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Although microfinance (MF) has been established as an effective approach to provide access to financial services for people in low income countries, close to one-third of adults worldwide, about 2 billion people, are still without access. The purpose of this study is therefore to provide knowledge on how MF institutions (MFIs) can innovate and scale their services to improve financial inclusion for more people in need, particularly small holder farmers.

Recent research suggests that Grameen Foundation builds on well-established MF models and focuses on continuously improving the design and increasing the reach of its services. Based on a retrospective longitudinal design, this study draws on dynamic capability theory to identify important lessons in MF innovation at Grameen through analyses of seven key agricultural MF programs.

This study finds that Grameen innovated these programs by sensing country-specific needs; seizing opportunities to use existing technology; creating linkages across multisector partners; adopting a business model that enabled replicability and sustainability of innovation transfer; and 5 integrating solutions that enabled process automation and scaling of outcomes. A key theoretical finding in applying dynamic capabilities theory to studies of innovation in MF revealed the core concepts to be transferrable, valuable, imitable and nonsubstitutable resources.

Using these insights, this study discusses theoretical, practical and policy implications of MF innovation to improve financial inclusion in low-income countries. Practitioners and researchers should assess the transferability of our findings to other MFIs and economic development contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how microfinance initiatives (MFIs) are organized and orchestrated to serve internal and external stakeholders.

A qualitative case study of three international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)–CARE, Oxfam and Grameen Foundation–provided insights into how they each organize and orchestrate MFIs. We used Pettigrew's (1987, 1990) contextual inquiry framework to guide our data collection and analysis of 20 interviews to understand how capacity building, technology adaptation and outcome measurement interact with content, context and process.

We found that CARE's classical model exemplifies decades of successful MFI service delivery, serving as a benchmark for other NGOs. Oxfam's adaptive model builds on CARE's model to leverage MFIs as platforms for achieving multisectoral outcomes. Finally, Grameen Foundation's innovative model builds on both CARE's classical and Oxfam's adaptive models, using human-centered design and scalable business practices. We also found overlaps between the three models, demonstrating the continuous adaptation of MFI models based on changing contexts, such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Our research focused on three NGOs headquartered in the USA, involving interviews with staff members having microfinance expertise. We offer analytical generalizability while emphasizing that any change in cultural context, institutional setting or operational conditions may produce different outcomes.

We provide exemplary and comparative insights into key issues related to organizing and orchestrating MFIs for NGO practitioners, scholars and policymakers who wish to understand prevailing service delivery models. Finally, we demonstrate the contextual inquiry framework as a viable approach to learn how NGOs organize and orchestrate MFIs through content, context and process.

This paper explores the practical usage of insights on knowledge management (KM) to support innovation in a software organization. The organization has for some time engaged in software process improvement (SPI) initiatives to improve its operation. The paper applies two complementary approaches to KM, the codified and the personalized, to evaluate current KM practices and to improve its SPI practices. Based on the insights from the case we review key principles within SPI and evaluate the applied KM approaches. We conclude that it is advisable for SPI efforts to explicitly address KM issues. Each software organization has to find its own balance between personalized and codified approaches, this balance needs to be dynamically adjusted as the organization matures, and the adopted KM approach should differentiate between different types of SPI services.

Fierce competition drives software vendors to rely on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategies and to continuously match new releases with customers’ needs and competitors’ moves. Such recurrent release practices pose specific challenges for software vendors which shape how they service customers. To address these challenges, this paper aims to apply service science to innovate strategies for SaaS release management.

Based on action research methodology, the authors collaborated closely with Software Inc., an alias for a large multinational software provider, to apply service-dominant logic systematically, to analyze and improve its SaaS release management process and to support ongoing value co-creation with its customers.

The authors provide a detailed account of how Software Inc. improved its SaaS release management practices; they extend current understanding of service innovation dynamics in SaaS environments and offer a model of value co-creation in SaaS release management grounded in the findings from Software Inc.

The research draws on a single case study with particular characteristics. Still, it allows for analytical generalizations with both theoretical and practical implications for how SaaS managers can improve recurrent release practices based on foundational service-dominant logic principles.

The authors suggest that SaaS managers concentrate on knowledge-sharing with customers, ensure continuous communication among teams supporting the service, re-organize release management to enhance the value co-creation process, use technology to improve customer service experiences and use service mapping to improve release management and service quality.

