We develop and test a rigorous theoretical account of firm global sourcing decisions, distinguishing the antecedents of offshore integration from those of offshore outsourcing. Although traditional theories of global sourcing focus on lowering costs, we argue that as high-performing firms seek to develop new capabilities by tapping into foreign knowledge, they will increasingly turn to offshore integration to reap colocation benefits and overcome expropriation challenges.…Read More
While much is understood about the general pattern of industry dynamics, a critical element underlying these dynamics, the rate of the expansion of individual firms, has been largely overlooked. We argue that the rate at which firms can reliably increase their scale of operations is a critical factor in understanding the structure of industries.…Read More
We assemble a panel data set of firms in the U.S. defense industry between 1996 and 2006 to examine the drivers of heterogeneous incumbent firm adaptation following the industry-wide demand shock of September 11, 2001.…Read More
The issue of the failure of incumbent firms in the face of radical technical change has been a central question in the technology strategy domain for some time. We add to prior contributions by highlighting the role a firm’s existing set of complementary assets have in influencing its investment in alternative technological trajectories.…Read More
Gita Surie explains how half of India’s population has little or no access to reliable energy, which means that 600 million people in rural India have a significant problem.…Read More
According to George Day, top businesses have a lot in common with top athletes. His research examines the qualities that separate “growth leaders” from “growth laggards” — in other words, the qualities that separate average or failing companies from those that achieve Olympic-level success.…Read More
Whereas network ideas and approaches have become prominent in both the managerial and sociological literatures, we contend that the increasing emphasis on network structures and their evolution has distracted us from the important issue of whether and when networks actually work in the ways that our theories assume.…Read More
Hospitals are increasingly facing market and regulatory pressures and the need to innovate is becoming ever more salient. One response has been the creation of the role of Chief Innovation Officer, or CIO.…Read More
In order to sustainably innovate and grow, firms must, at times, shrink. This research is premised on the concept that the success of a firm’s innovation strategy relies not just on its ability to “grow smart,” but equally on its ability to “shrink smart.”…Read More
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
