Which Service? How Industry Conditions Shape Firms’ Service‐Type Choices

This article studies the role of industry conditions as determinants of manufacturing and software firms’ decisions to offer services. It draws on the competence perspective on industry evolution and servitization to theorize and provide empirical evidence on how industry conditions affect firms’ choice to offer two distinct types of services—product‐oriented services and customer‐oriented services. It is argued that firms are likely to offer product‐oriented services in Schumpeterian industry environments to address high technological uncertainty by leveraging and reinforcing capabilities in the existing technology. In contrast, firms are likely to offer customer‐oriented services in non‐Schumpeterian industry environments to address value generation uncertainty by building competences in new technological or market areas. Based on longitudinal data on 410 public firms from manufacturing industries and the software industry, empirical evidence suggests that firms are indeed more likely to offer product‐oriented services in Schumpeterian industry environments, such as in the early stage of the industry life cycle and under conditions of high R&D intensity and competition, whereas they are more likely to offer customer‐oriented services in non‐Schumpeterian environments, such as in the later stages of the industry life cycle and in highly cyclical industries.     

Interpersonal guanxi and partner extra-role behavior: Mediating role of relational and transactional governance strategy

This paper identifies interpersonal guanxi between boundary spanners as an individual-level antecedent of partner firms' extra-role behavior (ERB) in interfirm relationships. Drawing on interfirm governance and the guanxi literature, we propose that guanxi between boundary spanners at the operational level may promote partner firms' ERB through two governance strategies: interfirm trust and relationship-specific investment. We analyze 268 pairs of sales managers and salespeople in a variety of industries in China, and we find that guanxi between boundary spanners positively affects partner firms' ERB and that this positive relationship is strengthened by interfirm ownership homogeneity. Moreover, the relationship is mediated by interfirm trust and relationship-specific investment, and the mediation effect of interfirm trust is stronger than that of relationship-specific investment. These findings provide new insights into the relationship marketing and guanxi literature by highlighting the effects of guanxi between operational-level boundary spanners on partner firms' ERB.     

Interfirm Innovation under Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence for Strategic Knowledge Partitioning*

This paper analyzes how uncertainty and life‐cycle effects condition the knowledge boundary between assemblers and suppliers in interfirm product development. Patents associated with automotive emission control technologies for both assemblers and suppliers are categorized as architectural or component innovations, and technology‐forcing regulations imposed by the government on the auto industry from 1970 to 1998 are used to define periods of high and low uncertainty. Results confirm that suppliers dominate component innovation whereas assemblers lead on architectural innovation. More importantly, when facing uncertainty firms adjust their knowledge boundary by increasing the knowledge overlap with their supply‐chain collaborators. Suppliers clearly expand their knowledge base relatively more into architectural knowledge during such periods. But assemblers' greater emphasis on component innovation in periods of greater uncertainty is only true as a relative deviation from an overall trend toward increasing component innovation over time. This trend results from an observed life‐cycle effect, whereby architectural innovation dominates before the emergence of a dominant design, with component innovation taking the lead afterward. Thus, for assemblers life‐cycle effects may dominate over task uncertainty in determining relative effort in component versus architectural innovation. This work extends research on strategic interfirm knowledge partitioning as well as on the information‐processing view of product development. First, it provides a large‐scale empirical justification for the claim that firms' knowledge boundaries need to extend beyond their task boundaries. Further, it implies that overlaps in knowledge domains between an assembler and suppliers are particularly important for projects involving new technologies. Second, it offers a dynamic view of knowledge partitioning, showing how architectural knowledge prevails in the early phase of the product life cycle whereas component knowledge dominates the later stages. Yet the importance of life‐cycle effects versus task uncertainty in conditioning knowledge boundaries is different for assemblers and suppliers, with the former dominating for assemblers and the latter more influential for suppliers. Finally, it supports the idea that architectural and component knowledge are critical elements in the alignment of cognitive frameworks between assemblers and suppliers and thus are key for information‐exchange effectiveness and resolution of task uncertainties in interfirm innovation.     

Extending the firm vs. industry debate: Does industry life cycle stage matter?

