As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into the context of complex products and systems (CoPS), making complex systems more intelligent, this article explores the consequences and implications for engineering management in emerging complex intelligent systems (CoIS). Based on five engineering management aspects, including design objectives, system boundaries, architecting and modeling, predictability and emergence, and learning and adaptation, a case study representing future CoIS illustrates how these five aspects, as well as their relationship to criticality and generativity, emerge as AI becomes an integrated part of the system. The findings imply that a future combined perspective on allowing generativity and maintaining or enhancing criticality is necessary, and notably, the results suggest that the understanding of system integrators and CoPS management partly fundamentally alters and partly is complemented with the emergence of CoIS. CoIS puts learning and adaptation characteristics in the foreground, i.e., CoIS are associated with increasingly generative design objectives, fluid system boundaries, new architecting and modeling approaches, and challenges predictability. The notion of bounded generativity is suggested to emphasize the combination of generativity and criticality as a direction for transforming engineering management in CoPS contexts and demands new approaches for designing future CoIS and safeguard its important societal functions.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are driving the evolution of complex products and systems (CoPS) into complex intelligent systems (CoIS). The introduction of AI implies generativity and increasingly fluid boundaries in such systems and presents challenges for organizations to control and manage systems that are safety critical. Building on a case study representing future CoIS, this paper explores fluid boundaries in CoIS, including approaches for navigating system criticality and generativity. The findings point to the relationship between fluid boundaries and a stable organizational and system core, along with a shared core mission. Together, they serve as a platform that enables both contributions from various constituent systems and dynamic reconfigurations of the overall system-of-systems (SoS). System criticality and generativity are navigated through setting bounds to generativity by checks and balances involving both human and AI, including safety requirements for constituent systems and overall human oversight. Such an approach extends beyond traditional system integration activities and alters the role of CoIS integrators.

Research Summary This article explores EMNEs innovation capability building in emerging markets. The paper provides a longitudinal account of how the Brazilian cosmetics firm Natura transitioned from scant to ample innovation resources and processes. Building on the institution-based view and the resource-based view, we explain how EMNEs innovation capability building is anchored in open innovation and collaborative nonmarket strategies. The paper reveals a unique pattern of innovation capability building based on a combination of local and global open innovation processes and harnessing the country characteristics over time. It is shown how combining open innovation and collaborative nonmarket strategies can help mitigate weak formal and informal institutions in emerging markets. The study offers an integrated framework explaining innovation capability building and the effects on the institutional setting. Managerial Summary The increase of well-known EMNEs has raised interest in understanding how these firms build sustainable innovation capabilities. Based on a longitudinal study of the Brazilian-based cosmetics firm Natura, this paper shows how an open innovation strategy can be used to tap into home-market natural resources and connect to the global setting. This innovation capability process involves traditional market-based strategies like inter-organizational collaborations but also nonmarket strategies, such as developing local relationships, supporting socio-biodiversity, and contributing to local society. The findings point at the importance of developing an overall innovation strategy, directing attention to innovation processes, engaging in recursive practice in innovation projects, responding to the market and nonmarket environments, and linking the emerging market institutional setting and the global market context.

Currently, new business models can be observed in content creator-based e-commerce. The research on e-commerce has grown rapidly and new concepts have emerged such as social commerce, platforms, and user-generated content. However, no overarching perspective has yet been formulated for distinguishing new content creator-based business models within e-commerce. The aim of this paper is therefore to characterize content creator-based business models by formulating a taxonomy of e-commerce based on a structured literature review of the concepts mentioned above. The results of our study point toward eight types of content creator-based business models. Our paper outlines theoretical and practical implications for the emerging phenomenon of content creator-based business, which we refer to as intellectual commerce. In addition, we describe 19 concepts related to Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and e-commerce.

THE CHALLENGE: Extensive research efforts are ongoing to ensure long-term competitiveness for Swedish system building industry, such as WASP[1] (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program), where technology development, including software development, for future intelligent systems is addressed. This development has potentially major consequences for organizations that develop, provide, and utilize future complex and intelligent systems. Maintaining some of these systems’ functions will be crucial to many functions in society, such as various infrastructure like transport systems, communications systems, and healthcare. The development is disruptive in character and changes the conditions for the actors in the system-building industry (see WASP’s Technology Foresight 2018). Closely related to this technology development, a number of management challenges are emerging, such as:

The emergence of ecosystems for dynamic and intelligent platform-based systems. This overthrows traditional principles of organizational design that are often based on direct mirroring of the system architecture (also referred to as "mirroring hypothesis" / Conway's law), where a typical situation is that there is a responsible organizational unit for each subsystem in the system. In the face current developments, new perspectives on the links between the system architecture and the organization need to be developed as a result of the emergence of ecosystems, new types of layered system architectures, the intelligent evolution of systems, the creation of training data, and the emergence of new types of actors such as data factories.

Complexity beyond human cognitive understanding creates a need to re-evaluate existing insights into bounded rationality (Simon, 1972) into a new understanding of rationality that recognizes that human cognition and the intelligence of systems are strongly interwoven. Such rationality may be understood as generative and open and potentially culminates in a paradigm shift in management knowledge. Based on this, new management approaches need to be developed, e.g. how emerging complexity can be embraced (Garud et al., 2013).

Digital technology is increasingly integrated in industrial applications and alters existing system architectures and innovation processes. This paper explores platform and application strategies based on an empirical case study of avionics at the Swedish firm Saab Aeronautics. The paper complements perspectives on digital innovation in relation to open source software development and systems such as mobile operating systems with applications, and points at limitations of organizational metaphors as bazaars and cathedrals. The results recognize that there is more to a city than a bazaar and a cathedral and show that the development toward digitalization necessitate industrial firms to consider safety-critical and security aspects while allowing for generativity based on recombination through system partitioning enabling different control and generativity priorities for different parts of the system.