“Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!” is the relentless message company leaders hear. If we only incrementally improve current products, we’re told, we’re doomed to failure. What should innovators do – incrementally enhance current products or swing for the fences? …Read More
This paper focuses on how the use of renewable energy technologies such as biogas can help to achieve environmental and socio-economic sustainability. It combines research on sustainable consumption and production, natural and industrial ecosystems and renewable energy adoption. …Read More
In many innovation settings, ideas are generated over time and managers face a decision about if and how to provide in-process feedback to the idea generators about the quality of submissions. In this article, we use design contests allowing repeated entry to examine the effect of in-process feedback on idea generation.…Read More
The product life cycle, or time path of sales, of many high-tech goods and services is bell-shaped. I show that product life cycles endogenously arise in markets with rapid technological innovations, are heterogeneous across products, and are affected by the level of market competition.…Read More
Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter have been popular in the U.S. for several years, allowing everyday consumers to fund entrepreneurial ventures in return for the finished product. While such “reward-based” crowdfunding can open many doors for entrepreneurs, could it also close others?…Read More
This paper investigates under what conditions knowledge available to team members leads to positive performance outcomes. We surmise that mutual knowledge that enables the team members to coordinate their work efforts is beneficial for team performance up to a limit after which excess mutual knowledge causes a decline in performance.…Read More
Our study examines the relationship between a firm’s multinationality and its performance. In a much-cited study, Lu and Beamish (2004) found evidence of an S-shaped relationship—with firm performance first decreasing, then increasing, then decreasing again as firms internationalized—in a sample of Japanese firms from 1986 to 1997.…Read More
Innovative new products come with hope, but also risk that they will not work as well as hoped. Thus testing and monitoring are key strategic decisions of an innovative firm in any market, and in some markets these strategic decisions will be intertwined with government regulatory policy.…Read More
We study how firms simultaneously engage in competition and cooperation in technology standard-setting multipartner alliances. Departing from prior research that has typically explored competition in isolation from cooperation, we bridge these two literatures by examining firm communication and community consensus in these venues.…Read More
Organizing for interdisciplinary research must overcome two challenges to collaboration: the cognitive incommensurability of knowledge and the political economy of research based in the disciplines. Researchers may not engage in interdisciplinarity because they would have to invest in new knowledge unrelated to their discipline or risk losing career-related rewards.…Read More
Imagine that you could dramatically improve your firm’s forecasting ability, but to do so you’d have to expose just how unreliable its predictions — and the people making them — really are. That’s exactly what the U.S. intelligence community did, with dramatic results.…Read More
It’s one of the paradoxes of being human: even when we know what’s good for us, we often make choices that are less than optimal. Wharton Professor Iwan Barankay researches how incentives can be used to create positive behavioral changes even after the incentive goes away.…Read More
Mental models, reflecting interdependencies among managerial choice variables, are not always correctly specified. Mental models can be underspecified, missing interdependencies, or overspecified, containing nonexistent interdependencies.…Read More
When established companies explore opportunities to innovate, they typically consider strategies that fall into one of two well-known categories: incremental or disruptive. According to Wharton Professor David Robertson, they should be considering a third way: complementary innovation.…Read More
Most previous research on the learning curve focuses on improvements in manufacturing efficiency; this article instead studies the role of learning in product innovation, a vital component of sustainable competitive advantage in high-tech industries.…Read More
We study optimal contracting in a setting that combines experimentation and adverse selection. In our leading example, an entrepreneur (agent) is better informed than the investor (principal) about both the quality the project (risky arm’s distribution) and the entrepreneur’s outside option (payoff of the safe arm).…Read More
Wharton management professor Exequiel Hernandez searches for the optimal mix of domestic and foreign partners in a firm’s network. The answer depends on what type of innovative solution a firm is trying to produce.…Read More
The burden of oral disease in the U.S. is high, and in need of novel approaches to improving preventive oral health behaviors. Almost half of U.S. adults have periodontal disease, while 92% of adults and 50% of children experience dental caries. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) put new emphasis on financial incentives in which financial rewards for patients and providers are linked to health decisions and outcomes.…Read More
We present a synthetic framework in which a technology entrepreneur employs a dynamic
commercialization strategy to overcome obstacles to the adoption of their ideal strategy. Whereas prior work portrays the choice of whether to license a new technology or to self-commercialize as a single, static decision, we suggest that when entrepreneurs encounter obstacles to their ideal strategy they can nevertheless achieve it by temporarily adopting a non-ideal strategy.…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
