Though one-stop shops seem like an obvious business strategy, research finds that client-supplier relationships play a stronger role in value creation.…Read More
Weighing the “One-Stop Shop” as a Value Creation Strategy
Capturing Economic Value from Innovation Investments
When Crowdfunding Crowds Out the Competition
Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter have been popular in the U.S. for several years, allowing everyday consumers to fund entrepreneurial ventures in return for the finished product. While such “reward-based” crowdfunding can open many doors for entrepreneurs, could it also close others?…Read More
Replicating the Multinationality-Performance Relationship: Is There an S-Curve?
Our study examines the relationship between a firm’s multinationality and its performance. In a much-cited study, Lu and Beamish (2004) found evidence of an S-shaped relationship—with firm performance first decreasing, then increasing, then decreasing again as firms internationalized—in a sample of Japanese firms from 1986 to 1997.…Read More
Us against Them: Network Dynamics under the Threat of New Entrants
Dealing with the threat of new entrants into its market is among the most fundamental strategic imperatives for any firm. This threat could be enhanced for various reasons, most prominently institutional or technological changes.…Read More
Innovation and Product Risk: Firm Strategy and Public Welfare
Innovative new products come with hope, but also risk that they will not work as well as hoped. Thus testing and monitoring are key strategic decisions of an innovative firm in any market, and in some markets these strategic decisions will be intertwined with government regulatory policy.…Read More
Strategy, Human Capital Investments, Business-Domain Capabilities, and Performance: A Study in the Global Software Services Industry
In knowledge-based industries, continuous human-capital investments are essential for firms to enhance capabilities and sustain competitive advantage. However, such investments present a dilemma for firms, because human resources are mobile.…Read More
Balancing on the Creative High-Wire: Forecasting the Success of Novel Ideas in Organizations
Betting on the most promising new ideas is key to creativity and innovation in organizations, but predicting the success of novel ideas can be difficult. To select the best ideas, creators and managers must excel at “creative forecasting”—i.e., predicting the outcomes of new ideas.…Read More
In the VC World, Collective Wisdom Isn’t Always So Wise
New research indicates that individuals’ investment decisions may outperform those of the group. How can firms make better decisions?…Read More
Managerial Compensation and Corporate Spinoffs
This article investigates how corporate spinoffs affect managerial compensation. These deals are found to improve the alignment of spinoff firm managers’ incentive compensation with stock market performance, especially among spinoff firm managers that used to be divisional managers of the spun-off subsidiary, and particularly when the spun-off subsidiary performs better than or is unrelated to its parent firm’s remaining businesses.…Read More
The First Step to Successful Innovation? Choosing the Right Partners
Wharton management professor Exequiel Hernandez searches for the optimal mix of domestic and foreign partners in a firm’s network. The answer depends on what type of innovative solution a firm is trying to produce.…Read More
The NPE: Benevolent Middleman or Stick-Up Artist?
How do non-practicing entities impact innovation? This question has enormous relevance to industrial policy, with virtually no direct evidence to inform it. There are two dominant theoretical perspectives, one of which views Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) as benevolent middlemen reallocating intellectual property (IP) to where it can be best used.…Read More
How to Win in an Omni-channel World
Retail customers are now “omnichannel” in their outlook and behavior — they use both online and offline retail channels readily. To thrive in this new environment, retailers of all types should reexamine their strategies for delivering information and products to customers.…Read More
Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One
Conventional wisdom holds that the internet makes the world flat and reduces friction by erasing the impact of the physical world on our buying habits. But Wharton professor David Bell argues that the way we use the internet is still largely shaped by the physical world we inhabit.…Read More
The Double-Edged Sword of Recombination in Breakthrough Innovation
We explore the double-edged sword of recombination in generating breakthrough innovation: recombination of distant or diverse knowledge is needed because knowledge in a narrow domain might trigger myopia, but recombination can be counterproductive when local search is needed to identify anomalies.…Read More
Reversing course: Competing technologies, mistakes, and renewal in flat panel displays
The study explores renewal in a novel but understudied context—an era of ferment with competing technological options. It focuses on IBM’s transition from market leadership in a failed path (plasma) to leadership in the emerging dominant technology (LCD) in the 1980s. Interviews and internal documents offer two primary factors explaining renewal at IBM.…Read More
What Became of Borders?
Economists have suggested at least since Mandeville and Smith that the virtues of capitalism lie in giving consumers what they want, and cheaply, through the vehicle of incentives to businesses and, in particular, their owners. It was the central task of economic theory in the twentieth century to show the precise sense in which, and conditions under which, this might be true.…Read More
Optimization as Constraint: A Comment on Mazzoleni and Nelson
This comment is an in-depth exploration of the neoclassical commitment to the idea that economic actors are appropriately modeled as optimizers—of profit, utility, or whatever.…Read More
The Importance of the Raw Idea in Innovation: Testing the Sow’s Ear Hypothesis
How important is the original conception of an idea—the “raw” idea— to an innovation’s success? In this article, the authors explore whether raw ideas judged as “better” fare better in the market and also determine the strength of that relationship.…Read More
Portfolio Management in New Drug Development
The pharmaceutical industry leads all industries in terms of R&D spend. Portfolio management in new drug development is extremely challenging due to long drug development cycles and high probabilities of failure.…Read More
The Impact of New Product Introduction on Plant Productivity in the North American Automotive Industry
Product launch—an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant—is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations, resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North American automotive plants from years 1999–2007, we estimate that a product launch entails an average productivity loss of 12%–15% at the plant level.…Read More