In order to sustainably innovate and grow, firms must, at times, shrink. This research is premised on the concept that the success of a firm’s innovation strategy relies not just on its ability to “grow smart,” but equally on its ability to “shrink smart.”…Read More
While creative ideas are defined as both novel and useful, novelty and usefulness often diverge, making it difficult for employees to develop creative ideas that are high in both.…Read More
The study explores renewal in a novel but understudied context—an era of ferment with competing technological options. It focuses on IBM’s transition from market leadership in a failed path (plasma) to leadership in the emerging dominant technology (LCD) in the 1980s. Interviews and internal documents offer two primary factors explaining renewal at IBM.…Read More
The emergence of radical technologies presents a significant challenge to incumbent firms. We study firms’ management of radical technological change by separating their actions into upstream research (“R” of R&D) and downstream development (“D” of R&D).…Read More
The case presents a situation in which Merck’s World Wide Licensing (WWL) division needs to make important organizational decisions to increase the speed, the breadth and the efficiency of its global licensing and partnering activities.…Read More
I present a decision process framework that informs the design and implementation of stakeholder influence strategy. This process combines insights from agent-based dynamic utility and dynamic network processes. Stakeholders strategically seek an outcome as close as possible to their preferred point but also wish to be on the winning side and not to pursue positions divergent from stakeholders with whom they have strong affective ties.…Read More
We empirically examine the innovation consequences of organizational knowledge brokering, the ability to effectively apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another. We investigate how organizational innovation outcomes vary by founders’ initial mode of venture ideation.…Read More
This paper uses a complex systems perspective to develop a theory of how human interaction dynamics (HID)-strategic decision processes and organizational mechanisms-for knowledge production under uncertainty give rise to a new organizational form. Our theoretical framework is derived from an inductive study of the international expansion of 14 Indian biotechnology and software firms.…Read More
Product launch—an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant—is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations, resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North American automotive plants from years 1999–2007, we estimate that a product launch entails an average productivity loss of 12%–15% at the plant level.…Read More
This article investigates the post-entry implications of pre-entry technological choices made during the uncertain period before a dominant design. Building on work on technological dynamics and organizational inertia, I argue that too early commitments to the winning technology may impede the ability to bring the best product to market, but delaying investment too long limits the ability to accumulate useful knowledge.…Read More
Achieving superior growth through innovation is a top strategic priority for all companies. Yet most management teams struggle to reach their firm’s ambitious growth targets and suffer slow growth.…Read More
Why and how do resources provide sources of competitive advantage? This study sheds new light on this central question of resource-based theory by allowing a single resource—entrepreneurial-firm patents—to play distinctive roles in different competitive arenas. As rights to exclude others, patents serve a well-known role as legal safeguards in product markets.…Read More
This study theorizes about the behavioral and knowledge creation implications of betting on the losing technology in a competing technology situation and focuses on three main outcomes. First, in a situation with competing technological options, firms that invest initially in the losing technology will be less successful subsequently in building new knowledge.…Read More
Organizations are frequently faced with high levels of complexity. While the importance of search for dealing with complex systems is widely acknowledged, how organizations should structure their search processes remains largely unexplored. This paper starts to address basic questions: How much of the entire system, and thus complexity, should be taken into consideration at any given time during a search process?…Read More
This paper uses complex systems theory to develop a conceptual model that suggests how development can be catalyzed by leveraging innovation in both technology and social organization to solve socioeconomic problems for developing country populations.…Read More
Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche.…Read More
We combine the streams of literature on outsourcing and offshoring to investigate (1) whether choosing an R&D offshore outsourcing strategy by technological firms is advisable, and (2) where these firms are more likely to allocate these R&D services outsourcing agreements offshore, namely, in developed or developing economies.…Read More
Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team-based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams.…Read More
This article comments on the behavioral theory of strategy advanced in Gavetti. His proposal offers valuable insights into the cognitive aspects of strategy when leaders are trying for big wins. It provides less guidance for understanding the actual achievement of success, partly because it underestimates the role of serendipity and of contextual factors illuminated by prior strategy research.…Read More
How do alliance portfolios evolve? We develop grounded theory based on Unisys’ case, which reveals how exogenous technological changes at the industry level and shifts in a firm’s strategy shape the composition of partners and the nature of alliance relationships.…Read More
