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
The emergence of radical technologies presents a significant challenge to incumbent firms. We study firms’ management of radical technological change by separating their actions into upstream research (“R” of R&D) and downstream development (“D” of R&D).…Read More
One factor affecting the replicability of routines is the template of what gets replicated. There isn’t much work on where this comes from. One view is that the routine is discovered over time. Another view is that in some cases firms prefer to copy the last incarnation exactly.…Read More
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
We examine how the multiplicity of interorganizational relationships affects strategic behavior by studying the influence of two such relationships — knowledge linkages and commercialization ties — on the voting behavior of firms in a technological standards-setting committee.…Read More
A central idea in the theory of technology cycles is that social and political mechanisms are most important during the selection of a dominant design, and that eras of incremental change are socially uninteresting periods in which innovation is driven by technological momentum and elaboration of the dominant design.…Read More
The records of Oxford University Press for the three-quarters of a century from 1896 suggest an enterprise with very specific economic characteristics. It published a huge number of titles and sold them all over the world, but there was real uncertainty about what kinds of books or which specific titles would sell well, at least within any given period.…Read More
The case presents a situation in which Merck’s World Wide Licensing (WWL) division needs to make important organizational decisions to increase the speed, the breadth and the efficiency of its global licensing and partnering activities.…Read More
Many modern information technology services are increasingly being produced in a host country to serve clients in an offshore location. As a result, the internationalization of service functions is beginning to resemble that of their more traditional manufacturing counterparts.…Read More
We empirically examine the innovation consequences of organizational knowledge brokering, the ability to effectively apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another. We investigate how organizational innovation outcomes vary by founders’ initial mode of venture ideation.…Read More
This paper uses a complex systems perspective to develop a theory of how human interaction dynamics (HID)-strategic decision processes and organizational mechanisms-for knowledge production under uncertainty give rise to a new organizational form. Our theoretical framework is derived from an inductive study of the international expansion of 14 Indian biotechnology and software firms.…Read More
Sample selection bias is a common problem in the business history literature. This paper proposes methods for researching and writing the history of firms and industries designed to address the problem. The key elements are a forward-looking perspective and close attention to the development over time of selection environments, the resources individual firms can mobilize, and understanding an agency within the firm or firms.…Read More
“Social learning” can occur when information is transferred from existing customers to potential customers. It is especially important in cases where the information that is conveyed pertains to experience attributes, i.e., attributes of products that cannot be fully verified prior to the first purchase.…Read More
The study considers the interdependencies between complementors in the business ecosystem and explores the nature of collaborative interactions between them. It sheds light on the organizational and the strategic contexts in which such interactions take place, and shows how they may influence the pattern and the benefits of collaboration.…Read More
The proponents of the “microfoundations project” have advanced a number of criticisms of theories of organizational routines and capabilities. While the criticisms derive in part from philosophical or methodological premises that are open to serious question, and tend to ignore the empirical research on the subject, there remains a valid core concern about the foundational characterization of human nature.…Read More
Achieving superior growth through innovation is a top strategic priority for all companies. Yet most management teams struggle to reach their firm’s ambitious growth targets and suffer slow growth.…Read More
Why do bidders in buyer-determined procurement auctions often bid above the lowest observed bid over the course of the auction? Are such bidding patterns meaningful? In this research, the authors propose that bidders infer their potential quality advantage or disadvantage through their observation of competitive bids and incorporate this information into their responses and price bids.…Read More
Extant literature on divestment has repeatedly found that firms are likely to divest their poorly performing operations. In this paper, I consider how product market relatedness and geographic market differences in growth, policy stability, and exchange rate volatility can moderate the negative relationship between performance and divestment.…Read More
We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies.…Read More
Although the stylized model of industry evolution suggests that firms transform from vertical integration to specialization over time, many industries still exhibit a continued persistence of integrated firms. In exploring this puzzle, I draw on detailed firm-level data from the semiconductor industry to analyze how integrated incumbents, beyond shifting to the specialized mode, reconfigured in the face of industry’s vertical disintegration.…Read More
