By allowing ventures to obtain market feedback during the product development process, experimentation confers a learning advantage. However, we know little about its costs. In particular, experimenting with an early-stage idea requires some degree of disclosure, leading to imitation risk. …Read More
The literature on the evolution of informal ties assigns a major role to formal organizational foci in tie creation. Once ties emerge, their persistence is usually explained by informal endogenous mechanisms such as the choice to collaborate or socialize. …Read More
In this project, I plan to study the questions of how firms learn and why they fail to learn in the context of post-merger integration. Existing works on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) argue that M&A is an important source of innovation and growth for firms. …Read More
Organizing for interdisciplinary research must overcome two challenges to collaboration: the cognitive incommensurability of knowledge and the political economy of research based in the disciplines. Researchers may not engage in interdisciplinarity because they would have to invest in new knowledge unrelated to their discipline or risk losing career-related rewards.…Read More
Most previous research on the learning curve focuses on improvements in manufacturing efficiency; this article instead studies the role of learning in product innovation, a vital component of sustainable competitive advantage in high-tech industries.…Read More
This research investigates capability development at the business unit level of analysis. To do so, we consider business units that have been serially bought and sold, or “repeatedly divested” units.…Read More
This research project investigates the role of consultants and their “rented capabilities” in the post-acquisition integration process. As a first objective, we aim to shed light on the role of intermediaries — specifically, consultants — in the growth-by-acquisition process.…Read More
This article investigates the microeconomics underlying the spectacular growth of productivity in China’s manufacturing sector over the period 1998–2007. Underlying the aggregate evidence of such dramatic growth, one observes a large, albeit shrinking, intra-sectoral heterogeneity coupled with an even more important process of learning and knowledge accumulation.…Read More
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
This research examines the impact of impending divestiture on business unit strategy and performance. Divestiture deals can be multi-year transactions with highly uncertain endings. During the deal period, as the parent-unit tie weakens, business units are placed into an organizationally-orphaned, limbo-like state.…Read More
In order to sustainably innovate and grow, firms must, at times, shrink. This research is premised on the concept that the success of a firm’s innovation strategy relies not just on its ability to “grow smart,” but equally on its ability to “shrink smart.”…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
Product launch—an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant—is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations, resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North American automotive plants from years 1999–2007, we estimate that a product launch entails an average productivity loss of 12%–15% at the plant level.…Read More
An organization’s ability to innovate depends to a large extent on its ability to allow organizational learning to occur internally. It is not enough that knowledge gets imported into the organization; knowledge needs to also diffuse within the organization.…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
