Contributions published at International Management (Thomas Keil)

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The article focuses on the use of corporate programs in organizational change and strategic renewal. It states chief executive officers use three designs for corporate programs: goal splitting where the objectives are split into specific goals assigned to business-unit managers, task-forces of skilled specialists who work to realize the organizational objectives, and design overlay which establishes an organizational unit that executes the strategy. It presents a chart of the three programs.

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Technological discontinuities pose serious challenges to top managers’ attention. These discontinuities, which often occur at the fringes of an industry, are usually driven by innovative and (often) venture capital-backed start-ups creating new products and transforming existing industries in ways that are difficult for incumbent managers to understand against the backdrop of their existing cognitive schemata. However, failing to appreciate and embrace successful technological discontinuities might endanger incumbents’ very existence. Extending the attention-based view, we explore whether and how interorganizational relationships guide top managers’ attention either to or away from technological discontinuities. We propose that homophilous relationships (e.g., alliances with industry peers) should exhibit a negative relationship with incumbents’ timely attention to technological discontinuities, whereas heterophilous relationships (e.g., with venture capitalists as a result of coinvestments) should exhibit a positive relationship. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the status of the partners strengthens the effect of homophilous and heterophilous relationships with the timely attention of top managers to technological discontinuities. Based on a longitudinal study of the incumbents in four information and communications technology industry sectors, we find that heterophilous ties through corporate venture capital (CVC), coinvesting with high-status venture capital firms, exhibit a strong positive relationship with timely attention. CVC, when it connects senior management to high-status venture capitalists through coinvestments, has a special role in directing top managers’ attention to technological discontinuities and ensuing business opportunities. Implications for the understanding of the role of interorganizational ties as structural determinants of top managers’ attention are discussed.

We fill a gap in the resource-based literature by identifying conditions and mechanisms that make a resource valuable to a firm ex ante-that is, before a decision on acquiring or building it is made. These conditions are (1) the firm's ex ante market position; (2) its ex ante resource base, which allows for complementarities; (3) its position in interorganizational networks, which gives it access to privileged information; and (4) the prior knowledge and experience of its managers, which allow superior judgment concerning the value-creating potential of the resource. These factors help explain why firms initially differ in how much value they attribute to a resource and, subsequently, why firms differ in their resource endowments. Our results also contribute to resource management theories by highlighting the role of managerial judgment in acquiring and accumulating resources and, thus, shaping firms' paths toward superior competitive positions. Furthermore, identifying firms' market positions and managerial judgment about demand-side value creation opportunities as resource value drivers highlights the importance of demand-side factors to strategic outcomes. We also discuss how our findings may open avenues for further studies and provide a basis for empirical tests of the resource-based view of strategic management.

Are all startups similarly affected by the survival benefits and drawbacks of locating in geographic clusters? In this paper, we argue that prior theorizing may have missed important contingencies that affect whether a startup experiences the benefits and costs of locating in a cluster. In particular, while the local levels of skilled labor, suppliers, and purchasers have a beneficial influence and local competition has a detrimental influence on startup survival, these relationships are moderated by heterogeneity in firms' resources and capabilities. We find support for these arguments using a dataset covering the early life of all independent startups in the Canadian manufacturing sector from 1984 to 1998.

How do acquisitions of competitors by new entrants or by other existing competitors affect a firm's performance, and how should a firm respond to such competitive actions? Acquisition research argues that because acquisitions cause consolidation, which can lead to collusive synergies, acquisitions by rivals will lead to decreased competitive intensity. In contrast, competitive dynamics research regards acquisitions as competitive moves that are difficult to match, and can have negative effects on a firm's performance. Based on an analysis of 1316 public software firms in the United States during 1980-2005, our findings are consistent with the prediction of the competitive dynamics research, that acquisitions of rivals in a firm's product segment negatively affect firm performance. Contrary to the competitive dynamics research, however, we find that matching the move with one's own acquisition has a further negative effect on firm performance. A focal firm's acquisition in another segment is the only response to an acquisition by a new entrant that has a positive effect. Thus, our results suggest that the optimal response strategies depend on the source of the competitive pressure, and that an acquisitive response may not be the best response strategy.

