In extreme circumstances such as pandemics, the presence of patients in hospital emergency departments becomes untenable. Healthcare professionals and organizations worldwide are leaning on ...technology as a crucial ally to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. This article focuses on the positive impact of telemedicine for helping service provision, from enabling virtual triage to mitigating the negative psychological effects of social isolation. The authors discuss the challenges and opportunities to telemedicine practices.
This article explains how telemedicine and other e-healthcare technologies can benefit people, medical staff and healthcare systems. One of the main challenges for telemedicine in many countries is the lack of regulations. The authors call on policy-makers to facilitate wider implementation of e-healthcare technologies, while considering issues of inclusiveness, privacy and data protection. The article informs managers about the use of new technologies. Examples are provided of e-healthcare technologies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example in terms of healthcare capacity and providing support to people affected by quarantine.
In the face of rising infection rates and increased healthcare demand, COVID-19 overwhelmed healthcare systems. System-wide change was subsequently necessary to absorb and adapt to the crisis through ...a new digital service‒telemedicine. The study unpacks how precursor resilience was actuated across the service ecosystem. Drawing on qualitative data from multiple healthcare actors, the study adopts oscillating foci to examine ecosystem resiliency across three levels: micro (physicians and patients), meso (healthcare managers) and macro (policymakers). Findings show the centrality of service co-design to service ecosystem resiliency, demonstrating the role of multi-actors at multi-levels for building ecosystem resilience during COVID-19 and beyond.
How do cognitive micro‐foundations impact organizational decision‐making in public management? The study focuses on the relationships between two cognitive micro‐processes (intuitive, type I and ...rational, type II) and the contrasting organizational decision‐making approaches of strategic planning and organizational spontaneity. Drawing on survey data from managers working across a range of public services in Brazil, the findings reveal that rational reasoning drives both approaches to organizational decision‐making. Intuitive reasoning, on the other hand, is observed to drive strategic planning only. Two socio‐psychological mechanisms moderate the core relationships: bureaucracy strengthens the rational reasoning–planning relationship, but weakens the intuitive reasoning–spontaneity relationship, while organizational learning plays a critical role in activating the intuitive reasoning–organizational spontaneity relationship. Post‐hoc analysis of variance reveals a group of public service organizations that rely heavily on both decision‐making modes and highlights the core features enabling paradoxical decision‐making.
Research has established the relevance of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) to firm performance but skepticism remains because of the ambiguity surrounding how EO might improve firm performance. We ...examine the key concepts of absorptive capacity and improvisation as two alternative learning modes serving as intermediate steps between EO and firm performance. Locating our study within manufacturing SMEs in Malaysia, we find that absorptive capacity enhances the EO–performance relationship, both as a moderator and a mediator. In contrast to expectations, however, improvisation showed no such effects but conferred its own separate benefits instead. We further discuss the different effects of these learning modes on high performance and low performance groups.
Local governments increasingly use social enterprises for public service delivery, but the sustainability of this approach is likely to be influenced by a range of resource dependencies. Drawing on ...the Resource Dependence Theory, we investigate the resources social enterprises must acquire and maintain for their survival among nearly 100 social enterprises created by English local governments to provide leisure services. Using survival analysis, we find that government-owned and more profitable social enterprises are less likely to be dissolved, as are those with a larger board of directors. We also find that board diversity is beneficial for enterprises with larger boards.
Crises for business-to-business (B2B) firms are characterized by unexpected or unanticipated severe threats that are highly uncertain where strategic response times are low in which executives are ...victim of overwhelming time pressures to action fast strategic responses to these events—as the threats bring to question the viability and survivability of the firm. Consequently, crises provoke a profound impact on executives' sensemaking, as they attempt strategically navigate these events. We bridge thinking around crisis management with theories of strategic decision-making and conclude that strategic improvisation is a vital mechanism that enables effective management interventions to be executed as a means of surviving, adapting, or potentially thriving under challenging circumstances. We derive a theoretically grounded framework of five strategic imperatives underlying our 10C Strategic Imperative Framework for improvisation readiness. First, we develop the Improvisation Readiness Index Score (IRIS) as a means for executives to diagnose their organization's improvisation readiness according to the requisite strategic imperatives. Second, we present a three-step guide for executives to consider for managing through crisis with improvisation and the strategic imperatives at its heart. Third, we illustrate the strategy improvisation challenges. This allows executives to close the strategic improvisation gaps between their ‘actual’ and ‘preferred’ readiness.
