Abstract To cope with ongoing change, an increasing number of companies view agile approaches as fundamental for remaining competitive in dynamic environments. However, realizing the outcomes associated with agility requires not only the implementation of agile practices but also employees who possess an agile mindset. Although scholarly understanding of the agile mindset has increased in recent years, a validated measurement instrument for individuals is still lacking. This paper addresses this research gap by following the validation procedure proposed by MacKenzie, Podsakoff, Podsakoff [1]. Based on a systematic review of existing conceptualizations of the agile mindset, we empirically developed a scale and specified a corresponding measurement model. To quantitatively evaluate and validate the model, we analyzed data from four independent samples (content validity: n = 184; pretest: n = 500; validation: n = 202; cross-validation: n = 218). As a result, we validate a four-dimensional conceptualization of the agile mindset comprising the attitude toward learning, collaborative exchange, empowered self-guidance, and customer co-creation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the agile mindset is correlated with key individual outcomes: job satisfaction, goal orientation, and reduced resistance to change and thereby reinforcing its relevance. In addition to its theoretical contribution, this study provides practical value by offering an economically efficient instrument for measuring the agile mindset.

Abstract The success of agile work heavily depends on people and their approach to challenges, with the agile mindset emerging as a pivotal driver. Despite its importance, Information Systems (IS) research lacks a systematic overview of the contexts where the agile mindset is relevant and the research gaps that remain. This study addresses this gap by systematically examining the factors influencing and resulting from the agile mindset in IS contexts and, for the first time, demonstrating its broad relevance across diverse IS domains. We conducted a systematic literature review, analyzing 62 relevant papers from IS research. Our findings show that the agile mindset plays a central role in four key areas: (1) implementing agile methods or scaled agile frameworks during agile transformations, (2) applying digital tools and driving digital transformation, (3) supporting coaching, training, and education, and (4) leadership and management. This study’s originality lies in highlighting the agile mindset’s wide-ranging applicability, offering practitioners actionable insights for designing processes and mechanisms to enhance the success of agile work in IS. Additionally, researchers are provided with a roadmap of open questions and future research opportunities to deepen our understanding of this critical concept in IS contexts.

In many instances, customers are seen as one of the key resources for new product development (NPD), as they often have deep product knowledge, either in the form of explcit or tacit knowledge. Firms' NPD departments are highly interested in internalizing these forms of customer knowledge with the help of customer integration methods, such as Ideas Competitions, Lead-User-Workshops etc. However, research analyzing how these methods enable transfer of customer's tacit knowledge – which can hardly be expressed – has been neglected. Thus, scholars are constantly calling for research that focuses on understanding the tacit knowledge transfer processes by means of customer integration methods. This research identifies a total of 15 methods with the help of a systematic literature review. By then systematically analyzing these methods, authors found that six of these methods make use of two major strategies to internalise customer's tacit knowledge: Story Telling-Strategy and Observing Customer Activities-Strategy. The rest of these methods do not allow for capturing customer's tacit knowledge at all. Based on these insights, authors derived valuable implications for NPD practice on how each of these methods can leverage tacit knowledge from customers more efficiently.

This research-in-progress-paper describes the case of SAPiens, which is a Virtual Ideas Community (VIC). Typically, SAPiens - and VICs in general - focuses solely on supporting the ideation interactions among members. There is evidence from a survey that SAPiens members are also interested in actively signaling competences, experiences and skills to third parties. However, SAPiens does not offer IT functionalities that would allow for such a signaling. Against this backdrop, we propose to enrich SAPiens through User Profile Webpages allowing SAPiens members to construct a public profile within the community and thereby to signal individual capabilities, skills and experiences. The aim of this action design research is to design such an IT artifact by building on the signaling theory. After this initial design, our research constitutes a circular process of constant refinement as well as piloting and evaluation of the IT artifact in the real world setting of the SAPiens VIC.

This research-in-progress paper presents a research project that aims at developing, piloting and evaluating a crowdfunding platform to support financing for start-ups emerging from university. Currently, universities' own financial resources to support setting up businesses from universities are limited. Universities' business foundation consultancy can often only intermediate between entrepreneurs on the one side and restricted funding programs or few investors on the other side. A crowdfunding platform enables many individuals of the (university) crowd to support promising business ideas with little investments cumulating to a greater sum in total. Thus, it has the potential to extend universities' opportunities to support entrepreneurs. In addition, tasks like idea communication, idea evaluation and investment decisions can be outsourced to the crowd. The idea, research setting, first results and a future outlook of this research project are discussed in this paper.