How Does Performance Feedback Affect Boundary Spanning in Multinational Corporations? Insights from Technology Scouts

Published Research

As much as prior research has shed light on the boundary-spanning processes of global organizations and their (positive) impact on an MNC’s performance, whether, when and how past performance ultimately shapes an MNC’s boundary-spanning activities remains an open question in management research.Read More

Opportunity, Status, and Similarity: Exploring the Varied Antecedents and Outcomes of Category Spanning Innovation

Published Research

Studies have shown that actors who affiliate with multiple categories generally do so at their own peril. Still, category spanning is routinely observed, although it is less understood. We address this gap by a longitudinal study of category spanning among nanotube technology inventors. Read More

The Impact of Context and Model Choice on the Determinants of Strategic Alliance Formation: Evidence from a Staged Replication Study

Published Research

Endogenous characteristics of alliance network structure have repeatedly been shown to predict future alliance ties in the strategic management literature. Specifically, the concepts and measures of relational, structural, and positional embeddedness (per Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999), as well as interdependence, are foundational for many studies.Read More

Dual Directors and the Governance of Corporate Spinoffs

Published Research

This paper investigates how “dual directors” enable firms that undertake corporate spinoffs to manage their post-spinoff relationships with the firms they divest, as well as the performance implications of dual directors serving simultaneously on these companies’ boards.Read More

Symbiont Practices in Boundary Spanning:  Bridging the Cognitive and Political Divides in Interdisciplinary Research

Published Research

Organizing for interdisciplinary research must overcome two challenges to collaboration: the cognitive incommensurability of knowledge and the political economy of research based in the disciplines. Researchers may not engage in interdisciplinarity because they would have to invest in new knowledge unrelated to their discipline or risk losing career-related rewards.Read More

Balancing on the Creative High-Wire: Forecasting the Success of Novel Ideas in Organizations

Published Research

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

The External Knowledge Sourcing Process in Multinational Corporations

Published Research

We study the processes through which multinational corporations (MNCs) identify and make use of external sources of knowledge. Based on a seven year longitudinal study of one MNC’s overseas scouting unit, we show how a simple one-directional “channelling” process gradually gave way to three higher value-added processes, labelled “translating”, “matchmaking” and “transforming.”Read More

Ready To Be Open? Explaining the Firm Level Barriers to Benefiting From Openness to External Knowledge

Published Research

While it is broadly recognized that sourcing external knowledge has a positive impact on firm innovation performance, we know very little about the firm level conditions under which this relationship holds. Read More

Experimentation and Project Selection: Screening and Learning

Published Research

We study optimal contracting in a setting that combines experimentation and adverse selection. In our leading example, an entrepreneur (agent) is better informed than the investor (principal) about both the quality the project (risky arm’s distribution) and the entrepreneur’s outside option (payoff of the safe arm).Read More

The First Step to Successful Innovation? Choosing the Right Partners

A person in a brown jacket and blue shirt against a black background, depicted in a headshot style.

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

Renting Capabilities from Consultants in Post-Acquisition Integration

Funded Research Proposal

This research investigates capability development at the business unit level of analysis. To do so, we consider business units that have been serially bought and sold, or “repeatedly divested” units.Read More

Connecting Internal and External Networks of Cooperation: The North Star Alliance’s Roadside Wellness Centers Across Africa

Funded Research Proposal

This research project examines how organizations can develop innovative solutions to large-scale socio-economic problems in emerging markets through multi-stakeholder partnerships. The objective is to determine how these partnerships are built, what the optimal configuration of partners is, and how the partnerships should be coordinated.Read More

Strategic switchbacks: Dynamic commercialization strategies for technology entrepreneurs

Published Research

We present a synthetic framework in which a technology entrepreneur employs a dynamic
commercialization strategy to overcome obstacles to the adoption of their ideal strategy. Whereas prior work portrays the choice of whether to license a new technology or to self-commercialize as a single, static decision, we suggest that when entrepreneurs encounter obstacles to their ideal strategy they can nevertheless achieve it by temporarily adopting a non-ideal strategy.Read More

Three Facets of Organizational Adaptation: Selection, Variety, and Plasticity

Published Research

When considering the adaptive dynamics of organizations, it is important to account for the full set of adaptive mechanisms, including not only the possibility of learning and adaptation of a given behavior but also the internal selection over some population of routines and behaviors. In developing such a conceptual framework, it is necessary to distinguish between the underlying stable roots of behavior and the possibly adaptive expression of those underlying templates.Read More

Selective attention and the initiation of the global knowledge-sourcing process in multinational corporations

Published Research

Multinational corporations (MNCs) frequently use their foreign subsidiaries to identify new opportunities to access external knowledge. This article builds on the attention-based view to examine how selective attention – the focus on certain issues or answers at the exclusion of others – works in the global knowledge-sourcing process in MNCs.Read More