A Strategic Double-Loop Learning Method for Organisational Decision-Making toward Servitisation

In recent years, manufacturing industries have been expected to achieve servitisation—namely, a shift from product sales to product-service systems—in order to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns. In order to achieve servitisation, manufacturing firms should grasp the business environment and encourage organisational learning to develop the knowledge for servitisation in their environment. The existing knowledge management studies enable the empirical acquisition and reuse of knowledge from past case studies and make efforts to support organisational learning. However, they do not cover the guiding of firms engaged in servitisation to learn appropriately for their business environment. The learning required for manufacturing firms engaged in servitisation is learning that focuses on questioning and modifying existing product-oriented premises—double-loop learning. This paper proposes a method to support strategic double-loop learning within manufacturing companies engaged in servitisation. This method evaluates the compatibility between the implicit premises that manufacturers refer to as the rationale for their decision toward servitisation and the external environment and enables to formulate a practical strategy for double-loop learning. The proposed method was applied to the case of a cassette tape music player to demonstrate its usefulness. This study suggests theoretical foundations for future research into knowledge management for traditional manufacturing companies’ decisions concerning servitisation, and suggests that these should be carried out dynamically according to the business environment.

Crisis and arbitrage opportunities: The role of causation, effectuation and entrepreneurial learning

This article examines the process by which entrepreneurs identify and work with an arbitrage opportunity emerging from an episodic crisis. Although prior research has investigated the role of entrepreneurial characteristics and context on opportunity development, the specific manner in which these factors emerge in the course of opportunity development during a crisis remain underexplored. By adopting a qualitative approach grounded in case studies of eight entrepreneurs in the US distillery industry, this article addresses that gap by examining the process of arbitrage opportunity development during COVID-19. Our study reveals the primacy of both causation and effectuation-based entrepreneurial decision logics and the role of double-loop learning, as entrepreneurs interact with the time-compressed duration of the arbitrage opportunity. Implications and insights for entrepreneurs, researchers and policymakers are discussed.

Comparison of Feedback Control Strategies for Operation of Granulation Loops

Granulation is a particle enlargement process during which fine particles or atomizable liquids are converted into granules via a series of complex granulation mechanisms. In this paper, two feedback control strategies are implemented to make granulation loop processes more steady to operate, i.e., to suppress oscillatory behavior in the produced granule sizes. In the first control strategy, a classical proportional-integral (PI) controller is used, while in the second, a double-loop control strategy is used to control the median diameter of the granules leaving the granulator. The simulation results showed that using the proposed control design for the granulation loop can eliminate the oscillatory behaviour in the produced granule median diameter and make granulation loop processes more steady to operate. A comparison between the two proposed control strategies showed that it is preferable to use the double-loop control strategy.