There is growing evidence that negative media coverage leads to positive resource outcomes in entrepreneurial ventures, which contradicts established organizational reputation theory. Drawing on reputational prominence, the reputational Matthew Effect, as well as the extensive literature on CEO power dynamics, we first examine the extent to which negative media coverage is positively related to entrepreneurial venture resource access. We then assess how CEO power moderates entrepreneurial venture resource outcomes through reputational prominence accruement, reputation transfer, and media platform dynamics. We test our theoretical arguments with a dataset of 4.3 million traditional media articles on 301 entrepreneurial ventures and venture CEOs, along with 400 thousand venture CEO tweets, retweets, and related digital trace metadata. Our results clarify the reputational resource effects of organization-level reputational prominence accruement through the lens of CEO power dynamics, extend the Matthew Effect to entrepreneurial ventures, and outline a reputational “forgiveness effect”.
Production Management
Prof. Thomas Friedli
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The final conference on the 1st of March in Aachen was the last get-together in our Consortium Benchmarking Artificial Intelligence in Operations.

The final conference closed the consortium benchmarking global productions strategies 2022. Prof. Dr. Thomas Friedli and Prof. Dr. Klaus Möller gave insights from research with their keynote speeches. Also, the five visits at Dätwyler, Festo, IMS:Gear, Schott and Kuka were summarized and discussed.

Our fourth and last meeting of our Global Production Academy 2022 took place at CLAAS in Harsewinkel this week.
As a globally leading agricultural machinery manufacturer CLAAS shared current insights into its production and its risk mitigation strategy for the global production network. In joint discussion rounds with our consortium together with Herrenknecht, CLAAS, FACC, HOMAG, MTU Aero Engines, Balluff, PERI and our research partner the wbk Institute of Production Science (wbk-KIT) we could collect and define valuable successful practices
Once again, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all participating companies for their exciting insights, our great discussions and openness in all four meetings. We are already looking forward to continuing our discussions in 2023.
If you would like to be part of our Global Production Academy 2023, feel free to reach out to our GPA Team!

Last Friday, the third meeting of the Global Production Academy, founded together with the wbk Institute of Production Science (wbk-KIT), took place. HOMAG, a leading manufacturer of woodworking machinery, shared exciting insights into its production strategy and its data-based approach for product allocation in the network. Afterwards, different approaches to design the production network were discussed together with the experts from Herrenknecht AG, CLAAS, FACC AG, HOMAG, MTU Aero Engines, Balluff EMEA and PERI In particular, the handling of uncertainty in the business environment and the consideration of soft decision criteria played a major role. We are already looking forward to deepening these discussions in the fourth meeting at the CLAAS on the topic of risk mitigation.
Our Focus Areas




The topic of the 2023 conference is "The Future of Global Manufacturing and the Role of Europe: Pathways to Sustainable Competitiveness".

CAS Production Management
In the course of increasing digitalization, production faces new opportunities and challenges. New skills and methods must complement existing experience. This CAS (Certificate of Advanced Studies) transports the latest findings in the field of production management into operational practice. The course is held in collaboration with HSR Rapperswil. Course language is German.
Team
Research Projects


From customer solutions to value-based pricing models.

We want to enable a structured exchange on digitalization in manufacturing companies in-between managers and experts from practice and science.

Objective of this Innosuisse project is to design, develop and implement a data and corporate strategy based manufacturing network dashboard which supports in strategic decisions.

Discuss the excellence journey of your lab operations on a new level

We analyze the state of the Swiss manufacturing industry regarding trends in production and especially their attitude and activities in off- or re-shoring operations.

Can we predict adverse regulatory inspection outcomes for you?
Selected Publications
Hudecheck, M., Siren, C., Grichnik, D., & George, G. (2021): Adversity and Venture Performance: Is Adverse Media Coverage Really That Bad for Entrepreneurial Ventures? In: Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research (FER), BCERC Conference. Best Paper Proceedings.
Western European manufacturers’ difficulties in earning revenue from industrial services in Pacific Asia have been linked to cultural values. Yet, ways of creating and capturing value from smart services in the region remain unexplored. Against this backdrop, this research seeks to (1) uncover how cultural values influence smart service revenue models, and (2) derive revenue model configurations enabling value capture. To do so, the authors study six Western European manufacturers commercializing smart services in Pacific Asia. The results indicate that indirect and freemium revenue models may achieve fit with the cultural values identified.
Classen, Moritz; Blum, Christoph; Osterrieder, Philipp & Friedli, Thomas (2019): Everything as a service? Introducing the St.Gallen IGaaS Management Model. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Smart Services Summit. Thun : Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services, 2019, S. 61-65. https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/257814
Manufacturing companies enhance increasingly their hardware products with services. The deployment of digital technologies intensifies the fusion of products and related services towards hybrid offerings consisting of smart products and smart services. If manufacturing companies can control all relevant performance measures of such hybrid offerings in use, they are at the edge to further transform their business.
At this stage, bundles of products and services merge into a single service offering. With such a service, customers may use the product while the supplier ensures the product’s functionality. This kind of offering is called Product-as-a-Service. Manifold industry-specific applications of this concept have emerged, such as Lightning-as-a-Service or Windpower-as-a-Service. In a broader sense, these offerings are subsumed under Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS). However, only few manufacturing companies offer XaaS, let alone the number of companies that are economically successful in this endeavor.
In contrast, software vendors show the successful transformation from selling on-premise solutions to offering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In order to do so, software companies had to restructure their offering. Far more than just adopting a new business model, switching to SaaS was a strategic move for software firms that entailed fundamental organizational changes. As software vendors demonstrate how profitable SaaS is, the underlying transformation path could be a didactic play for manufacturing companies.
Importantly, a comprehensive framework to transform a manufacturing firm towards XaaS is missing. In order to fill this lacuna, we propose a holistic management model. The four layers strategy, business model, operating model and enablers represent the main levers for turning the transformation towards XaaS into action.