FINDER
The
FINDER programme, a research collaboration between
Radboud University and
Atos, sets out to Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era (FINDER). You will investigate the innovative collaborative arrangement amongst organisations – grassroots, incumbents and the wider society - as they inclusively explore digital technology for new product or market development. The keywords defining the programme are digital transformation, collaboration, strategic reorientation and value creation to society at large.
The FINDER research scope spans industries and job functions, requiring candidates to synthesise complex information and to approach problems nimbly in a manner that can be transferred to both academics and practitioners. It demands a sophisticated understanding of the context in which business is done, the effect of technology in driving these collaborative processes and of the stakeholders involved. FINDER’s integrated curriculum prepares students to drive change at the vanguard of business and technology by challenging them to consider multiple perspectives and to create innovative solutions to problems that are not only profitable to business but also relevant and responsible towards society at large.
We are currently looking for an intellectually curious candidate, aspiring to gain a doctorate in the discipline of Management – FINDER workstream #3: ‘Alternative business models in digital ecosystems’: In good times and bad, firms regularly reshape themselves. Firms may re-align organisation structure with strategy and changed external circumstances (Puranam & Gulati 2009), intervene to stimulate specific activities (Okhuysen and Eisenhardt 2002; Aalbers, 2019), or downsize during challenging times (Dougherty & Bowman 1995). Even under such challenging circumstances, entrepreneurship continues to take place. Intra-entrepreneurs often have to build organisations in order to perform activities for which markets are not yet ready, or even are the first to render solutions to navigate out of crisis. Accordingly, entrepreneurs and managers must consider the design of business models and even building businesses to execute transactions which cannot yet be performed in the market. While reshaping firms (e.g. changing structure or size) is both important and frequent, it is also relatively understudied. Moreover, extant research (e.g. on downsizing and turnaround) typically focuses on traditional outcomes (e.g. profits) with less emphasis on such things as collaboration, knowledge creation and innovation at the individual or team levels. The study of business models at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship research involves an exploration of how firms do business at the system-level under such challenging conditions. These are conditions typically to be expected, also in the wake of COVID-19, with economic prospects scaling down substantially across various industries. Such interdisciplinary investigations are essential for understanding how firms may re-align organisation structure with strategy under suddenly changing external circumstances, with the implications of digital transformation potentially helping different emergent ecosystem actors to outperform in this new landscape. Europe’s financial services industry presents an example of this type of dynamics, facing both technology-driven as well as institutionally-driven challenges in re-inventing and exploring alternative business models as well as entering into economically uncertain times as economic crisis looms on the horizon.
This quantitatively oriented research project investigates the following research question:
What are the characteristics of alternative business models in digital ecosystems? Which factors facilitate their development as firms reshape themselves in the face of sudden crisis? This project brings together research on antecedents, processes and consequences associated with organisational reshaping and consider the role of technology as enabler or constraint in this process. The project outline allows for the combination of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches targeting single or multiple organisational levels. The project has good access to the European financial services industry and the fintech community in particular as inroads to original data collection and industry exposure, as well as access to the major academic business data repositories (Icon, Crunchbase, Lexus Nexus, etc.).
For this project you will counselled by and report to your supervisory team lead by
Dr Rick (H.L.) Aalbers, Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at
Radboud University | Institute for Management Research| Centre For Organization Restructuring
As a Marie Curie FINDER PhD Fellow you will (amongst other things) be responsible for delivering prescribed project objectives on time and within budget. You will be collaborating with other researchers at the
Institute for Management Research (IMR) at Radboud University and Atos Europe. You will communicate and provide information to academic and industrial supervisors, and regularly attend formal supervisory meetings. While placed at Atos, you will be conducting doctoral research in order to support a dedicated impact case. You will also be expected to attend and prepare reports for regular meetings with other members of the FINDER team, and to report progress, agree future work and exchange data/experience.