Managers in large, established companies need to protect the legacy of their existing business, perform in the present and innovate to remain relevant in the future. This strategic challenge requires managers to simultaneously respond to the demands of current customers, while exploring emerging business opportunities in unfamiliar markets with new technologies. Sustaining their existing businesses, however, requires efficiency and commitment, while building emerging businesses thrives on experimentation and flexibility. Balancing these often contradictive innovation activities forces managers to develop appropriate organisational resources, structures and capabilities. Moreover, the conventional R&D business model is proved inadequate for creating emergent businesses.
COINS researchers have developed a holistic framework that integrates strategy, corporate entrepreneurship, creation of new markets, platform business models, open innovation, management talent and culture that shed the light on organizational capabilities, practices and structures that support successful strategic transformation of companies that face potentially disruptive changes. The research contributed to novel understanding of how companies, that historically used a product-centric business model, develop a multisided platform business model by managing their emergent innovation ecosystem. It also investigated how established firms can digitally transform an existing industry to create a new one. It was found that innovation managers skilfully combine cultural (identity claims, entrepreneurial narratives) and material resources (large-scale demonstrators) that permit experiential understanding of the novel technologies. The research on corporate accelerators provided unique insights into the managerial capabilities that are needed to develop an effective internal start-up processes and utilize internal and external technological and market expertise for selecting promising ventures. Another research stream examined the integration of IT-enabled open strategy practices with the formal strategy process in order to create and implement emerging business initiatives. The research identified the set of critical decision areas and bridging practices that strategy managers need in order to orchestrate an on-line community that aims to develop new businesses in an increasingly inclusive and transparent manner (i.e. a more open approach to strategy and innovation)