Bounding an emerging technology: Para-scientific media and the Drexler-Smalley debate about nanotechnology

Published Research

‘Nanotechnology’ is often touted as a significant emerging technological field. However, determining what nanotechnology means, whose research counts as nanotechnology, and who gets to speak on behalf of nanotechnology is a highly political process involving constant negotiation with significant implications for funding, legislation, and citizen support.Read More

Governing Collaborative Activity: Interdependence and the Impact of Coordination and Exploration

Published Research

We examine the performance implications of selecting alternate modes of governance in interorganizational alliance relationships. While managers can choose from a range of modes to govern alliances, prior empirical evidence offers limited guidance on the performance impact of this choice.Read More

Reproducing Knowledge: Inaccurate Replication and Failure in Franchise Organizations

Published Research

The recognition that better use of existing knowledge can enhance performance has spawned substantial interest in the replication of productive knowledge within organizations. An enduring belief is that when expanding by replication, organizations can and should strive to adapt to fit the salient characteristics of new environments.Read More

Balancing Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Domains: Evaluation of Performance Implications in Alliance Portfolios

Published Research

Organizational research advocates that firms balance exploration and exploitation, yet it acknowledges inherent challenges in reconciling these opposing activities. To overcome these challenges, such research suggests that firms establish organizational separation between exploring and exploiting units or engage in temporal separation whereby they oscillate between exploration and exploitation over time.Read More

Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential? 

Published Research

Drawing on and extending prototype theories of creativity and leadership, we theorize that the expression of creative ideas may diminish judgments of leadership potential unless the charismatic leadership prototype is activated in the minds of social perceivers. Study 1 shows creative idea expression is negatively related to perceptions of leadership potential in a sample of employees working in jobs that required creative problem solving.Read More

Emergence of new markets, distributed entrepreneurship and the university: Fostering development in India

Published Research

University-industry partnerships facilitate socio-economic development by incubating innovations and diffusing entrepreneurial capabilities to create new markets in rural areas. Complexity theory based approaches are used to develop a process model of emergence based on a case study of a leading Indian technical institution involved in creating new technologies and markets.Read More

Social Capital for Hire? Mobility of Technical Professionals and Firm Influence in Wireless Standards Committees

Published Research

The movement of personnel between firms has been shown to have important implications for firms, yet there has been little direct investigation of the underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to their human capital, mobile individuals carry social capital, affecting the outcomes of the firms they join and leave by altering the patterns of interaction between firms.Read More

Innovating knowledge communities – An analysis of group collaboration and competition in science and technology

Published Research

A useful level of analysis for the study of innovation may be what we call “knowledge communities” — intellectually cohesive, organic inter-organizational forms. Formal organizations like firms are excellent at promoting cooperation, but knowledge communities are superior at fostering collaboration — the most important process in innovation.Read More

Network Composition, Collaborative Ties, and Upgrading in Emerging-Market Firms: Lessons from the Argentine Autoparts Sector

Published Research

What types of relational and institutional mechanisms shape knowledge flows and the upgrading capabilities of emerging-market firms in the face of economic liberalization? We analyze the Argentine autoparts sector to distinguish the relative impact of different types of network relationships on a firm’s process and product upgrading.Read More

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot? The Reverse Transfer of Knowledge through Mobility Ties

Published Research

While mobility’s effect on knowledge transfer to firms that hire mobile employees is well-demonstrated, we choose to explore mobility’s effect on knowledge transfer to firms that lose these employees. Focusing on this ‘outbound mobility’ allows us to isolate effects of social mechanisms associated with mobility.Read More

Institutions and the Internationalization of U.S. Venture Capital Firms

Published Research

In recent years, venture capital firms have increasingly turned to foreign countries in search of investment opportunities. The cross-border expansion of venture capital firms presents an interesting case of internationalization, because they are at variance with both conventional portfolio and direct investment models.Read More

Corporate Venture Capital and the Returns to Acquiring Portfolio Companies

Published Research

A prominent motive for corporate venture capital (CVC) is the identification of entrepreneurial-firm acquisition opportunities. Consistent with this view, we find that one of every five startups purchased by 61 top corporate investors from 1987 through 2003 is a venture portfolio company of its acquirer.Read More

Value Creation and Destruction: A Study of the US Medical Devices Industry

Published Research

This dissertation studies firm strategy to gain technological knowledge from external sources in dynamic industries and the performance implications of these strategies. In dynamic industries, firms need to integrate new knowledge, and build new resources and capabilities to maintain competitive advantage.Read More

The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas

Published Research

People often reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty.Read More

Why Do Firms Divest?

Published Research

In this paper, I examine how lower-cost production and new market opportunities influence the divestment decisions of firms. I argue that lower-cost production and new market opportunities in foreign markets can provide a better use of existing firm resources and posit that these opportunities are likely to influence firm divestment of home-country operations.Read More