Different knowledge,different benefits: toward a productivity perspective on knowledge sharing in organizations

We develop a differentiated productivity model of knowledge sharing in organizations proposing that different types of knowledge have different benefits for task units. In a study of 182 sales teams in a management consulting company, we find that sharing codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task, but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients. In contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signaled competence, but did not save time. Beyond the content of the knowledge, process costs in the form of document rework and lack of advisor effort negatively affected task outcomes. These findings dispute the claim that different types of knowledge are substitutes for each other, and provide a micro‐foundation for understanding why and how a firm's knowledge capabilities translate into performance of knowledge work. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Benchmarking the Firm's Critical Success Factors in New Product Development

Managing new product development (NPD) is, to a great extent, a process of separating the winners from the losers. At the project level, tough go/no-go decisions must be made throughout each development effort to ensure that resources are being allocated appropriately. At the company level, benchmarking is helpful for identifying the critical success factors that set the most successful firms apart from their competitors. This company- or macro-level analysis also has the potential for uncovering success factors that are not readily apparent through examination of specific projects. To improve our understanding of the company-level drivers of NPD success, Robert Cooper and Elko Kleinschmidt describe the results of a multi-firm benchmarking study. They propose that a company's overall new product performance depends on the following elements: the NPD process and the specific activities within this process; the organization of the NPD program; the firm's NPD strategy; the firm's culture and climate for innovation; and senior management commitment to NPD. Given the multidimensional nature of NPD performance, the study involves 10 performance measures of a company's new product program: success rate, percent of sales, profitability relative to spending, technical success rating, sales impact, profit impact, success in meeting sales objectives, success in meeting profit objectives, profitability relative to competitors, and overall success. The 10 performance metrics are reduced to two underlying dimensions: program profitability and program impact. These performance factors become theX-and Y-ax.es of a performance map, a visual summary of the relative performance of the 135 companies responding to the survey. The performance map further breaks down the respondents into four groups: solid performers, high-impact technical winners, low-impact performers, and dogs. Again, the objective of this analysis is to determine what separates the solid performers from the companies in the other groups. The analysis identifies nine constructs that drive performance. In rank order of their impact on performance, the main performance drivers that separate the solid performers from the dogs are: a high-quality new product process; a clear, well-communicated new product strategy for the company; adequate resources for new products; senior management commitment to new products; an entrepreneurial climate for product innovation; senior management accountability; strategic focus and synergy (i.e., new products close to the firm's existing markets and leveraging existing technologies); high-quality development teams; and cross-functional teams.     

Customer information resources advantage,marketing strategy and business performance: A market resources based view

Chief among a firm's market-based resources are its relational resources such as brand equity, customer equity and channel equity that result from its interactions with customers and marketing intermediaries, and intellectual resources – accumulated knowledge about entities in the market environment such as consumers, end use and intermediate customers and competitors. In the evolving digital data rich market environment, customer-based resources, a subset of a firm's market-based resources, are becoming increasingly important as potential sources of competitive advantage. Customer information assets refer to information of economic value about customers owned by a firm. Information analysis capabilities are complex bundles of skills and knowledge embedded in a firm's organizational processes employed to generate customer knowledge from customer information assets. Customer insights or knowledge is a firm's extent of understanding of customers that informs its business decisions. Building on the resource-based, capabilities-based and knowledge-based views of the firm, resource advantage theory of competition, and the outside-in and inside-out approaches to strategy, this article presents a market resources-based view of strategy, competitive advantage and performance. The article presents a framework delineating the relationship between a firm's customer information based resources, marketing strategy and performance, and discusses implications for theory, research and practice.     

Strategizing by the government: Can industrial policy create firm‐level competitive advantage?

Despite the prevalence of governmental action devised to foster firms and industries, the link between industrial policy (IP) and competitive advantage has received scant attention in strategic management. I propose a model where such a link is mediated by the accumulation and churning of local resources and capabilities. I also introduce the concept of support‐adjusted sustainable competitive advantage (SASCA), which occurs if a firm's observed performance is superior to the expected performance of competitors had they received the same array of policies. I argue that achieving SASCA through IP is a difficult endeavor and requires the interplay of three conditions: insertion in global production networks, geographical specificity, and governmental capability. Thus, the model expands the potential determinants of competitive advantage into the context of governmental intervention. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparing the resource‐based and relational views: knowledge transfer and spillover in vertical alliances

