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At the end of 2008, the founder and employees of MEG - an insurance brokerage firm active in the market since 2003 - were looking forward to a promising future. Having achieved sales of €33 million in 2007 and just short of €54 million in 2008, the company was aiming to hit the €100 million mark in the next financial year. Within a very short time, the firm founded by Mehmet E. Göker as “insurance specialists” had established itself as the second-most successful insurance broker in Germany. Its rapid rise to the top was thanks to a business model that consistently identified and supported customers interested in insurance products - and also thanks to a particular corporate culture at MEG.

Key teaching/learning objectives:
- Introduction to corporate culture
- What is a corporate culture?
- How to establish and change corporate culture?

We examine how crisis conditions affect the link between structural holes and organizational performance. Since brokerage offers early access to diverse perspectives and autonomy in exchange relations, the benefits of brokerage should rise when crises erupt. However, evidence on the subject has been inconclusive, raising the question of whether crisis actually imposes a boundary condition on structural hole theory. Using longitudinal data on investment banks, and exploiting the 2000 dot.com crisis as well as the 2008 financial crisis, we explore whether crises moderate the favorable effect of brokerage on performance. Our results reveal that only exclusive, and not shared, structural holes are advantageous for performance, as they facilitate ambidextrous responses to crisis. Implications for brokerage theory and for new research on crisis are discussed.

© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Using unique data from the LEGO Ideas platform and a novel approach of algorithm-based abduction, we combine multiple methods to provide new insights into crowd selection. Through qualitative content-coding, interviews, and prior literature, we derive an initial set of variables. We then use machine learning for feature selection and to identify the most important factors for crowd selection. The findings are used to build theory on crowd selection, which we test on a hold-out sample. Our key finding is that ideator and idea characteristics suggested by prior research can predict crowd selection only at early stages. More specifically, crowds rely on ideator status, prior success, and a carefully crafted idea presentation with many images to weed out bad ideas in early stages. However, these characteristics have little bearing in predicting winners at later stages. We explain this with signaling theory, where these ideator and idea characteristics represent strong, costly signals for idea quality and value only in early stages but fade as new signals (such as social signals of popularity and gaining fact traction) emerge. Our study provides two main contributions to research on crowd selection and idea evaluation. First, our approach enables us to prune explanations for crowd selection and guide attention to the factors which matter most. Second, we extend prior work by considering multi-stage crowd selection and highlighting its dynamic nature.