Must-have or Nice-to-have? Using Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) to Advance Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Research

As executive guest editor, I lead the editorial team of a virtual special issue in the Journal of Business Research dedicated to the application of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship research, together with Patrycja Klimas, Ricarda Bouncken, and Jan Dul.

Necessary conditions are enablers that must be present for an outcome to occur. They often work as bottlenecks or constraints: their absence prevents an organization, team, or individual from achieving its goals. Where regression-based techniques show which factors contribute to an outcome on average, NCA separates the need-to-haves from the nice-to-haves. The special issue invites submissions that use NCA to theoretically and empirically advance strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship research, and aims to establish best-practice examples for the growing NCA community.

The submission window opened on January 1, 2025. Read the full call for papers or learn more about the paper development workshop we organized to support authors.