The authors bridge service-dominant logic principles and SaaS knowledge by demonstrating how service-dominant logic can be used to improve SaaS release practices and by offering conceptual and practical knowledge about value co-creation between customers and suppliers in SaaS contexts.

While recent research has established that businesses can benefit from engaging with people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP), the authors know little about the practices that managers can use to effectively strategize this ethically sound and financially attractive proposition and turn it into new business.

To address this gap, the authors reported on an action research study in which the authors collaborated with a major Mexican agribusiness, ANSA, to expand its market through value co-creation with the country’s poorest farmers. To shape the strategizing, the authors combined dynamic capability theory and options theory, and the authors used the asset hexagon framework to understand the BOP population’s needs.

The authors offer a detailed account of how ANSA’s management team collaborated downstream with distributors and farmers and upstream with suppliers to grow a new micro-franchise business that increases the well-being of the poorest farmers and creates additional business opportunities. The research describes how firms can strategize and implement new business ventures for co-creating value with the BOP population. The results are a process model and related propositions for strategizing value co-creation with BOP.

The authors offer new empirical insights, a grounded process model and model-related propositions on strategizing BOP options. As such, the study contributes to the BOP literature by joining critical ethics with actionable knowledge of how such efforts may unfold and by demonstrating how theory may be enacted and developed in the process.

Reports from a systems development research tradition in which emphasis is put on relating research activities to practice and on establishing fruitful collaboration between groups of researchers and practitioners. Describes and evaluates a specific research project in which a large group of researchers and practitioners worked together to understand, support, and improve systems development practices in four organisations over a period of three years. Uses the case to reflect on the research goals, approaches, and results involved in this tradition for researching systems development practice. Proposes collaborative practice research as a way to organise and conduct research into systems development practice based on close collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Exemplifies the use of pluralist research methodology by combining action research with experiments and conventional practice studies. Argues that collaborative practice research offers one practical way to strike a useful balance between relevance and rigour. Concludes with a discussion of the implications for the relation between research and practice within the systems development discipline and with lessons on how to design research efforts as collaborations between researchers and practitioners.

The paper seeks to explore the impact of events in Software Process Improvement (SPI) environments based on a longitudinal study of a requirements management initiative at Ericsson.

The paper presents the initiative from three perspectives – the improvement initiative, the targeted software practices, and the environment.

SPI initiatives easily get interrupted, are side‐tracked, and progress slowly due to changing environments. While most practitioners are painfully aware of this, the SPI literature has so far only touched on the issue. Agility principles would have helped Ericsson respond more effectively to events that impacted the initiative. Development of agile SPI practices requires coordination and alignment with other initiatives to develop agile software organizations.

SPI has been adopted by many organizations to help them to deliver quality software. However, its success is a matter of debate and this paper deals with the issues involved.

While the literature on software process improvement (SPI) offers a number of studies of small software firms, little is known about how such initiatives evolve over time. On this backdrop, this paper aims to investigate how adoption of SPI technology was shaped over a ten year period (1996‐2005) in a small Danish software firm.

The investigation is based on a longitudinal, interpretative case study of improvement efforts over a ten‐year period. To help structure the investigation, we focus on encounters that impacted engineering, management, and improvement practices within the firm. The study contributes to the SPI‐literature and the literature on organizational adoption of technology.

The paper finds the improvement effort fluctuating and shaped between management's attempt to control SPI technology adoption and events that caused the process to drift in unpredictable directions.

The experiences suggest that managers of small software firms remain flexible and constantly negotiate technology adoption practices between control and drift, creating momentum and direction according to firm goals through attempts to control, while at the same time exploring backtalk, options, and innovations from drifting forces inside and outside the firm.

Based on the research, the paper recommends substituting the “from control to drift” perspective on organizational adoption of complex technologies like SPI with a “negotiating control and drift” perspective.

Compares experimental (eg. prototyping) and analytical (eg. specifying) approaches in systems design. Derives ′The Principle of Limited Reduction′. Defines this as: “Relying on an analytical mode of operation to reduce complexity introduces new sources of uncertainty requiring experimental countermeasures; relying on an experimental mode of operation to reduce complexity introduces new sources of uncertainty requiring analytical countermeasures”. Concludes that a mixed approach is best, but warns that this is as yet (1992) hypothetical.