How do non-practicing entities impact innovation? This question has enormous relevance to industrial policy, with virtually no direct evidence to inform it. There are two dominant theoretical perspectives, one of which views Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) as benevolent middlemen reallocating intellectual property (IP) to where it can be best used.…Read More
In new research sponsored by the Mack Institute, Rahul Kapoor and coauthor Thomas Klueter analyze how alliance-based strategies may help companies successfully manage the challenge of disruptive technology.…Read More
Crowdfunding has exploded in popularity since 2009, and its pace shows no signs of slowing. Funded researcher Ethan Mollick argues that this trend poses important implications for established firms as well as entrepreneurs.…Read More
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
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
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
Entrepreneurial ventures are a key source of innovation. Nowadays, ventures are backed by a wide array of investors whose complementary asset profiles differ significantly. We therefore assert that entrepreneurial ventures can no longer be studied as a homogeneous group.…Read More
What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification.” As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from games and play to make them more engaging, we are witnessing a veritable ludification of culture.…Read More
A new study reveals the surprisingly pivotal role that narratives play when organizations forge a new strategic direction.…Read More
Fifteen years into her legal career, Kelly Brown could see that the legal landscape was experiencing changes that were accelerating the need to innovate and transforming law firms into more complex businesses. She wanted to place herself at the forefront of innovation in her field.…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
In crowdsourcing contests, choices about contest structure affect both number and quality of entries. Funded Researcher Pinar Yildrim shares knowledge about how firms can get their ideal results by manipulating contest structure.…Read More
This study develops and tests a set of novel theoretical predictions about the conditions under which category spanning is rewarded by external audiences. To do this, we revisit the assumption that comprehensible organizational identities are associated with individual categories.…Read More
Retail customers are now “omnichannel” in their outlook and behavior — they use both online and offline retail channels readily. To thrive in this new environment, retailers of all types should reexamine their strategies for delivering information and products to customers.…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
Terry Fadem, a Mack Institute Senior Fellow, researches the aggregate effect of questions, and the errors, problems, and benefits that they produce. Through hundreds of surveys and interviews, he’s gathered data on how managers ask questions and deal with the answers.…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
Conventional wisdom holds that the internet makes the world flat and reduces friction by erasing the impact of the physical world on our buying habits. But Wharton professor David Bell argues that the way we use the internet is still largely shaped by the physical world we inhabit.…Read More
