The scale of social environment change and the complexity of interactions among involved actors seem to have accelerated in recent years. To adapt to this era of change, businesses, public institutions, and non-profit organizations must fundamentally rethink their strategies: who they are, where they're headed, and how to get there. Innovation, which newly combines goods, people, and information to create new value, is essential for successful strategy development. While change may bring difficulties, it can also provide opportunities for innovation in strategies.

The environment surrounding companies is becoming increasingly uncertain due to Covid-19 and changes in the international situation, and companies' supply chains are also required to change flexibly. To sustain competitive advantage, companies must develop strategies to cope with uncertainty, in other words, "innovation in strategies". This special issue is designed as a call for a paper to discuss "innovation in strategies".

The research was gathered from a wide variety of organizations, including large companies, venture companies, universities, research institutes, and NPOs, to present strategies for resolving the difficulties surrounding each organization. The common objective of the strategy in this special issue was not simply to maximize profits, but to accomplish sutainability. Many of the strategies involved muddled efforts and long-term initiatives to achieve this goal. We hope that this special issue will present new research perspectives and arguments, as well as be of practical significance.

The literature on innovator's dilemma suggests that the exploration activity needs to be removed from an existing organization. The theory of ambidextrous organization emphasizes the importance of exploiting existing resources with the strong support of top management. The case analysis of a large enterprise's successful innovation in the face of innovator's dilemma identifies three practices of exploiting existing resources within exploration. First, some existing capabilities can be readily combined. Second, once some existing capabilities are incorporated, exploration is curved out as an independent activity. Third, the existing capabilities are deconstructed and recast in the new value network. While prior studies have emphasized the top management's leadership in creating the interface for exploiting existing capabilities, this study additionally shows the importance of local leadership on the ground to identify and flexibly deal with varied natures of existing resources and capabilities. The top-down and the bottom-up leaderships mutually condition each other to achieve organizational ambidexterity.

We performed the qualitative comparative analysis to test which interaction among founding team characteristics and other management resources affect the short-term initial public offerings (IPOs). We used data from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), 65 university-launched ventures with IPO. We found three causal pathways for achieving IPO rapidly from establishment. The first pathway is founded by experienced top management personnel and the filing of patent applications. The second pathway is a student-founded company with patent applications and university VC raised fund. And the third is a founding team of researchers and management personnel with university VC raised fund. This research contributed to imprinting theory by investigating the relationship of achieving IPO from establishment quickly and the combination of founding team and the other management resources of university-launched ventures in Japan. In addition, practical implications were presented for VCs and support organizations regarding the composition of the founding team and the nature of support for achieving IPO rapidly.

This study focuses on the social reactions to the diffusion of innovations. In this study, social reactions to Genetically Modified (GM) foods were viewed as a social amplification process of risk perception. We compared the social amplification process of risk perception in the case of GM foods and the case of genome-edited foods, an innovation similar to GM foods through a textual analysis of newspaper reports. The results of the analysis showed that there were significant differences in both cases, indicating the potential for the smooth diffusion of genome-edited foods in society. The major differences between the two cases are the provision of consumer self-selection rights and the provision of balanced benefits-risks. This study indicates that it is important for entities that promote the diffusion of innovations to develop strategies that take into account not only the attributes of the innovation but also how it is perceived in society.

Many companies are engaging in open innovation around social issues such as the SDGs, but they have not achieved sufficient results. The main factor is the problem of people to implement the strategy. The author designed a system that creates a new worldview from narrative dialogues. The uniqueness of this study is that it systematic approaches corporate innovation from the perspective of individual interests and narratives. The author conducted a prototype experiment with three global companies. 82.5% of the participants found a new worldview, and 92.5% wanted to continue discussing the output. It was also found that whether or not the output was a worldview they wanted to realize was strongly correlated with their desire for continued discussion, and that those whose personal interest improved after the experiment had a high level of autonomous motivation. The results suggest the effectiveness of this system to relate diverse participants in social issue innovation.

Monetary donations are becoming an important source of research funding in Japan. I compare two hypothetical nonprofit organizations, a medical research institution and a hospital providing medical assistance to the needy, using the concepts of charity and philanthropy. I use Impact philanthropy and Warm-glow model for the theoretical analysis. I derive some practical implications. Utility-based approach reveals that Impact philanthropy model does not fit the medical research fundraising. Appeal-based approach is suitable for major gift fundraising. There are some effective tactics in major gift fundraising for medical research: legitimizing paltry donations, making victims visible, and others. To decrease the perceived cost of donations, it is helpful to propose periodic donations and bequest donations. Scientific thinking in fundraising and donation allocation will strengthen the donors' perceived utility. Although this study is a review of foreign studies, there is potential for future integration of societal-based studies to discuss applications appropriate for Japan.

In recent years, the SDGs have become a common language for doing business globally. Corporate executives recognize the importance of the SDGs. How do large companies understand the SDGs and incorporate them into their strategic management? In this paper, I investigate the actual situation of "SDGs introjection" by Japan's three major automakers, and based on the "5 Ps," which classify the major themes that comprise the SDGs, I conduct the content analysis of the top messages in the sustainability reports of the three companies for the period 201520. As a result, the following points emerged. First, the analysis at the industry level revealed that the executives directly linked the SDGs to "corporate issues" and strongly emphasized their contribution to "prosperity goals" that are closely related to their product businesses. Second, the firm-level analysis revealed which SDG themes were perceived by firms themselves as lacking social recognition. In conclusion, this paper argues that although it is true that companies are introjecting the SDGs in tune with industry trends, the way they "introject" the SDGs is selective, and that it is a "strategic introjection" that shows the proactive initiatives of the companies.

This paper uses firm-level data from the Japanese National Innovation Survey 2015 to investigate whether project termination, or delay, foster or hamper introducing product innovation in innovation activities. The empirical results indicate two possibilities. First, firms that experience project termination, or delay, are characterized by factors affecting high-innovation performance, such as large firm size, high research and development (R&D) intensity, a high share of postgraduate employees, and cooperation for innovation with external organizations. Second, the probability of introducing new products is approximately 12.0% higher for treated firms (i.e., firms that experienced termination, or delay) than for untreated firms (i.e., firms with no experienced termination, or delay). These results imply that project termination, or delay, for Japanese innovation-active firms was derived from R&D trial-and-error; such learning-from-failure successfully leads to their high propensity to innovate.