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

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

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

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

Do Ties Really Bind? The Effect of Knowledge and Commercialization Networks on Opposition to Standards

Published Research

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

Keeping Steady As She Goes: A Negotiated Order Perspective on Technological Evolution

Published Research

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

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

Advancing the Conceptualization and Operationalization of Novelty in Organizational Research

Published Research

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

Balancing Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Domains: Evaluation of Performance Implications in Alliance Portfolios

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

Social Capital for Hire? Mobility of Technical Professionals and Firm Influence in Wireless Standards Committees

Published Research

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

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

Innovating knowledge communities – An analysis of group collaboration and competition in science and technology

Published Research

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

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