Welcome to the March issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. This month features papers from the ISPIM Connects Global Conference "Celebrating the World of Innovation" held on December 7^th–8^th, 2020. This special issue continues our ongoing fruitful cooperation with the ISPIM society in promoting and spreading knowledge and experience in innovation management around the world.

This issue opens with Helle Alsted Søndergaard, Mette Præst Knudsen, and Nicolai Søndergaard Laugesen’s paper, “The Catch-22 in Strategizing for Radical Innovation”. They point out that “Corporate strategy development is a well-oiled and recurring process in most established companies. Innovation strategy, however, especially for radical innovation, is new and unknown territory. This creates challenges for companies with radical innovation ambitions” (pg. 4). The authors identify two main challenges to enable radical innovation: gravitation and alignment. They suggest a framework aimed at asking questions necessary to raise awareness about inherent business challenges. Their aim in the paper is to help companies overcome, alleviate or mediate the “catch-22’s” that sometimes arise when facing or driving radical innovation at the intersection between corporate and innovation strategy work.

The second paper is by Patrick Brecht, Daniel Hendriks, Anja Stroebele, Carsten H. Hahn, and Ingmar Wolff on “Discovery and Validation of Business Models”. They focus on “How B2B Startups can use Business Experiments”, providing a case study that reports on low-cost paid business experimentation by a German B2B agricultural startup company. The paper aims to demonstrate how business experiments (for example, ad, press article, brochure, interview) can help startups discover and validate their business model’s desirability in a quick and cost-effective way. The authors follow an iterative design thinking approach to focus on two main steps in experimentation: build and evaluate. They conclude, “Practitioners should consider a sequence of business experiments that are run to improve the company’s learning effect, to better explain negative outcomes, and to use a mixed data collection approach” (pg. 31).

This is followed by Mika Westerlund, Diane A. Isabelle, and Seppo Leminen’s “The Acceptance of Digital Surveillance in an Age of Big Data”. This paper covers a range of topics in examining digital and mass surveillance, digital identity, citizen privacy, personal data, biometrics, and intelligence activities. They note the implications of their results after focusing on links between privacy perception, intelligence activities on the nation-state level, and the rise in surveillance using big data. The results of their research point out that during the COVID-19 pandemic recent advances in digital technologies have been intensifying and now contribute to a major increase in digital surveillance. They propose a balanced approach to sharing, collection, and use of personal data in digital form, given the communications technology doors that have opened up with state-corporate collaboration to fight the pandemic.

Sara Abdalla and Koichi Nakagawa present the final paper on “The Interplay of Digital Transformation and Collaborative Innovation on Supply Chain Ambidexterity”. They investigate the impact of digital transformation on supply chain (SC) efficiency and adaptability and explore the role of collaborative innovation as a catalyst. They use survey data from Japanese manufacturing companies with a hierarchical multiple regression analysis to test multiple hypotheses. The results show that collaborative innovation between suppliers and customers in a SC strengthens the impact of digital transformation on adaptability, but not on efficiency. They conclude that, “firms can achieve SC ambidexterity through widening the scope of collaborative innovation by including different types of partners” (pg. 52).

The TIM Review currently has a Call for Papers on the website for a special edition on "Distributed Ledger Technologies and Smart Digital Economies" (June 2021). For future issues, we invite general submissions of articles on technology entrepreneurship, innovation management, and other topics relevant to launching and scaling technology companies, and for solving practical business problems in emerging domains. Please contact us with potential article ideas and submissions, or proposals for future special issues.