Coordination and cohesion in digital ventures: a process model of alignment breakdown and reconstitution

Abstract

Digital ventures that build a second product have to divide the work of two products and also continuously negotiate a shared sense of what the venture is. The mirroring hypothesis explains the first problem, that an organisation’s structure comes to correspond to the architecture of its product, but it does not extend to the second, the identity of the venture. I study how coordination and cohesion co-evolve as the underlying digital artefacts change, through a multiple case study of five fully digital ventures developing a second product. I combine interviews with dated archival web records to reconstruct each venture’s move. I distinguish three coordination structures, integration, project-based arrangement and separation, and three modes of cohesion, extended, derivative and new identity. The ventures move through a repeating cycle of equilibrium, breakdown and reconstitution. A venture’s position on both dimensions shifts as it passes through the cycle. In four of the five cases the venture’s identity led the breakdown or moved together with the coordination breakdown, which challenges the structural focus of the mirroring account and marks identity as a co-primary dimension of alignment. The balance of exploration and exploitation, which ambidexterity research has treated as a structural choice, here works as a recurring process. I contribute a process account of how the correspondence between organisation and artefact breaks and re-forms over a venture’s life, and I identify identity as an alignment dimension the mirroring hypothesis has limited account of.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Innovation, 2026 · DOI ↗