Journal of Small Business Management

Novel Forms and Models of Organization

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

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 (Crawford et al., 2015, 2017, 2024). 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. This JSBM online collection on “novel forms and models of organization” calls for scholars to rethink the ways firms organize and grow to achieve exceptional performance (Wales et al., 2025). 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. We are especially interested in organizational forms enabling rapid growth without compromising productivity, efficiency, and societal impact (Liguori et al., 2024), and facilitating innovation and market entry, firm resilience, and survival within both firm shocks and exogenous shocks (Sharma et al., 2024). Moreover, we are 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. Our 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 (Simon, 1996, 2009; Audretsch et al., 2021; Lampe et al., 2024; Belitski et al., 2023; Giustiziero et al., 2023)—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 (Giustiziero et al., 2023). While prior work has examined financial performance, resource management, scaling, and innovation in such firms (Johann, Block & Benz, 2022; Audretsch, Lehmann & Schenkenhofer, 2018; Schenkenhofer, 2022; Schenkenhofer et al., 2025), most evidence comes from European contexts (Schenkenhofer et al., 2025; Kim & Park, 2019; Audretsch & Belitski, 2026), with little evidence from other regions of the world (Deng, Ma & Zhu, 2022). For example, niche leaders in parts of Asia may begin with an imitation strategy and then move up the value ladder (Suh & Kim, 2014). 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 (Kim & Park, 2019; Schenkenhofer et al., 2025). Little is known about how organizational forms differ across regions, industries, countries, and clusters (Clayton et al., 2018), or which specific characteristics enable them to experiment, adopt, and develop certain forms of organization that ensure their exceptional performance.

Objective and ambition of the Online Collection

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. We welcome 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 (e.g., hidden champions, Mittelstand, SADI firms, global niche leaders, scalers, gazelles, and blitzscalers. We welcome 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.

In this sense, this collection is expected to be “one mile wide and one inch deep”, as it investigates 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 (Deng, Ma & Zhu, 2022). 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.

EXAMPLES OF POSSIBLE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Theme 1: Novel organizational forms inside the firm (leadership and decision architecture).

How do firms adopting novel forms of organization differ in leadership, governance, and decision-making, and how do these differences shape innovation and productivity at the frontier? What internal “microstructures” (e.g., boards, design, cross-functional teams, routines) enable firms to combine and recombine internal capabilities with external knowledge and ecosystem actors to achieve exceptional performance? How do novel organizational forms affect authority, accountability, and coordination across functions, and what are the effects on innovation speed, product and managerial innovation, value creation, talent retention, growth, and scaling?

Theme 2: Make–buy–ally and collaboration diversity as organizational design for frontier outcomes.

Which combinations of internal investment (“make”), external acquisition (“buy”), and alliance orchestration (“ally”) constitute novel organizational models that sustain frontier performance across firm types (hidden champions, niche leaders, sustained innovators, blitzscalers, scalers, etc.)? How does the diversity (institutional and geographic) of external knowledge and innovation partners translate into firms adopting novel forms of organization, and what internal routines convert diverse inputs into outcomes? Under what conditions do international vs regional knowledge collaboration and spillovers generate non-redundant knowledge that improves innovation and performance, and how do firms with different organizational forms apply, filter, and integrate this knowledge?

Theme 3: Digitalization, AI, and process organization (resilience, productivity, and scaling).

How does digitalization (AI and robotics, data systems, cloud, prominent role of intangibles, etc.) reshape internal process architectures, and which organizational forms best convert digital investments into productivity and innovation gains? Which governance models (data rights, intellectual property, cybersecurity, partner contracts) enable novel organizational forms to adopt and scale complex technologies while maintaining trust and control in technology and partners? How do digitally savvy firms pivot and reconfigure organizational forms to build resilience to supply, demand, and geopolitical shocks, and what design features predict faster recovery and sustained innovation?

Theme 4: Ecosystem embedment, alliances, and global value chain orchestration.

How do firms implement novel forms of organization while embedded in industry and entrepreneurial ecosystems, and how does ecosystem position shape organizational models for innovation and scaling? How do niche leaders and other exceptional performers orchestrate global supply chains as an organizational capability, not only a sourcing choice, across regional and international contexts? What partner portfolio mixes (universities, suppliers, customers, competitors, government, research labs, conferences, competitions, trade and industrial associations, scientific communities) are associated with frontier outcomes, and what form of organization do firms need to adopt to efficiently govern such collaborations, knowledge spillovers, and firm strategies?

Theme 5: Context and institutions (policy, techno-nationalism, clusters, and decoupling).

How do relationships with government shape novel organizational models through procurement, standards, subsidies, and cluster governance, and when do these relationships enhance versus constrain innovation and productivity? How do organizational models vary between emerging and traditional industries and across industrial clusters of novel and emerging industries where traditional forms of organization are no longer working? How do deglobalization pressures and techno-nationalism reshape firms’ organizational choices?

Theme 6: Business model innovation patterns and comparison across “champions”.

What distinctive business model configurations characterize exceptional performers across countries, regions, industries, and stages of growth, age, and size, and how are these configurations enabled by organizational form? How do European, Asian, American, and African leaders in WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries differ in adopting and experimenting with novel forms of organization? What contextual factors explain these cross-country differences? Do niche leaders exhibit distinctive innovation patterns (radical vs incremental, product vs process, ecosystem vs standalone), and which organizational designs best explain variation in these patterns and their performance effects?

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