Editorial: A cross-disciplinary approach to the business strategy research

The four articles of the second issue in 2021 of Corporate and Business Strategy Review look for the impact of the pandemic in economies, companies, employees, and schools, and give suggestions to try to surpass recession periods and increase students and employees’ satisfaction and needs, which can lead to an increase in companies’ financial performance

Preservice Teachers Consider Game-Based Teaching and Learning

Gaming has become a core activity with children and more teachers are using games for teaching content than they did five years ago. Yet, teachers report that they learn about game titles, impact studies, and facilitation techniques through their own initiatives or from other teachers rather than from their teacher education program. This chapter reports on a combined curricular strategy built on game strategy research that asked teacher candidates (n= 125) to discuss news headlines about games, play educational games, review games, and game research, teach others how to play educational games, and construct games. Findings reveal that candidates saw value in using games in K-12 to teach content, were able to develop assessments based on game content at a novice level, and were able to construct games either alone or in small groups. Educators contemplating gaming as an instructional strategy may be interested in the espoused combination strategy to encourage game adoption in K-12 settings.

Serendipity and Organizational Capability

We clarified the concept of serendipity through discriminating the five types of serendipity by using three classification criteria, together with through illustrating the case of each type of serendipity. Then, based on our view that serendipity can be regarded as organizational capability, a key concept of the resource-based view of strategy research, we explored the organizational capability required for the serendipitous innovation by reviewing two recent research papers. As a result, we found that the properties of the organizational capability for increasing and facilitating the serendipitous innovation are not so different from those for the non-serendipitous innovation. The essential facilitating factor for the serendipitous innovation is the realization and penetration of the idea that the unexpected information is one of the important sources of innovations.

Employee Social Network Strategies: Implications for Firm Strategies and Performance in Future Organizations

Employee social network strategies play a key role in firm strategies and organizational performance. Currently, scholars underestimate the contributions of employee social strategies in firm strategies. Little is known how informal employee social networks, group entitativity and competition could shape and direct firm strategies and organizational performance. The article examines social network theory and strategic management’s content, process and open schools of thought to propose a new interpretation for managing firm strategies. More specifically, the author examines alternate causal paths, underlying processes and structures as mechanisms in employee social network strategies within a theoretical framework. The article proposes 4 theoretically driven propositions and makes two contributions. First, the article contributes to organizational behavior literature by focusing on the literature gap in network dynamics and competitive actions through employee social networks. Second, although there is immense literature on positive and negative employee competition in business, the article makes a contribution to the strategic management literature by moving beyond formalized structures and roles within an organization to focus on the multilevel informal workplace social interactions and processes that impact strategizing activities. Overall, the article extends strategy research in relation to how employee social networks operate through competition and group entitativity in firm strategies.

Conceptualizing Cuvée Organizations: Characteristics Leading towards Sustainable Decision-Making Practices

This paper discusses the role and responsibility of business organizations in a sustainability transition with a thought-provoking hypothetical construct, the cuvée organization. The aim of the paper is to introduce and conceptualize this normative concept on what sustainable and responsible business would look like in an ideal world—more specifically, which meta features should characterize a business organization that is designed for sustainability? It also tests the concept’s applicability to a micro-process, an everyday challenge any organization aiming for sustainability would face, namely discounting. The concept of the cuvée organization emerged from participatory backcasting, a normative scenario-building exercise conducted with a sustainability expert panel. In this co-creative process, the panel capitalized on the metaphor of cuvée wine and winemaking, which provided the cognitive means to chart the unknown. The emerged concept of the cuvée organization stands for a business archetype which is designed to serve a prosocial cause, subordinating activities and structural features accordingly. When applying this construct to discounting, our approach lies with ecological rationality in behavioral decision making as well as the practice-based approach of corporate strategy research. In this theoretically rigorous effort, we aim to show which meta-characteristics could support an organizational structure leading to better decision making, aiming to avoid various forms of temporal and spatial discounting. The originality of the research is filling the normative vision with details through the conceptualization of the cuvée organization. On the level of methodologies, our research contributes to understanding the novelty and applicability of backcasting processes and provides an astounding example for the use of metaphors in future studies.

Control Strategy Research of Based on Resonance Feedforward and Current Estimate of the Photovoltaic Grid Inverter

Due to poor quality of grid-connected current and large impedance value of grid are caused in weak grid environment. Therefore, a control strategy combining multiple resonant feedforward and current estimation method is adopted in this paper. Firstly, in order to make the positive feedback channel have the feedback effect only at the main background harmonics, the low-order harmonics of the grid are extracted by using the method of multi-resonance feedforward control. At the same time, under the premise that the suppression effect of LCL natural resonant frequency remains unchanged, the current estimation method is added into the control strategy, so as to reduce the system cost. Finally, the simulation results show that thus verifying the correctness and effectiveness of the control strategy.

Research on Adidas International Development Strategy under COVID-19

Affected by COVID-19, Adidas' global net sales in 2020 decreased by 3.756 billion euros compared to 2019. Adidas's net sales worldwide decreased by 3756 million euros in 2020 compared to 2019. This article will analyze the changes in Adidas's operation situation and competitiveness under the impact of COVID-19. At the same time, combined with the 2016-2020 financial statement data publicly disclosed by Adidas, this article will analyze the specific impact of COVID-19 on Adidas' financial status and provide a more in-depth interpretation of the financial statements. The goal of this article is to analyze Adidas' future development strategy and make recommendations by analysing the impact of COVID-19 so that it can better meet the needs of external interests and internal management. Many scholars' relevant research is mostly on the development strategy research at the macro level. However, there is a lack of strategic research on the micro-enterprise level after being affected by COVID-19. This article first reviews the literature and expands new research directions based on existing research. Then, this article will use the PEST method to analyze the changes in Adidas's external macro environment under the influence of COVID-19 and apply the theory and methods of financial statement analysis to specific applications. Then this article will combine Potter's five forces model analysis method to further analyze Adidas' external environment and industry environment under the influence of COVID-19. Finally, this article will conclude and put forward development strategy recommendations.