Contributions published at International Management (Thomas Keil)

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One of the central explanations of the high failure rates of de novo entrants is the liability of smallness. As a corollary, most prior literature has suggested that firms should experience survival benefits from growth. In this paper, we argue that survival benefits need to be balanced against the potential cost of rapid growth, and they are contingent upon the structure of the environment. We predict a curvilinear relationship between an entrant's growth rate and failure and argue that the relationship is contingent upon the local agglomeration of economic activity and the local structure of competition. We test and find support for our predictions using firm-level longitudinal data of all de novo entrants into the Canadian manufacturing sector between 1984 and 1998.

We use an analytical model to study the effects of customer-specific synergies – i.e. synergies that arise when firms sell multiple products to the same customers. At the firm level, we show that the profitability of a customer-specific synergy depends upon cross-market correlation of customer preferences, differs when the synergy is cost-based versus differentiation-based, and can be negative even when the synergy is kept proprietary to a single firm. We also show that returns to imitating such a synergy may decline as it strengthens. At the industry level, we find that exploiting customer-specific synergies causes endogenous market convergence at a point that depends upon whether the synergy is cost-based or differentiation-based and whether it is imitated.

This study develops a cross‐level model examining the effects of intellectual capital facets (i.e., human, social, and organizational capital) on unit ambidexterity. Further, it proposes that organizational‐level high‐performance human resource (HPHR) practices significantly shape these effects as well as the unit ambidexterity–unit performance relationship. Hierarchical linear modeling on multisource and lagged data from a sample of 148 business units from 58 US Fortune 500 firms shows that unit human and social capital positively contributes to unit ambidexterity, unit organizational capital has a negative relationship with unit ambidexterity, and organizational HPHR practices amplify the former and mitigate the latter of these unit‐level effects. The findings also reveal that the relationship between ambidexterity and unit performance becomes stronger in organizational contexts of heightened HPHR practices. This multilevel approach increases understanding of how units achieve ambidexterity and attain related performance gains.

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We report findings from an in-depth single case study about a failed new venture initiative in a large firm that suggest that attentional agency (i.e. the exercise of discretion by managers over the distribution and allocation of attention of other organizational members) and the incompleteness of governance channels (i.e. the formal and informal mechanisms set up by managers to provide the necessary information to guide their attention) are key determinants of the distribution of organizational attention and behavior of organizational members. Our findings demonstrate the central role of individual discretion, as opposed to structural determinism, to organizational attention and behavior. They also suggest that attentional agency and incomplete governance channels may lead to incoherence in the implementation of a strategic initiative as well as a drift away from initial scope and objectives and languishing of the initiative, which may be countered by a focus on quality of attention. Finally, they highlight the crucial role of the quality of top management attention, rather than top management support per se, in determining the performance of a corporate venture.

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