In this project, I seek to compare how effectively family firms undertake and implement acquisitions and divestitures relative to their non-family counterparts. While family firms are less likely than non-family firms to undertake divestitures, the stock market returns earned by the family firms that undertake these deals exceed those of non-family firms.…Read More
Marketing is at the interface of the firm and its present and prospective markets, and is the organizational function that absorbs much of the environmental turbulence. …Read More
We are exploring the reasons for the infamous “deny, deflect and delay” approach of Facebook leadership, and will argue that some of the damage they incurred might have been avoided had they absorbed four lessons we have drawn from our studies of highly vigilant organizations.…Read More
Our field’s growing attention to interorganizational network structure frequently builds on the Watts and Strogatz (1998) small world model. Our literature has identified “small worlds” — actual networks which simultaneously obtain relatively high clustering and short path length — in many contexts. …Read More
Existing research on the diffusion of innovations has focused on the benefits of using central influencers to trigger adoption cascades in networks. Yet, prior work has not examined how influencers’ role complexity moderates these benefits. …Read More
Managers have no shortage of advice on how to achieve organic sales growth through innovation. Prescriptions range from emulating the best practices of innovative companies like Amazon, Starbucks, and 3M to adopting popular concepts such as design thinking, lean startup principles, innovation boot camps, and co-creation with customers. …Read More
Entrepreneurial start-up ventures are a major contributor to innovation and job creation in the U.S. One critical task that entrepreneurs face is finding investors who are willing to provide the funding and resources that will allow the business to survive.…Read More
Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in the middle.…Read More
This paper explores whether innovation breakthroughs stimulate or impede future progress in individual innovation. On the one hand, one could argue that substantial improvements to the status quo might inspire advances through competition.…Read More
The extent to which workers adjust to labor market disruptions in light of increasing pressure from trade and automation commands widespread concern. Yet little is known about efforts that deliberately target the adjustment process. …Read More
Former politicians on the board of directors bring to the firm domestic political connections and political knowledge. Previous research has mainly highlighted the role of contacts, without fully recognizing the role of political knowledge accumulated at home. …Read More
Why are some firms consistently able to grow faster than their rivals in the same industry? We employ dynamic capabilities theory to show that organic growth leaders excel because they have innovation prowess. …Read More
Institutional environments are often considered exogenous in firms’ investment decisions. While the non-market strategy literature has discussed various approaches that firms may adopt to influence their interactions with institutions, such discussion is mostly absent in the analysis of market strategies. …Read More
Lean startup principles have fueled a revolution in business and entrepreneurship, but there is a downside to early market testing, according to new Wharton research.…Read More
To help firms make strategic decisions about blockchain, the Mack Institute introduces a new white paper laying out a road map and key questions for blockchain adoption.…Read More
When firms span related product categories, spillovers across categories become central to firm strategy and industrial policy, due to their potential to foreclose competition and affect innovation incentives. …Read More
We offer the first field experiment showing how job assignments create social ties at work and influence their persistence. …Read More
We seek to explore how individuals evaluate the uncertainty during the nascent period of industry disruption, and to identify factors that can help improve their forecasting accuracy. To do so, we will draw on a recently developed research methodology of forecasting tournaments.…Read More
Does heightened employer‐friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state‐level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would “inevitably disclose” trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual‐level patenting outcomes. …Read More
Accreditation of providers helps resolve the pervasive information asymmetries in health care markets. However, meeting accreditation standards typically involves flexibility in implementation, leading to heterogeneity in performance. …Read More
