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
As outsourcing expands in scope to increasingly higher-end tasks, the tension between value creation and appropriation in such inter-firm relationships raises important questions regarding the extent to which a firm should outsource activities in the value-chain and engage with its suppliers.…Read More
Previous research has analyzed the imprinting effect associated with the firm’s international expansion without considering the full range of differences between home and host countries. These differences are important because, depending on the development gap, and the direction of the difference, learning opportunities and the possibility of upgrading firm’s capabilities will be vastly different. …Read More
. In this paper we bring together these disparate explanations and explore their joint effect on firm survival to create a more complete picture of industry evolution.…Read More
In knowledge-based industries, continuous human-capital investments are essential for firms to enhance capabilities and sustain competitive advantage. However, such investments present a dilemma for firms, because human resources are mobile.…Read More
Does intensive internal training of employees lead to higher profits? In knowledge-based industries where the main asset is skilled professionals such as software engineers, the answer is yes, according to Senior Fellow Joydeep Chatterjee. But not all training yields equal benefits.…Read More
Mack Institute senior fellow Charlotte Ren researches how a firm’s past experience can impact their present performance. In her article “Does Experience Imply Learning?” with Louis Mulotte and Jaideep Anand, Ren emphasizes that activities which led to previous success, while tempting for firms to repeat, may actually prove detrimental. This so-called “competency trap” distracts firms from exploring new opportunities.…Read More
This research investigates capability development at the business unit level of analysis. To do so, we consider business units that have been serially bought and sold, or “repeatedly divested” units.…Read More
One factor affecting the replicability of routines is the template of what gets replicated. There isn’t much work on where this comes from. One view is that the routine is discovered over time. Another view is that in some cases firms prefer to copy the last incarnation exactly.…Read More
The proponents of the “microfoundations project” have advanced a number of criticisms of theories of organizational routines and capabilities. While the criticisms derive in part from philosophical or methodological premises that are open to serious question, and tend to ignore the empirical research on the subject, there remains a valid core concern about the foundational characterization of human nature.…Read More
In a statement that is relatively famous, considering its position at the back of an old book, Alfred Marshall remarked on the ‘the manifold influences of the element of time’. He noted the obstacles those influences pose to mathematical analysis (or, he said, any analysis) of a complex, ‘real life’ problem – and the tendencies to over-simplification that often result.…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
University-industry partnerships facilitate socio-economic development by incubating innovations and diffusing entrepreneurial capabilities to create new markets in rural areas. Complexity theory based approaches are used to develop a process model of emergence based on a case study of a leading Indian technical institution involved in creating new technologies and markets.…Read More