We examine how determinants of absorptive capacity influence learning in alliances over time. Using longitudinal patent cross-citation data, we find an inverted U-shaped pattern over time that is influenced by firm-level and relational factors. Technological similarity only modestly increases learning in the initial stages of a relationship, but moderate levels substantially increase knowledge flows later in the alliance. High technological diversity is related to higher initial learning rates, but the effects diminish over time. Somewhat surprisingly, research and development intensity is negatively related to initial learning rates but has a considerable positive effect later in the relationship. We suggest that initial learning rates in alliances may be constrained by the capacity to absorb knowledge, while later-stage outcomes are constrained by exploitation capacity.

Many companies react to competitors’ acquisition sprees refl exively, by launching bids of their own. Smart managers should consider other moves.

The article discusses the development of a systematic framework to describe demand-based strategies to diversification and to compare it with supply-side-based strategies. The concept of unique demand complementarity is proposed to capture the idea that companies sell two or more products to the same customers, and possess the unique capability to provide value for customers who buy both products. By contrasting unique demand complementarities with cost-based economies of scope, a conceptual difference between them is found for business expansion. The difference between the performance effect of unique demand complementarities and the performance effect of economies of scope are also considered.

We investigate how corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) can rapidly attain central positions in venture capital syndication networks. Using data of CVC investments by U.S. corporations between 1996 and 2005, we complement prior research, which suggests that centrally positioned VCs predominantly invest together with other centrally positioned VCs. While we find clear support for the social network theory arguments that prior central positions in syndication networks significantly explain future network positions of CVCs, we also find a negative interaction effect between past centrality and corporate resources. This finding implies that resources of CVCs can substitute for their lack of prior centrality and allow them to gain rapidly central positions in rigid VC syndication networks.

Studies invoking a capabilities lens often ascribe deliberateness in organizational decisions to develop new capabilities. Drawing on five longitudinal case studies of large, global firms in the information and communication technology sector, we examine how firms engender cognizance of their future capability needs in situations characterized by high decision-making uncertainty. We develop a theoretical account of how firms use investments in start-ups to actively engage in experimentation outside organizational boundaries, a learning process which we term as disembodied experimentation. Disembodied experimentation creates awareness of voids in the capability base of an incumbent and helps to overcome inertial restraints thereby influencing the decision to invest in capability development. The relationship between learning from disembodied experimentation and the decision to develop capabilities is moderated by knowledge brokering functions and adaptation complexity.

The literature suggests that established firms need to balance their exploration and exploitation activities in order to achieve superior performance. Yet, previous empirical research has modeled this balance as the interaction of orthogonal activities. In this study, we show that there is a trade-off between exploration and exploitation and that the optimal balance between exploration and exploitation depends upon environmental conditions. Using a novel methodology to measure the relative exploration versus exploitation orientation, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the relative share of explorative orientation and financial performance. This relationship is positively moderated by the R&D intensity of the industry in which the firm operates.

Our longitudinal study of the entire population of internal corporate ventures within a large European electronics manufacturer finds that the conventional focus in the corporate venturing literature to evaluate ventures based on business growth and financial performance may be misguided. Instead, we found that ventures are temporary conduits for capability development and play a primary role in launching the founding stage of new capability life cycles. Ventures' main contribution was often to transfer valuable capabilities to other ventures or the firm's existing business units. The benefit from investing in ventures was therefore largely independent of their commercial success. Furthermore, estimation of success rates proved highly sensitive to the stage of the ventures at which sampling began. These findings suggest the need to reconceptualize the notion of early stage ventures and their success. We further found that the venturing process can be conceptualized as a nested system of simultaneous selection at both the venture and the capability level. We show that these selection processes are distinct yet operate in a coevolutionary way and are amenable to proactive management.