Surviving disruption from digital acceleration requires continuous innovation. Download our white paper to learn how.…Read More
Navigating Digital Disruption: How to Thrive Through Innovation Management
Strategies for Innovating
Inequality Aversion When the Reward is Scarce: The Case of Salary vs. Equity Compensation
Do workers have different equality preferences depending on the type of payoff? In many firms, the distribution of equity compensation is more equal than the distribution of salary. We design an experimental group production game to examine how workers respond to combinations of different distributions of equity and salary.…Read More
Standard vs. Partnership-Embedded Licensing: Attention and the Relationship Between Licensing and Product Innovations
This paper examines the relationship between the licensing of knowledge and the creation of product innovations. We consider that firms organize licensing activities in different ways and that licensees are heterogeneous with respect to the attention available to apply and transform in-licensed knowledge to create new product innovations. …Read More
Value Creation through Novel Resource Configurations in a Digitally Enabled World
We propose a conceptual framework for examining the value‐creation potential embedded into novel, digitally powered resource configurations. We suggest that business digitization calls for firms to adopt a system‐based, value‐creation‐centric perspective for designing and organizing their resource configurations. …Read More
The Importance of Social Entrepreneurship in National Systems of Innovation — An Introduction
This special issue links “National Systems of Innovation” with “Social Entrepreneurship” to showcase how social entrepreneurship enables the diffusion of new technologies to make a social impact and engender “creative destruction” through the value generating activities of economic actors ranging from individuals, micro-enterprises to large organizations. …Read More
Alpha Assets: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage Through Innovation
This proposal is to fund a first study as part of a longer-term initiative to better understand the threat of disruption from technological innovation. Disruption as a term has come to be used so frequently that it has lost specific meaning. In the larger project, I aim to bring precision to the term and focus on two specific questions. …Read More
Plant Operations and Product Recalls in the Automotive Industry: An Empirical Investigation
While there is overwhelming support for the negative consequences of product recalls, empirical evidence of operational drivers of recalls is almost nonexistent. In this study, we identify product variety, plant variety, and capacity utilization as drivers of subsequent manufacturing-related recalls.…Read More
The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation
“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
Achieving Sustainability: Insights from Biogas Ecosystems in India
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
Idea Generation and the Role of Feedback: Evidence from Field Experiments with Innovation Tournaments
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
Innovation Is the New Competition: Product Portfolio Choices with Product Life Cycles
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
When Crowdfunding Crowds Out the Competition
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
Human Capital Investments, Shared Knowledge, and Performance: A study in the Off-shored IT Services Industry
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
Replicating the Multinationality-Performance Relationship: Is There an S-Curve?
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
Innovation and Product Risk: Firm Strategy and Public Welfare
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
Conflict, Cooperation, and Consensus in Standards-Setting
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
Symbiont Practices in Boundary Spanning: Bridging the Cognitive and Political Divides in Interdisciplinary Research
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
Superforecasting: How to Upgrade Your Company’s Judgment
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
How to Design Incentives that Make Change Stick
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
Consequences of Misspecified Mental Models: Contrasting Effects and the Role of Cognitive Fit
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