Internationalizing Firm Innovations: The Influence of Multimarket Overlap in Knowledge Activities

Published Research

This paper explores how multimarket overlap in knowledge activities influences firm decisions to internationalize their homecountry generated innovations.Read More

Trade Secrets and Innovation: Evidence from the “Inevitable Disclosure” Doctrine

Published Research

Does heightened employer‐friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state‐level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would “inevitably disclose” trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual‐level patenting outcomes. Read More

Homophily and Consolidation in Intra-Firm Collaboration Networks and their Impact on Innovation Output

Funded Research Proposal

Research in management science has long posited that network structures, specifically the patterns of informal interactions among people, affect information flows and knowledge recombination. Yet, how do different network topologies affect the production of new knowledge and ideas? Read More

Women, Rails and Telegraphs: An Empirical Study of Information Diffusion and Collective Action

Working Papers

How do social interactions shape collective action, and how are they mediated by the availability of networked information technologies? To answer these questions, we study the Temperance Crusade, one of the earliest instances of organized political mobilization by women in the U.S. Read More

External Verifiability of Accounting Information and Intangible Asset Transactions

Working Papers

Firms commonly use disaggregated accounting information to facilitate efficient contracting over intangible assets. However, reliance on accounting measures creates information asymmetries and thus a role for contract audits.Read More

Managing Valuable Knowledge in Weak IP Protection Countries

Published Research

Although knowledge assets provide multinational corporations with competitive advantages in foreign markets, it can be difficult for firms to protect their knowledge in foreign countries – especially countries with weak intellectual property (IP) protection.Read More

Human Capital Investments, Shared Knowledge, and Performance: A study in the Off-shored IT Services Industry

Working Papers

This paper investigates under what conditions knowledge available to team members leads to positive performance outcomes. We surmise that mutual knowledge that enables the team members to coordinate their work efforts is beneficial for team performance up to a limit after which excess mutual knowledge causes a decline in performance.Read More

The External Knowledge Sourcing Process in Multinational Corporations

Published Research

We study the processes through which multinational corporations (MNCs) identify and make use of external sources of knowledge. Based on a seven year longitudinal study of one MNC’s overseas scouting unit, we show how a simple one-directional “channelling” process gradually gave way to three higher value-added processes, labelled “translating”, “matchmaking” and “transforming.”Read More

Selective attention and the initiation of the global knowledge-sourcing process in multinational corporations

Published Research

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

Global Sourcing and Foreign Knowledge Seeking

Published Research

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

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

Reproducing Knowledge: Inaccurate Replication and Failure in Franchise Organizations

Published Research

The recognition that better use of existing knowledge can enhance performance has spawned substantial interest in the replication of productive knowledge within organizations. An enduring belief is that when expanding by replication, organizations can and should strive to adapt to fit the salient characteristics of new environments.Read More

Positioning knowledge: schools of thought and new knowledge creation

Published Research

Cohesive intellectual communities called “schools of thought” can provide powerful benefits to those developing new knowledge, but can also constrain them. We examine how developers of new knowledge position themselves within and between schools of thought, and how this affects their impact.Read More

Network Composition, Collaborative Ties, and Upgrading in Emerging-Market Firms: Lessons from the Argentine Autoparts Sector

Published Research

What types of relational and institutional mechanisms shape knowledge flows and the upgrading capabilities of emerging-market firms in the face of economic liberalization? We analyze the Argentine autoparts sector to distinguish the relative impact of different types of network relationships on a firm’s process and product upgrading.Read More

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot? The Reverse Transfer of Knowledge through Mobility Ties

Published Research

While mobility’s effect on knowledge transfer to firms that hire mobile employees is well-demonstrated, we choose to explore mobility’s effect on knowledge transfer to firms that lose these employees. Focusing on this ‘outbound mobility’ allows us to isolate effects of social mechanisms associated with mobility.Read More