•Bridges thinking around crisis management with theories of strategic decision-making.•Concludes that strategic improvisation enables effective management interventions under challenging circumstances.•Derives a theoretically grounded framework of five strategic imperatives that underlie improvisation readiness.•Develops the Improvisation Readiness Index Score (IRIS) as a means to diagnose improvisation readiness according to the requisite strategic imperatives.•Presents a three-step guide for executives to consider for managing through crises with improvisation and the strategic imperatives at its heart.•Using a set of case vignettes, this article illustrates the strategy improvisation challenges.
To shed new light on the contested impact of service outsourcing, the study examines whether service outsourcing is associated with higher cost of entry and if higher pricing impacts service ...engagement among citizen groups. To this end, the study draws on secondary objective data to capture different ownership types in local authorities community sport provision (public, non-profit, private), the cost of access (£) to use community sport facilities, and the level of service engagement with the service among different citizen groups. The exploratory model draws on analysis of variance with a post-hoc test to examine if significant differences exist between ownership types on pricing and engagement. The empirical observations reveal that service outsourcing is associated with significantly higher pricing relative to traditional local government provision, but no significant differences are found in the levels of engagement among citizen groups between the three ownership types.
Improvisation is vital for strategy development, but there remains a lack of understanding about this phenomenon. This emerges directly from the insufficient investigation of its drivers and context. ...This paper extends improvisation research to the unexplored competitive settings of an emerging middle-income economy. Drawing on survey data from Malaysian research-intensive firms, we examine managerial and organisational antecedents of improvisation under turbulence. Findings reveal that organisational risk-taking and manager expertise are common antecedents of improvisation, but additional relationships arise under high (flexibility) and low turbulence (learning, manager tenure), developing capacity to inform practice, which is critically lacking in international business and management theory
Purpose
This paper aims to discuss the strategic role of telehealth technologies in managing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a viewpoint paper, based on opportune ...information published and discussed by scholars and managers from different sources; the authors gathered this information to discuss the implications of telehealth during the outbreak.
Findings
Based on examples and benchmarking, the authors found that it is possible to lean on telehealth technologies as a frontline ally to avoid the spread of the virus by tracking, testing and treating (3T’s model).
Research limitations/implications
Together with information published on COVID-19, the authors present their critical observations on the use of telehealth. However, the authors acknowledge that there are restrictions on the use of new technologies in health-care practices that were not addressed by this paper, and they suggest further research to address this limitation.
Practical implications
Governments, health-care organizations and managers are encouraged to take advantage of the information published in this paper. One of the benefits of telehealth is the possibility of bringing patients and physicians together virtually, without the need for physical contact. Henceforth, the authors suggest a more comprehensive implementation of best practices from telehealth to relieve congested health-care facilities and to avoid the risk of further infection.
Social implications
The economic and social impacts of the virus are considered unprecedented by governments worldwide. Therefore, the authors advocate that telehealth practices embedded in health-care practices relieve the pressure that naturally arise during this type of critical event.
Originality/value
In this timely paper, the authors provide invaluable information related to the impact of telehealth technologies on flattening the infection curve of COVID-19.
Innovation ambidexterity is especially complex for young technology-based firms because they are resource-challenged and knowledge deficient in strategic terms; but they possess considerable scope ...for entrepreneurship. Strategic entrepreneurship may provide a solution. Incubators emerged as a policy solution precisely due to this dilemma. We conceptualise that strategic entrepreneurship, as a synthesis of opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking behaviours of young technology-based firms, can affect both explorative and exploitative innovation activities in these firms and expect that subsequent innovation ambidexterity affects profitability. Our empirical analyses reveal complex and competing interrelationships that both ease and exacerbate the tensions associated with innovation ambidexterity. We contribute to theory by testing strategic entrepreneurship as it applies to innovation ambidexterity and evidence behaviours that contribute to its foundations. To entrepreneurs and managers, we offer a set of prescriptions for innovation ambidexterity in young firms that accounts for the complementarities between complex and theoretically opposing constructs.