Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of the link between human capital and strategy across hierarchies.

Design/methodology/approach

– Using data on personality traits as a proxy for strategy implementation success, empirical data included 1,738 Operational Personality Questionnaire personality traits assessments in one large multinational firm. Respondents spanned from top-management to white-collar employees. Besides personality traits, measures include employment level and employment status. In addition, a total of 43 interviews were performed on the employee-level, with middle managers, with senior managers, and with executive-level managers.

Findings

– After a strategic shift, successful implementation of a human resource management (HRM) strategy decreased down through the hierachies. This has implications for a firm trying to realign its resources to a new strategy. If the strategic shift is large, this will pose a great problem as human capital further down in the hierarchy will not be aligned to the new strategy, but rather be aligned to the old strategy.

Research limitations/implications

– The findings are discussed using the concept of the strategic centre of gravity. The authors elaborate on the concept in terms of the origin, mass, and inertia of the strategic centre of gravity.

Practical implications

– A successful strategic shift in this sense will to a great extent depend on how successful the implementation is at lower levels of hierarchy, thus pointing to the importance to considering this when designing and pursuing strategic change.

Originality/value

– The research contributes to the HRM literature by furthering the understanding of aligning human capital on different organizational levels to strategy and by developing the concept of the strategic centre of gravity. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Quantitative analysis of the evolution of innovations at national systems level is not alwayspossible due to the lack of reliable, comprehensive and adequate data sets. Therefore, managerialpractice among organizations as well as policy decision making are often myopic anduninformed about actual dynamics.In the Swedish case, there are promising data sets, even if the adequacy of existing variabledefinitions needs to be explored and debated. Official data collected by the central statisticsauthority SCB (Statistics Sweden) includes several potentially relevant variables on all privateand public organizations in Sweden and their employees. These data are compiled into timeseries for a number of years which allows for longitudinal analysis. Data can also be mergedwith other data sets on the environmental goods and services sector and energy consumption dataand therefore allow for a detailed “demographic” or “population ecology” analysis ofenvironmentally oriented or friendly innovation since at least 2003. Halmstad University hasrecently gained full access to these data.In this paper, these databases are described in some detail. Problems of definitions andmeasurement are particularly discussed, and some initial descriptive statistics are presented.Further, the paper advocates the use of models inspired by population ecology and demographyin analyzing existing data. In particular it is suggested that interactive diffusion models mayenhance the understanding of the evolution of green innovations and their dynamics. It is alsosuggested that multi-level regression analysis is applicable in estimating the power of factors thatbring progress to the “greening” of the Swedish innovation system.Together, such models are potentially useful in forecasting the development of innovationsystems. The models can also be used in generating, testing by simulating and thus evaluatingapproaches to management of innovation and innovation policy implementation. A dynamicunderstanding of the “greening” of the innovation system is a critical asset in the development oftools to be used for continuous improvements in both policy making and the management ofinnovation in organizations.

CTIM2 publishes articles in scientific journals, conference proceedings and reports and is heavily engaged in supervising and supporting the production of Ph.D. theses of the doctoral students who are members of the group. The present book consists of manuscripts not published before. One book in the series has previously been published: S.Å Hörte (2006), CPDR on Innovation and Product Development, Halmstad University, Sweden (ISBN: 91‐975075‐0‐4).