The lean start-up approach has garnered tremendous amount of interest in recent years and has become mainstream among entrepreneurs. However, this practitioners’ conversation has been largely decoupled from the broader academic literature in management and technology strategy. …Read More
This article examines the importance of plasticity and diversity in organizational adaptation and with respect to dynamic capabilities. It begins by conceptualizing what elements comprise a dynamic capability within an evolving organization using the contrast between templates (genotypes) and realized practices (phenotypes).…Read More
This year, the Mack Institute teamed up with Darden’s Batten Institute to co-host the bi-annual Product Innovation and Technology Management Mini-Conference. The sixth iteration of this one-day event attracted more than 30 scholars to the Wharton School for lectures, discussions, and camaraderie.…Read More
When considering the adaptive dynamics of organizations, it is important to account for the full set of adaptive mechanisms, including not only the possibility of learning and adaptation of a given behavior but also the internal selection over some population of routines and behaviors. In developing such a conceptual framework, it is necessary to distinguish between the underlying stable roots of behavior and the possibly adaptive expression of those underlying templates.…Read More
While much is understood about the general pattern of industry dynamics, a critical element underlying these dynamics, the rate of the expansion of individual firms, has been largely overlooked. We argue that the rate at which firms can reliably increase their scale of operations is a critical factor in understanding the structure of industries.…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
This is a guest post by Professor Dan Levinthal, organizer of Emerging Scholars Workshop 2013. The Mack Institute, with support from the Kauffman Foundation, has just held the second Emerging Scholars Workshop. This is an exciting new program that brings together 20 outstanding doctoral students from leading programs (INSEAD, Harvard,…Read More
