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
The Future of Mobility: Strategy, Technology, and Geopolitics
Rahul Kapoor
Progress and Setbacks: The Two Faces of Technology Emergence
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
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
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
Emerging Innovation Leadership Challenges for Global Firms
Our Fall Conference 2017 asked participants to consider how to effectively link strategy with strong organizational leadership.…Read More
Capabilities, Technologies, and Firm Exit During Industry Shakeout: Evidence from the Global Solar Photovoltaic Industry
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
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
Capabilities, Technologies, and Firm Survival During Industry Shakeout: Evidence from the Global Solar Photovoltaic Industry
. In this paper we bring together these disparate explanations and explore their joint effect on firm survival to create a more complete picture of industry evolution.…Read More
What We Learned, and What’s Next, In Our Vehicle Innovations Forecasting Challenge
2016 turned out to be a mixed bag for vehicle innovations, as we learned through our 2016 forecasting tournament. The 2017-2018 Challenge launches July 14.…Read More
How to Build Resilience in the Face of Disruption
Knowing both how and when to embrace disruption is key to your organization’s long-term success. Wharton’s Rahul Kapoor offers key steps managers can take.…Read More
Organizing for New Technologies
Getting an innovative technology to market can be a challenge for an established company when the technology runs counter to the company’s current business model. But the right organizational design can help.…Read More
Right Tech, Wrong Time
Why do some transformative technologies dominate the market quickly, while others take decades to catch on? It’s a function not just of the technologies themselves, say the authors, but also of their broader ecosystems (electric cars, for example, need a network of charging stations).…Read More
Connecting What’s Needed with What’s Possible
The Mack Institute Fall Conference 2014 examined how rapid advances in technology continuously change the way that organizations innovate.…Read More
When Disruptive Technology Threatens, Find a Partner
In new research sponsored by the Mack Institute, Rahul Kapoor and coauthor Thomas Klueter analyze how alliance-based strategies may help companies successfully manage the challenge of disruptive technology.…Read More
Decoding the Adaptability-Rigidity Puzzle: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Incumbents’ Pursuit of Gene Therapy and Monoclonal Antibodies
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?
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
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
Persistence of Integration in the Face of Specialization
Although the stylized model of industry evolution suggests that firms transform from vertical integration to specialization over time, many industries still exhibit a continued persistence of integrated firms. In exploring this puzzle, I draw on detailed firm-level data from the semiconductor industry to analyze how integrated incumbents, beyond shifting to the specialized mode, reconfigured in the face of industry’s vertical disintegration.…Read More