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© 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The British Psychological Society.

In a dynamically evolving market, Trumpf, a company renowned for high-quality machine tools, faces significant challenges, including increasing competition and changing customer needs and expectations. Marcella Montelatici, head of the sales division, is tasked with addressing these challenges to ensure the company remains competitive. Of course, the market for machine tools has grown, especially in China, but competition has also intensified. So, market participants are under pressure to lower prices. Additionally, customers are increasingly seeking comprehensive machining solutions in place of standalone equipment.
Trumpf has responded to the current go-to-market challenges by diversifying its product portfolio to introduce more machine variants. The business has also expanded its footprint in lower-priced segments through its acquisition of JFY in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. However, the organization still faces certain internal challenges when it comes to leveraging these new opportunities, and this is particularly felt in the company’s sales division. Lack of proactive customer engagement is a key issue, as is the under-utilization of digital tools. Plus, there are inefficiencies in collaboration between the Trumpf headquarters and subsidiaries. While the company has added several innovative products to its basket of offerings, it is missing opportunities to upsell them to its existing customers, and this is not the least of the company leadership’s worries.
Marcella recognizes the need for significant organizational changes to address these challenges and align the sales division with evolving market demands. The case invites participants to develop strategies based on the facts presented in it to help Trumpf reorient its B2B sales approach with a view to boosting revenue and driving market shares.

Emerging crowdsourcing and crowdfunding mechanisms enable citizens to decide which research projects should be funded. By transferring control from professional scientists, these mechanisms reflect a broader shift towards more open “Mode 2” knowledge production that allows non-academic stakeholders to shape the direction of science. Although this may lead to a greater emphasis on the social impact of research, there is no systematic evidence on how crowd evaluators weigh social impact relative to other criteria such as scientific merit or team qualifications. There are also concerns that the personal financial costs associated with crowdfunding prevent certain socio-economic groups from participating, reducing the representativeness of opinions. Similarly, it is not clear what role citizens’ personal interest in particular topics plays in shaping their evaluations. We provide empirical evidence using data from over 2,300 crowd evaluators who assessed four research proposals in different fields and could express their support using a crowdsourcing mechanism (i.e., recommendation) and a crowdfunding mechanism (i.e., donation of own money). We confirm that crowd evaluators give significant weight to perceived social impact, although this weight is not larger than that of scientific merit. Compared to crowdsourcing, crowdfunding gives greater voice to citizens with higher income and education. Personal interest in a topic tends to be associated with greater project support, which may partly reflect an inflated assessment of social impact. Despite these general patterns, we also observe differences across projects – illustrating context-specificity and variability that make open Mode 2 processes difficult to predict and control.

with permission of Elsevier

with permission of Elsevier