A series of Strategic Management Journal studies have debated the extent to which business‐unit, corporate parent, and industry effects explain variance in firm performance. Despite evidence that the industry life cycle impacts competition and performance, the life cycle concept has yet to be incorporated into the firm vs. industry debate. Building on ideas from systems theory, we use longitudinal data from 1,957 firms in 49 industries to examine the relative importance of business‐unit, corporate parent, and industry effects during the growth, maturity, and decline stages of the industry life cycle. We find that corporate parent and industry effects increase as industries move through the life cycle while business‐unit effects decrease between maturity and decline. Thus, the life cycle concept should be incorporated within the firm vs. industry debate. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Interfirm cooperation and structural change in the European automobile industry

The past quarter-century has seen the rapid growth of interfirm cooperative arrangements, on a global scale. In the automobile industry, the forms of cooperation have ranged from mergers and acquisitions, with each partner firm retaining its corporate identity and brand name, to very informal strategic partnerships. Because of its past fragmentation, the consolidation of the European industry into “producer groups” has been a main feature of structural change. Arguably, this development and the formation of rent-seeking coalitions within the European Union were of greater significance than companies' purely technology-oriented cooperative ventures. As a result of the industry members' individual and collective rent-seeking, at the national and EU levels respectively, large price disparities among national markets have persisted. Regulatory barriers as well as the noncompetitive behavior of firms continue greatly to influence the automotive sector, despite the Union's ambitious vision of “Europe 92” as the final stage in the development of an open market for products and factors. Whatever benefits automobile producers may have derived from integration, it has done little so far to enhance consumer welfare.     

Structural and competitive determinants of a global integration strategy

Both structural determinants and competitive factors can work to define the relevant environment for strategy formulation within an industry. This study examines the effects of each of these two sets of factors on global integration strategies, and finds that their impacts vary considerably from one industry to another. The study also investigates the relationship between a business's global integration strategy and its performance, using an industry'specific perspective. In the aggregate, the businesses studied appear to be under-globalized. However, this relationship varied significantly by industry; four of the industries studied appeared to be under-globalized, while the remaining three industries were at or near an optimal level of globalization.     

网络竞争与网络产业改革

本文运用博弈分析,论证了在不触动网络垄断的情况下,网络产业的纵向结构分离或开放接入会产生内在的提高下游产品或服务价格的驱动力量,从而对近年来我国网络产业下游产品或服务的价格上涨给出了新的解释。建立有管理的竞争机制,允许绕道、开放用户选择权,是网络产业实现有效竞争并使竞争惠及最终用户的可行途径。     

Interfirm Relationships in the Supply Chain: The Small Supplier’s View

The need for global market presence, the complexity of new product development, and the emphasis on core competence are making alliances among firms more important, and recent evidence suggests that these issues are affecting small suppliers as well as the large firms that are their customers. This paper studied the relationship orientation (i.e., the perceived importance, of interfirm relations) in a fragmented supplier industry whose single largest customer group is automotive OEMs. The primary objective of the research was the identification of factors that discriminate between firms with high and low relationship orientations. The study found four factors describing benefits and barriers associated with interfirm relationships, and found that firms with a high relationship orientation were smaller and more optimistic about the industry’s ability to support a greater number of firms in the future, and perceived faster technology change than firms with a low relationship orientation.     

低碳经济视角下的省域竞争研究

省域低碳竞争环境因美国政策改变而发生跃变。低碳经济主要通过高碳出口产业、高碳战略产业、新能源与节能产业、低碳城市、碳交易等途径作用于省域竞争。从新制度经济学与战略管理学角度,对上述各领域历史与现状考察后,可推演出省域在各领域迥然不同的竞争战略,进而从钻石模型研究建立省域低碳竞争优势的路径。     

Interfirm coopetition,interfirm knowledge creation,and collaborative innovation performance: The moderating roles of environmental competitiveness and dysfunctional competition

