The First Step to Successful Innovation? Choosing the Right Partners

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Wharton management professor Exequiel Hernandez searches for the optimal mix of domestic and foreign partners in a firm’s network. The answer depends on what type of innovative solution a firm is trying to produce.Read More

Connecting Internal and External Networks of Cooperation: The North Star Alliance’s Roadside Wellness Centers Across Africa

Funded Research Proposal

This research project examines how organizations can develop innovative solutions to large-scale socio-economic problems in emerging markets through multi-stakeholder partnerships. The objective is to determine how these partnerships are built, what the optimal configuration of partners is, and how the partnerships should be coordinated.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

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

The Evolution of Alliance Portfolios: The Case of Unisys

Published Research

How do alliance portfolios evolve? We develop grounded theory based on Unisys’ case, which reveals how exogenous technological changes at the industry level and shifts in a firm’s strategy shape the composition of partners and the nature of alliance relationships.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

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

Home-Country Networks and Foreign Expansion: Evidence From the Venture Capital Industry

Published Research

We propose that home country network advantages shape firms’ foreign expansion. We argue that a social status advantage is transferable from one market to another as a signal of quality but that a brokerage advantage is more context-specific and difficult to transfer.Read More