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| Mode | Main category | Conceptualization | Typical activities |
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| 1 | External relationship type | A1: cooperative enterprises | (1) Collaborative innovation with partner companies
(2) Consciously establish innovative partnerships, collide with each other in the communication process, and create and improve partnerships
(3) Inviting customers to participate in the whole process of research, development, and sales and deal with unexpected problems together
(4) Organizing and participating in conferences and forums for entrepreneurs in the industry
(5) Participating in school-enterprise exchanges organized by higher education institutions to gain inspiration for improvised exploration and development from teachers and students
(6) Establishing long-term partnerships with research institutions |
| A2: collaborative innovation |
| A3: partnerships |
| A4: conferences and forums |
| A5: school-enterprise exchanges |
| A6: customer engagement |
| A7: cooperative research institutions |
|
| 2 | Internal relationship type | A8: team members
A9: individual resources | (1) Leveraging team members’ personal resources to expand new business
(2) Creating and maintaining a high degree of team knowledge heterogeneity to stimulate the collision of ideas
(3) Team relationship training to enhance team members’ sense of understanding, willingness to communicate, and common responsiveness
(4) Adopting informal communication, humor, and expressions of trust to reduce power distance and increase team members’ willingness to make autonomous decisions and to improvise |
| A10: team knowledge heterogeneity |
A11: team relationship training
A12: informal communication |
| A13: reduced power distance |
| A14: autonomous decision making |
| A15: improvisation |
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| 3 | Flexible time type | A16: division of labor
A17: setting aside time | (1) Dividing labor in the team for exploration and development and encouraging members to improvise
(2) Setting aside time for informal activities to explore fresh information and ideas and refine programs
(3) Thinking about how to reorganize the existing resources of the company and boldly experiment with them
(4) Frequent market monitoring and forward thinking for executives themselves
(5) Setting aside “unhindered time” to think about current opportunities for innovation or threats of sudden change without being disturbed by employees and customers
(6) Reading literature published by leading scholars and entrepreneurs and putting useful insights into practice immediately |
| A18: informal activities |
| A19: resource reorganization and piecing together |
| A20: forward thinking |
| A21: identifying opportunities for innovation |
A22: identifying threats of mutation
A23: literature reading |
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| 4 | Improvised platform type | A24: information platform | (1) Organizing regular cross-regional departmental video conferences to discuss ongoing projects and new ideas and welcoming unplanned proposals
(2) Assembling the creative team immediately to focus on response options and completely new solutions based on situational needs
(3) Creating an organizational atmosphere of trial and error and giving employees a relatively relaxed working environment
(4) Holding one-on-one informal meetings with middle and senior staff to randomly generate new strategic ideas
(5) Conducting an incentive mechanism for employees to propose feasible and innovative ideas, with criticism treated without malice |
| A25: program seminar |
A26: organizational climate building
A27: platform incentive mechanism |
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| 5 | Stimulating thinking type | A28: new program
A29: guided impromptu discussion | (1) Encouraging employees and partners to come up with new solutions and, once implemented, closely monitoring these projects for any unforeseen situations that occur in the early stages and keeping track of them
(2) Frequently shifting exploration and development-related topics during regular meetings, leading impromptu discussions
(3) Holding regular meetings of teams at all levels to organize brainstorming and instant reflection
(4) Letting employees participate in the whole process when expanding new markets and opening subsidiaries, and providing framework guidance while boldly delegating execution
(5) Allowing the team to have different interpretations of the current ambiguous situation and reducing ambiguity in “learning by doing” |
| A30: regular seminar meeting |
A31: empowerment
A32: ambiguous situations |
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| 6 | Demonstration and guidance type | A33: challenging the status quo | (1) Emphasizing “bold innovation” when identifying new market opportunities and encouraging employees to generate new ideas, challenge the status quo, and create new approaches
(2) Emphasizing “task orientation” when dealing with unexpected situations, guiding employees to quickly improve programs, closing loopholes, and solving problems in a timely manner
(3) Using more open behaviors in the early stages of innovation projects and more closed behaviors in the mature stages overall
(4) Variably creating a relaxed or demanding team innovation climate and switching between them in time
(5) Taking the lead in modeling exploratory and exploitative improvisational behavior |
| A34: new approaches |
| A35: new ideas |
A36: open behavior
A37: closed behavior
A38: organizational climate shift |
| A39: improvisational behavior demonstration |
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