This paper investigates whether and how interfirm coopetition—the combination of cooperation and competition—affects collaborative innovation performance in competitive environments. We address this issue by introducing interfirm knowledge creation as a mediating mechanism based on knowledge creation theory and by examining the moderating effects of environmental competitiveness and dysfunctional competition. The hypotheses are tested using survey data from a sample of 170 Chinese high-tech firms. The results show that interfirm knowledge creation mediates the impact of interfirm coopetition on collaborative innovation performance. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the positive relationship between interfirm coopetition and interfirm knowledge creation is stronger under higher levels of environmental competitiveness but weaker under higher levels of dysfunctional competition. The positive relationship between interfirm knowledge creation and collaborative innovation performance is more evident under higher levels of environmental competitiveness. These findings enrich the interfirm coopetition literature, contribute to knowledge creation theory by extending it to the interfirm context, and provide a better understanding and useful advice for enterprise managers and government officials.     

Technology and evolving supply chains in the beef and pork industries

The U.S. beef and pork industries have achieved dramatic productivity growth in recent decades; however, the supply chain and market structure of each industry has evolved in different ways. Technological advances have been a key reason for productivity growth, with pharmaceutical innovations playing a major role. This article canvasses the similarities and differences in how beef and pork flow through their respective supply chains and documents the changes, causes, and benefits of the increased efficiency in each industry. Past research is summarized in a broad view of the livestock industry and policy and trade issues are discussed. Such a perspective allows for the consideration of what the future might hold for each industry, and how technological innovation influences product quality, trade, and market structure.     

Decomposing Pioneer Survival: Implications for the Order‐of‐Entry Effect

In contrast to previous studies of pioneer survival that directly compare the survival of market pioneers with later entrants, this paper proposes that a market pioneer, as the first entrant, operates under two distinctly different survival processes, one during the initial monopoly period and another during the later competition period. The two processes of market pioneers need to be separately estimated and compared with the survival process of later entrants. This paper demonstrates a method for decomposing the pioneer's survival and empirically shows how researchers can compare the pioneer survival in two periods with that of later entrants and identify period‐specific advantages of pioneering. Our empirical analysis using data collected from two different types of industries—a low‐tech (i.e., newspaper) industry and several high‐tech industries—reveals several interesting new findings that illustrate the advantages of decomposing pioneer survival. For example, this paper shows that when treating first‐mover survival as a single process, one can only find an oversimplified pattern showing that first movers have a survival chance equal to that of second movers in the newspaper industry, but a lower one than the second movers in high‐tech industries. However, when analyzing the first‐mover's survival as a sequence of monopoly and competition processes, new insights emerge. In the newspaper industry, the pioneers can have survival advantages in both the monopoly and the competition periods relative to the second movers, and there is a significant survival advantage for those second entrants who delay market entry until the first entrant exits. In contrast, the overall pioneer survival disadvantage identified in the high‐tech industries when treating the survival as a single process comes from the survival disadvantage in the competition period but not in the monopoly period. Furthermore, our empirical analyses using data from two types of industries reveal completely different patterns with regard to the pioneer survival advantage, which suggests that being first can benefit pioneers in both two‐market periods in low‐tech industries but can be extremely risky for pioneers to gain any survival advantages in both two‐market periods in high‐tech industries because the former markets have relatively low market and technology uncertainties, and organizational change is less important; whereas the latter industries have significantly high market and technology uncertainties, technological advances emerge frequently, and firms are required to adapt themselves quickly to a fast‐changing environment.     

Do professional service firms benefit from customer and supplier collaborations in competitive,turbulent environments?

Although recent research on business-to-business professional service firms (PSFs) emphasizes the role and consequences of collaboration with business partners, we know little regarding the conditions under which bright-side benefits of PSF interfirm collaboration turn into dark-side drawbacks. Our study shows that customer and supplier collaborations have both bright and dark sides, and their benefits with respect to helping a PSF to drive service performance are contingent on the levels of the environmental competition and turbulence. In particular, we show that increasing levels of competitive intensity and environmental turbulence encountered by a PSF can diminish the capacity of customer and supplier collaborations to drive service performance. When the level of competitive intensity increases, the benefits of customer collaboration become more positive; however, the dark-side of supplier collaboration becomes more pronounced, which negatively influences service performance. When the level of environmental turbulence increases, the dark-side of customer and supplier collaborations becomes more critical and the benefits derived from interfirm collaboration to promote service performance can be lost.     

