Co-Creating Strategy and Culture in New Technology Regimes on the Internet

One of the least understood aspects of knowledge management in organizational research and the sociology of innovation is to explain how new technology paradigms facilitate the creation and adoption of new regimes and business practice of innovation by old firms. When innovation regimes are started up by cohesive communities of collaborators, born-online and born-global, the relationship is even less understood. My research explores how some of the largest fashion-technology start-ups on the Internet create and spread new technology and practice in digital marketing and e-commerce to vertically integrated, transnational fashion industry leaders. I bridge innovation and economic sociology with international business and strategic management to explain how Ron Burt's "good ideas" are actually generated and meaningfully reapplied by emerging new entrants in the organizational practice of established incumbent fashion firms from Europe and the US. The fashion industry is an extreme case-study offering an ideal context to investigate these emergent processes, revealing the dynamic relationship between innovation and change. The research posits that executives in established organizations in this context can manage the tension between challenge and opportunity of adopting disruptive practice by learning to manage collaboratively the parts of their value chains that are most affected by the entrepreneurial creativity of new peers.