Rapid technological change, globalization of supply chains and demand, increasing physical and digital connectivity, and inter-dependencies between actors in innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems are forcing entrepreneurs and managers to rethink how they organize beyond the manufacturing of products and services, how they innovate, what technologies they adopt, and what markets they enter. The forms and models of organization affect a firm's ability to become exceptional. At the core of firm organization, the factors that distinguish them from their counterparts in the industry and region are firm size, firm age, stage of entrepreneurial continuum, institutional context, and technology-savviness. Firms that have been able to optimize their organization will outperform their regional competitors, markets, and industry; create new forms of growth at a different pace; and approach the innovation and production frontier. Through organizations in different forms, entrepreneurs and mature firms create product and process innovation and coordinate people, external ecosystem actors, government, suppliers, and capital to achieve frontier outcomes.
This collection is especially interested in organizational forms enabling rapid growth without compromising productivity, efficiency, and societal impact, and facilitating innovation and market entry, firm resilience, and survival within both firm shocks and exogenous shocks. Moreover, the collection is interested in understanding how firms' high growth, scaling, and exceptional performance are driven by novel organizational forms. This focus is timely for the Journal of Small Business Management as an intellectual platform that studies why and how the most novel forms and models of organization in performance, growth, efficiency, and innovation are emerging in large tech firms and in exceptional performers among micro-, small-, and micro-firms, in social entrepreneurial firms, and even non-profit organizations. The special focus includes the novel forms of organization that allow for persistent steady growth, high value added, and other exceptional performers—such as niche innovators, scaleups, accelerators, blitzscalers, hidden champions, and Mittelstand-type firms and hyperspecialized firms—that repeatedly outperform their counterparts in the industry.
By combining specific forms of organization, these firms often operate nearby or at the innovation and production frontier despite constrained resources and through global or localized resource orchestration. Hidden champions or niche innovators—for example, hyperspecialized digital and non-digital firms that focus on a small set of activities and scale through digital technologies or localized networks and interdependencies with complements and partners often plugging into collaborators' value chains—are highly successful small firms that hold top global market positions in niche segments.
Global outreach is an important locus to understand novel forms of organization. Global firms, such as micro-multinationals or born-global firms, are young and small firms that internationalize early, working with a lean core and extensive external partners for production, distribution, or customer acquisition, and often relying on global value-chain orchestrators. While prior work has examined financial performance, resource management, scaling, and innovation in such firms, most evidence comes from European contexts, with little evidence from other regions of the world. For example, niche leaders in parts of Asia may begin with an imitation strategy and then move up the value ladder. These firms may be more likely to pursue listing and brand recognition, may expand into adjacent domains beyond niche focus, and may balance domestic and global knowledge via investment in training, R&D, and engagement with ecosystem actors regionally and globally. Little is known about how organizational forms differ across regions, industries, countries, and clusters, or which specific characteristics enable them to experiment, adopt, and develop certain forms of organization that ensure their exceptional performance.
This online collection invites work that theorizes and empirically examines novel forms and models of organization, including structures, processes, architectures, institutions, and governance, that enable firms of different ages, sizes, and niche focus to approach or redefine the productivity and innovation frontier. The collection welcomes research that opens the black box of novel forms and models of organization, enabling firms to outperform their close and distant competitors, recombine a variety of knowledge, and adopt new modes of working, hiring, and innovating to achieve exceptional performance. Additionally, the collection welcomes research that explains when, how, and why particular organizational forms and models outperform others across regions, industries, clusters, and ecosystems in diverse contexts of high-cost developed economies, high-cost emerging economies, and other developing economies.
This collection is expected to investigate how novel forms of organization can appear beyond the OECD and WEIRD countries representing Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (primarily North America, Western Europe, Australia, and parts of East Asia like Japan/South Korea). Interestingly, most developed Asian economies have actively identified and cultivated niche leaders and innovators through national programs, such as Japan's Global Niche Top Companies Selection 100 and South Korea's World-Class 300 & Global Specialized Enterprise Cultivation. In China, two policy-driven categories—niche champions and specialized, advanced, differentiated, and innovative firms—aim to move small businesses up global value chains, emphasizing market performance, strategic uniqueness through innovation, competitive advantage, internationalization, and sustainable growth. Understanding new forms and models of organization for innovation and firm growth will create a rich empirical setting and extend existing growth and innovation theories.