THE EFFECTS OF CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING ON AGGREGATE INDUSTRY SPECIALIZATION

It has been widely argued that the purpose of corporate restructuring during the 1980s was to produce a population of more industry-specialized, competitive firms in response to intensifying global competition. A number of studies show that corporate restructuring resulted in increased corporate focus during the 1980s. However, no study has yet examined whether corporate restructuring resulted in increased specialization at the industry level during the 1980s. This study examines this issue. First, we examine whether or not aggregate industry specialization increased during the 1980s. That is, we ask: did the average firm in any given U.S. industry become more or less specialized to that industry during the 1980s? Second, we examine whether corporate restructuring was a significant determinant of change in aggregate industry specialization during the 1980s. Using a sample of 686 four-digit SIC industries and 64 two-digit industry groups, this study finds that aggregate industry specialization declined very slightly at both the four-digit and two-digit level between 1981 and 1989. This study also finds that sell-offs of establishments through corporate control transactions or interfirm asset sales had no significant effect on aggregate industry specialization.     

SPECIALIZED SUPPLIER NETWORKS AS A SOURCE OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: EVIDENCE FROM THE AUTO INDUSTRY

This study examines the relationship between interfirm asset specificity and performance in the auto industry. More specifically, I examine the extent to which differences in supplier–automaker asset specialization may explain performance differences between Japanese automakers (Nissan and Toyota) and U.S. automakers (Chrysler, Ford, General Motors). The findings indicate a positive relationship between supplier–automaker specialization and performance. In particular, the data suggest a positive relationship between interfirm human asset cospecialization and both quality and new model cycle time. Moreover, site specialization is found to be positively associated with lower inventory costs. The findings suggest that in the auto industry a tightly integrated production network characterized by proximity and a high level of human cospecialization will outperform a loosely integrated production network characterized by low levels of interfirm specialization.     

Does IT alignment between supply chain partners enhance customer value creation? An empirical investigation

In today's hypercompetitive market, a firm's individual efforts, by themselves, are not sufficient to respond to marketplace changes in a timely and effective manner. Rather, the firm must rely on its intermediaries and bundle their respective resources to create responsiveness and added value to customers. In this investigation, the authors draw on the relationship marketing literature and the resource-based perspective to examine how firms can increase their customer value creation by exploring two specific driving forces, i.e., strategic importance of supply chain partners and interfirm integration, and relationship-enabled responsiveness as the dynamic capabilities derived from the driving forces. Using the developed scales for customer value creation, hypotheses are tested on data collected from 184 firms. Results suggest that strategic importance of supply chain partners motivates interfirm integration, i.e., strategic collaboration and information technology alignment, setting the stage for enhanced relationship-enabled responsiveness, and subsequently, customer value creation for the firm.     

Connecting Interfirm and Intrafirm Collaboration in NPD Projects: Does Innovation Context Matter?

Interfirm collaboration is an important strategy for firms to generate new products and services. Whereas existing research emphasizes the importance of interfirm collaboration engagement to realize synergistic benefits in interfirm NPD projects, it remains surprisingly silent on the potential impact of intrafirm relational processes and how they can impact the interfirm setting. In this article, we therefore explore the impact of intrafirm collaboration engagement on the relationship between interfirm collaboration engagement and new product development (NPD) performance in interfirm NPD projects. Relying on insights from information processing theory, the authors hypothesize that intrafirm collaboration engagement increases firms' capacity to process complex information flows in the case of extensive interfirm collaboration engagement. Moreover, it is expect that the added value of extensive intrafirm collaboration engagement depends on the innovation objective (i.e., incremental versus radical new product development) of the interfirm NPD project. In particular, we hypothesize that the positive moderating impact of intrafirm collaboration engagement on the relationship between interfirm collaboration engagement and NPD performance is stronger for radical interfirm projects than incremental interfirm projects. Analyzing 195 interfirm NPD projects, a negative interaction effect between interfirm and intrafirm collaboration engagement is observed in radical interfirm NPD projects, whereas significant interactions between them remain absent in incremental interfirm NPD projects. Jointly, these findings provide first evidence that intrafirm relational processes can substantially impact partners' ability to realize relational rents in interfirm settings. Moreover, the negative interaction effect between interfirm and intrafirm collaboration engagement points to potential trade‐offs between inward‐looking and outward‐looking absorptive capacity.     

