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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Whereas network ideas and approaches have become prominent in both the managerial and sociological literatures, we contend that the increasing emphasis on network structures and their evolution has distracted us from the important issue of whether and when networks actually work in the ways that our theories assume.…Read More
