Back to the familiar? How attention and rare experiences overcome local search in external technology sourcing.

Working Papers

In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical framework that considers how established firms forming partnerships with startups may be subject to spatial and temporal myopia and how these tendencies are moderated by the established firms’ histories of experiencing essential failures and successes in solving R&D problems. Read More

Towards a Causal Theory and Test of Network Effects: Structural Holes, Alliance-Network Externalities, and Organizational Innovation

Working Papers

We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.Read More

Alliance performance and subsequent make-or-ally choices: Evidence from the aircraft manufacturing industry

Published Research

This study examines the extent to which firms that are collaborating with other firms in a particular area of business subsequently change modes of governance and undertake independent activities in the same area of business. Read More

Borrow and Buy: Complementarity and Substitutability of Acquirer’s Alliances and Technology Acquisitions

Working Papers

I aim to contribute to corporate strategy and technology and innovation management literatures by refining the way we think about how firms’ externally accessible resources and capabilities influence those firms’ heterogeneous boundary choices and their resulting outcomes. Read More

Do Institutional Reforms Perpetuate or Mitigate the Matthew Effect? Intellectual Property Rights and Access to International Alliances

Published Research

We explore how intellectual property rights (IPR), a type of formal institution, affect firms’ access to global alliance networks and their positioning within those networks. We employed a difference-in-difference design to assess the impact of IPR reforms across thirteen countries.Read More

Pursuing the New While Sustaining the Current: Incumbent Strategies and Firm Value During the Nascent Period of Industry Change

Published Research

This study considers the nascent period of industry change when the prevalent business model is being threatened by a new model, but there is significant uncertainty with respect to whether and when the new model will dominate. Read More

Small Worlds in Context: How Generalizable is Interorganizational Network Structure?

Working Papers

Our field’s growing attention to interorganizational network structure frequently builds on the Watts and Strogatz (1998) small world model. Our literature has identified “small worlds” — actual networks which simultaneously obtain relatively high clustering and short path length — in many contexts. Read More

Competition–Cooperation Interplay during Multifirm Technology Coordination: The Effect of Firm Heterogeneity on Conflict and Consensus in a Technology Standards Organization

Published Research

We examine how competitive tensions and cooperative motivations together shape firms’ interactions and group‐level outcomes during technology coordination activities in multifirm settings. Read More

Confrontation or Collaboration: The Role of Social Movements in Firm-Level Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

The past decade has witnessed an explosion in research at the intersection of markets and social movements, with an increasing acknowledgment of social movements as key drivers of change in organizations and markets. Social movements create new products and markets, change practices in existing organizations, and can have profound impacts on the commercialization of innovation. Read More

A Typology of R&D Processes Based on Market Excludability and Information Appropriability 

Working Papers

We explore the relationship between competition among downstream commercializing firms (e.g. incumbent pharmaceutical firms) and upstream innovative firms (e.g. startup biotechnology firms). We find that in an alliance regime, common in high technology industries, competition among the commercializing firms can reduce the productivity of the innovators, resulting in a net loss of societal welfare (e.g. less drugs invented and brought to market). Read More

The Impact of Context and Model Choice on the Determinants of Strategic Alliance Formation: Evidence from a Staged Replication Study

Published Research

Endogenous characteristics of alliance network structure have repeatedly been shown to predict future alliance ties in the strategic management literature. Specifically, the concepts and measures of relational, structural, and positional embeddedness (per Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999), as well as interdependence, are foundational for many studies.Read More

Conflict, Cooperation, and Consensus in Standards-Setting

Funded Research Proposal

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

The First Step to Successful Innovation? Choosing the Right Partners

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

PERSPECTIVE—Shrouded in Structure: Challenges and Opportunities for a Friction-Based View of Network Research

Published Research

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

Coordinating and Competing in Ecosystems: How Organizational Forms Shape New Technology Investments

Published Research

We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies.Read More

Balance Within and Across Domains: The Performance Implications of Exploration and Exploitation in Alliances

Published Research

Organizational research advocates that firms balance exploration and exploitation, yet it acknowledges inherent challenges in reconciling these opposing activities. To overcome these challenges, such research suggests that firms establish organizational separation between exploring and exploiting units or engage in temporal separation whereby they oscillate between exploration and exploitation over time.Read More

The Evolution of Alliance Portfolios: The Case of Unisys

Published Research

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