Why Do Firms Enter a New Product Market? A Two‐Dimensional Framework for Market Entry Motivation and Behavior

What are the energetic forces that induce established firms to enter new product markets? While most previous research has explained the economic profits expected from a new product market as firms' distinctive motivation for market entry, some recent studies also emphasize interfirm competition and benchmarking activities as another important factor that motivates firms' new market entry. To explain the established firms' diverse new product market entry behaviors, this study presents a two‐dimensional scheme of entry motivation in terms of the degrees of target market profit focus and competitor focus. The first dimension captures the economic motivation of firms' new market entry that ranges from focusing on the direct expected profits from the target market to considering more strategic/indirect benefit incentives. The second dimension captures the degree of firms' external motivation for entry affected by competitors that ranges from independent entry decisions to fully competitor‐oriented entry decisions. Using multiple‐industry survey data, the current study empirically verifies that these two entry motivation dimensions explain a great portion of actual firms' new product market entry behaviors and that they are independent of each other. Subsequently, this study validates that firms' operational size and their environmental factors like perceived technological uncertainty and competitive intensity upon new market entry affect the degrees of the two dimensions of firms' new product market entry motivation. More specifically, large firms less emphasize target‐market profits than small firms, and when perceived technological uncertainty is high, potential market entrants become less target market profit focused but more competitor focused. Under a highly competitive new market condition, firms focus on both target‐market profits and competitors. Based on the analysis of new market entry motivation dimensions, the current study proposes a new typology of established firms' market entry behaviors. The suggested typology represents the four different types of new product market entrants and examines specific characteristics and entry strategies for each type of potential entrants. This entry‐motivation framework should provide a deeper understanding of the backgrounds of entry behaviors and assist firms in developing appropriate entry strategies and in advantageously responding to rival firms' actions with regard to entry.     

Technological Performance and Alliances Over the Industry Life Cycle: Evidence from the ASIC Industry

Technology development in firms is frequently based on a combination of internal and external technological learning. Consequently, firms need to develop both technological capital (a patent portfolio) and alliance capital (a portfolio of technology alliances). This paper examines the relationship between technological capital, alliance capital, and their joint impact on the technological performance of firms, with an application to the application‐specific integrated circuit industry. We find that positive marginal returns to alliance capital are decreasing at higher levels of alliance capital. Technological capital and alliance capital can either augment or reduce each others' influence on innovation performance depending on the stage of the technology life cycle in the industry. A reinforcing relationship related to absorptive capacity requirements and technological uncertainty is present in early stages, while technology leakage and market competition effects render the combination of high levels of technological and alliance capital counterproductive in later stages of the technology life cycle.     

Demand chain alignment competence — delivering value through product life cycle management

This paper endorses demand chain alignment as a competence that supports effective product life cycle (PLC) management. Demand chain alignment integrates the demand creation (historic domain of marketing) and demand fulfilment processes (domain of supply chain management), to develop and to deliver products that convey superior customer value while deploying resources efficiently. So far, the relationship between demand chain alignment and PLC management has only been addressed from an operations and demand/supply chain perspective, but not from a marketing perspective. Three research propositions, on the relationship between both concepts, are derived from a literature review and applied to a case study from a global player in the tobacco industry. The findings do not support the current view that the product life cycle is a market-oriented classification variable for demand chain strategies. Instead, demand chain alignment needs to link customer needs-based segments with the supply chain. Moreover, PLC management and demand chain alignment have a mutually reinforcing relationship, in which PLC management can facilitate the competence development, ensures a dynamic perspective and, at the same time, benefits from aligned demand creation and fulfilment processes. Based on the findings, a model integrating demand chain alignment and PLC management is proposed.