Questions and concerns about the replicability and generalizability of social science research are prominent today, and the management field is just starting to grapple with these issues. …Read More
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
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
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
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
1) We examine the evolution of alliance networks by predicting ties and structure in the chemical and semiconductor industries. We compare our results to historical studies to determine how industry, timeframe, and method affect findings. 2) We explore the relationship between alliance networks and the locus of technological development which focuses on the standards-setting context.…Read More
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
We examine how the multiplicity of interorganizational relationships affects strategic behavior by studying the influence of two such relationships — knowledge linkages and commercialization ties — on the voting behavior of firms in a technological standards-setting committee.…Read More
A central idea in the theory of technology cycles is that social and political mechanisms are most important during the selection of a dominant design, and that eras of incremental change are socially uninteresting periods in which innovation is driven by technological momentum and elaboration of the dominant design.…Read More
In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that considers that firms may be subject to both spatial and temporal myopia when crossing organizational boundaries and have a history of failures and successes in solving R&D problems. We use this framework to clarify how established firms search for and select among emerging partnering opportunities.…Read More
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 construct of novelty is an important primitive for theories of organization learning, strategic change, and innovation. The organizational pursuit of novelty is generally theorized as necessary for long-term organizational adaptation and survival yet variance increasing in the short term.…Read More
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 movement of personnel between firms has been shown to have important implications for firms, yet there has been little direct investigation of the underlying mechanisms. We propose that in addition to their human capital, mobile individuals carry social capital, affecting the outcomes of the firms they join and leave by altering the patterns of interaction between firms.…Read More
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
A useful level of analysis for the study of innovation may be what we call “knowledge communities” — intellectually cohesive, organic inter-organizational forms. Formal organizations like firms are excellent at promoting cooperation, but knowledge communities are superior at fostering collaboration — the most important process in innovation.…Read More
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
