drivers of firm performance. Yet, while we have accumulated detailed knowledge on the strategies firms can use to position within and shape the success of industry architectures, such as lobbying or standard setting, we know relatively little about the system-level factors that determine which of several alternative industry architectures prevails in the longer run. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a longitudinal, comparative case study of two alternative industry architectures in the German beverage industry that aim to reduce the negative ecological footprint of packaging: reuse and recycling. While from an ecological perspective reuse has been the preferred architecture, in recent years for some beverages the recycling architecture has gained significant market share. We explain this surprising development by showing that, in addition to the presence of a central system orchestrator, the success of an industry architecture hinges on the degree to which it generates value for the customer and on how this value is distributed among the firms within the industry. Our findings suggest that in times of fierce competition between industry architectures it might be advisable for firms to share value and even outsource the role of system integration to an independent entity. This finding is important as it stands in stark contrast to the prior literature, which has made detailed suggestions on how individual firms can strategically occupy bottleneck positions and engage in system orchestration to maximize their own performance. In this sense, we contribute to the literature on industry architectures by showing that the same strategic actions that are key to the success of individual firms within industries might be harmful when trying to maximize the success of the industry architecture the firm is part of.
Joern Hoppmann is Full Professor and the Head of the Management Research Group at the University of Oldenburg (Germany). His research centers on questions at the intersection of strategic management, sustainability, and innovation, especially in the context of energy, mobility, and IT. Joern Hoppmann’s research has appeared in leading management and innovation journals - such as the Academy of Managment Journal, Organization Science, the Journal of Business Venturing, or Research Policy - and has received multiple awards, e.g., the Young Talent Award of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB), the Best Paper Award of the Division “Organizations and the Natural Environment” (ONE) of the Academy of Management, and the ETH medal for the best doctoral dissertation in the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics of ETH Zurich in 2013. Joern Hoppmann holds a PhD in Management from ETH Zurich (Switzerland). Prior to and during his time in Zurich, he was as research fellow and associate at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), as well as a visiting researcher at IMD Business School (Lausanne, Switzerland), the University of Hamburg (Germany), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA).
