Rahul Kapoor

Private Equity, Corporate Acquirers, & Product Innovation: An Investigation of Corporate Science Acquisitions 1990-2022

Funded Research Proposal

Private equity has become an increasingly active player in technology acquisitions in recent years, yet most strategy scholarship has focused on the effects of corporate acquirer ownership on innovation outcomes, providing little guidance to managers on how to choose between the two M&A options. To remedy this gap, I examine how private equity and corporate acquirers differentially affect product innovation at acquired targets using hand-collected new product introduction announcements.…Read More

Building Business Foresight Capabilities

Funded Research Proposal

The objective of this research is to study how organizations can develop superior business foresight capabilities, defined as capabilities to develop accurate beliefs about future business opportunities and threats in an industry undergoing significant disruptive change. These capabilities will be embedded among people and processes that will include the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs).…Read More

How Corning Leverages Its Organizational Memory to Create New Industries

Funded Research Proposal

Rahul Kapoor, Management, The Wharton School Abstract: The objective of this project is to document the history of Gorilla Glass―a material developed by Corning (formerly Corning Glass Works) that enables the touchscreen devices of the 21st Century. Corning started developing the predecessor technologies to Gorilla Glass in the 1960s, discontinued the…Read More

The Future of Mobility: Strategy, Technology, and Geopolitics

A night cityscape featuring light trails from moving vehicles on a highway and a curved overpass, surrounded by tall buildings.

Discussing the “once in a century” transformation of the auto industry, including electric and autonomous vehicles, data and AI, and global supply chain issues…Read More

Progress and Setbacks: The Two Faces of Technology Emergence

Published Research

Emerging technologies are an important driver of economic growth. However, the process of their emergence may not only be characterized by technological progress but also by setbacks. We offer a perspective on technology emergence that explicitly incorporates setbacks into the technology’s evolution and explains how industry participants may react to setbacks in emerging technologies.…Read More

Pursuing the New While Sustaining the Current: Incumbent Strategies and Firm Value During the Nascent Period of Industry Change

Published Research

This study considers the nascent period of industry change when the prevalent business model is being threatened by a new model, but there is significant uncertainty with respect to whether and when the new model will dominate. …Read More

Studying Industry Disruption Using Crowdsourced Tournaments

Funded Research Proposal

We seek to explore how individuals evaluate the uncertainty during the nascent period of industry disruption, and to identify factors that can help improve their forecasting accuracy. To do so, we will draw on a recently developed research methodology of forecasting tournaments.…Read More

Capabilities, Technologies, and Firm Exit During Industry Shakeout: Evidence from the Global Solar Photovoltaic Industry

Published Research

Explanations of entrants’ survival in an emerging industry are premised on pre‐entry capabilities or technology entry choices prior to the emergence of the dominant design. We consider how these drivers interact to strengthen or nullify firms’ pre‐entry advantage, and facilitate adaptation as the industry evolves. …Read More

Challenges in the Gene Therapy Commercial Ecosystem

Published Research

The emergence of biotech has resulted in a rich ecosystem of different types of actors contributing to the technological advance. Despite the enormous promise of biotech-based therapeutics, there is substantial uncertainty regarding when scientific discoveries will emerge, whether these discoveries will achieve clinical success, and how commercialized treatments will create value. …Read More

Decoding the Adaptability-Rigidity Puzzle: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Incumbents’ Pursuit of Gene Therapy and Monoclonal Antibodies

Published Research

The emergence of radical technologies presents a significant challenge to incumbent firms. We study firms’ management of radical technological change by separating their actions into upstream research (“R” of R&D) and downstream development (“D” of R&D).…Read More

Collaborating with Complementors: What Do Firms Do?

Published Research

The study considers the interdependencies between complementors in the business ecosystem and explores the nature of collaborative interactions between them. It sheds light on the organizational and the strategic contexts in which such interactions take place, and shows how they may influence the pattern and the benefits of collaboration.…Read More

Coordinating and Competing in Ecosystems: How Organizational Forms Shape New Technology Investments

Published Research

We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies.…Read More