Research Design

The potential inter-relationships between dynamic organizational networking phenomena on the one hand and their managerial implications on the other create a vast research agenda of potential interest to practitioners. This agenda cannot be tackled by monolithic, top-down research designs regardless of the 'size' of the various research efforts that evolve in DOMINO. A thorough research of particular organizational phenomena requires access to a variety of empirical settings that will allow focused research efforts to be correlated with empirical data drawn by different sites, providing multi-faceted insights into the issues examined. This need has been evident to the DOMINO research team from the research design phase, and therefore research work has been arranged in a way that will nurture variety and polyphony. The plurality of partners, not only in terms of academic backgrounds but also of the participation of industrial partners in the DOMINO consortium as well, ensures a selection of empirical settings quite varied that will allow the observation of the networking phenomenon in a variety of industrial sectors (e.g., automotive, construction, education, pharmaceutical, and retail).

Therefore, the DOMINO project proposes an innovative research model, which is actually designed around two basic concepts: empirical settings and focused research projects. The first concept deals with the actual settings in which empirical work will be conducted, while the second one describes the particular research issue to be investigated. Focused research projects are the main construct within the DOMINO research structure. The set up of 10 focused research projects comprises the overall research effort into a more manageable and focused set of actions to be undertaken by researchers. Each one of them is concerned with answering some specific, focused research questions, which correspond to the overall research theme under investigation in the DOMINO project (i.e., management of dynamic, networked organizational settings) and contributes to the overall research picture of the project. The empirical settings are empirical sites and sources of data available for the researchers within and across focused research projects (Table 1).

The pace at which organizational phenomena advances, particularly through technological innovation, implies that there is seldom sufficient time to rationalize on experiences gained from handling specific situations and thus to consolidate these findings into frameworks for managerial action. Yet, to obtain implementable results, researchers need to follow the flow of business developments and to a great extent allow the research agenda to be defined by business reality. The DOMINO research design allows a tighter interaction between the process of framing and focusing the research questions on network phenomena on the one hand and business reality on the other.