Turning Participation into Durable Organizational Capability

Abstract

Leaders increasingly open strategy processes to employees, yet many participatory initiatives fail to change how work gets done. This study examines how a bounded open-strategy intervention contributes to capability renewal during strategic transitions. Drawing on a three-year case study of a European SaaS scale-up, we identify three mechanisms through which participation becomes consequential: cross-functional triangulation, authorship legitimacy, and distributed translation. Together, these mechanisms explain how participation reshapes coordination beyond the intervention itself and how capability renewal is accomplished in practice through a designed participatory process rather than top-down redesign alone. We translate these findings into RESET, a practical framework for designing open-strategy interventions that build capability rather than symbolic engagement. Discipline strategy (18)