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

Watershed Moments, Cognitive Discontinuities, and Entrepreneurial Entry: The Case of New Space

Working Papers

In this paper, we explore how an industry’s watershed moments – vivid, publically salient, emotionally resonant events – can drive the emergence of a new market. Our empirical context is the New Space market, a growing number of new, private companies developing and using spaceflight-access technologies. Read More

Leapfrogging for Last-Mile Delivery in Health Care

Funded Research Proposal

Lowering the cost and increasing the speed of last mile delivery are major challenges for the distribution channels of most industries. These challenges are even more severe in developing countries, where a large part of the population is located in rural areas, and where the lack of physical infrastructure results in a sizable part of the population residing in isolated areas, compromising their access to important services for their investment in human capital, such as timely health care.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

Alpha Assets: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage Through Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

This proposal is to fund a first study as part of a longer-term initiative to better understand the threat of disruption from technological innovation. Disruption as a term has come to be used so frequently that it has lost specific meaning. In the larger project, I aim to bring precision to the term and focus on two specific questions. Read More

Innovation and the Evolution of Industries: History-Friendly Models

Published Research

The disruptive impacts of technological innovation on established industrial structures has been one of the distinguishing features of modern capitalism. In this book, four leading figures in the field of Schumpeterian and evolutionary economic theory draw on decades of research to offer a new, ‘history-friendly’ perspective on the process of creative destruction.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

Competing Technologies and Industry Evolution: The Benefits of Making Mistakes in the Flat Panel Display Industry

Published Research

This article investigates the post-entry implications of pre-entry technological choices made during the uncertain period before a dominant design. Building on work on technological dynamics and organizational inertia, I argue that too early commitments to the winning technology may impede the ability to bring the best product to market, but delaying investment too long limits the ability to accumulate useful knowledge.Read More

Falling Flat: Failed Technologies and Investment Under Uncertainty

Published Research

This study theorizes about the behavioral and knowledge creation implications of betting on the losing technology in a competing technology situation and focuses on three main outcomes. First, in a situation with competing technological options, firms that invest initially in the losing technology will be less successful subsequently in building new knowledge.Read More