We compare resource‐based and relational perspectives to examine competitive advantages within the context of vertical learning alliances. Previous research has shown that through such alliances suppliers acquire knowledge to forge new capabilities and attain performance improvements. We ask whether such improvements are exclusive to the learning partnership, or are available in other average partnerships of this supplier. We posit that the extent to which such performance improvements are partnership exclusive depends on whether the newly forged capabilities lie entirely within the supplier firm's boundaries, or at the learning dyad level. As such, we untie two forms of performance improvements arising from learning dyads. While the resource‐based view helps explain the performance gains learning suppliers deploy across average partners, the relational view reveals the additional performance edge that remains exclusive to the learning partnership. Based on empirical evidence from a survey of 253 suppliers to the equipment industry, we find that partnership exclusive performance (i.e., ‘relational performance’), the true source of learning dyads' competitive advantage, is a function of suppliers acquiring know‐how within the dyad, developing dyad‐specific assets and capabilities, and structuring buyer‐supplier relational governance mechanisms. We discuss implications for research and practice. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creating Dynamic Capability: The Role of Intertemporal Integration, Knowledge Retention, and Interpretation

Uncertainty about the ability for technological knowledge to be transformed to meet market demands, lack of complementary technologies, the lack of developed markets for a given technical feature, and other types of uncertainty add significant challenges to organizations as they develop products for future markets. In spite of these significant challenges, some organizations develop a dynamic capability in new product development that becomes a powerful source of competitive advantage and a source of renewal, growth, and adaptation as the environment changes. Many approaches to new product development (e.g., cross‐functional development teams, quality function deployment, early supplier involvement, heavyweight product development teams) address the need to integrate knowledge more rapidly and effectively within projects. These approaches do not address, however, how knowledge is integrated over time or how integration of knowledge from previous new product development efforts influences the firm's new product development performance. This study focuses on providing a greater understanding of the integrative practices that contribute to this capability in new product development. Based on insights from the innovation and learning literatures, this study proposes relationships about the influence of knowledge retention and interpretation activities on the organization's ability to integrate knowledge developed in prior new product development projects and on new product development performance. Data collected from a sample of new product development professionals are employed to test the proposed relationships among knowledge retention, knowledge interpretation, integration of prior knowledge, and new product development performance. The findings suggest that knowledge retention and interpretation activities positively impact a firm's new product development performance. In particular, practices that enable the retention and interpretation of knowledge improve new product development performance indirectly through the firm's enhanced ability to apply knowledge developed in prior product development projects to subsequent projects. Practices that enable the interpretation of knowledge in the firm's current strategic context also improve new product development performance directly. These findings lead to important implications for managing new product development.     

Client dependence and vendor innovation: The moderating role of organizational culture

With the dramatic increase in technological interconnectedness between firms and the overall speed of technological change, organizations depend on each other to survive and stay competitive. While it is generally believed that dyads and networks can offer advantages over internal development in the innovation process, the authors suggest that it is not necessarily the case. Using a sample of 120 vendor firms that work in information technology industries in the Indian subcontinent, they find that client dependence in the inter-organizational relationship decreases vendor innovation. To resolve this dark side of business relationships, they further examine how the organizational culture can impact the dependence-innovation relationship. In line with organization literature, the authors distinguish two sub-dimensions of outcome-oriented culture: performance orientation, which reflects a firm's internal focus on employee performance, and competitiveness, which reflects a firm's focus on external competitors and markets. It is found that a vendor's competitiveness facilitates innovation, and that it weakens the negative effect of client dependence on vendor innovation. However, performance orientation strengthens the negative effect of client dependence on vendor innovation. Accordingly, in order to prevent themselves from falling into the dependence trap in the innovation process, firms need to build an externally oriented competitive culture and avoid overemphasizing their internal performance.     

Knowledge‐based resources,entrepreneurial orientation,and the performance of small and medium‐sized businesses

While theory suggests that management has discretion in manipulating resources in order to build competitive advantage, resource‐based research has focused on the characteristics of resources, paying less attention to the relationship between those resources and the way firms are organized. In explaining performance, entrepreneurship scholars have focused on a firm's entrepreneurial strategic orientation (EO), leaving its interrelationship with internal characteristics aside. We argue that EO captures an important aspect of the way a firm is organized. Our findings suggest that knowledge‐based resources (applicable to discovery and exploitation of opportunities) are positively related to firm performance and that EO enhances this relationship. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

International diversification,subsidiary performance,and the mobility of knowledge resources

We examine the link between international diversification, organizational knowledge resources, and subsidiary performance. The success of international corporate diversification depends on a firm's capability to transfer knowledge to its subsidiaries, and how its local subsidiaries effectively utilize that knowledge. As knowledge resources are imperfectly mobile, a firm may find it difficult to transfer knowledge to its subsidiaries. In our analysis of 4964 Japanese subsidiaries over a 14‐year period, we find that knowledge that is valuable, but not rare, positively affects subsidiary performance in the short term, but not the long term. In contrast, knowledge that is both valuable and rare affects subsidiary performance in the long term, but not the short term. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Knowledge worth having in ‘excess’: The value of tacit and firm‐specific human resource slack

Whether holding resources in excess of what is needed to sustain routine operations (i.e., having slack) increases or decreases firm performance is a question of ongoing interest to management scholars. We contribute to existing theory by arguing that human resource slack generally decreases a firm's performance but that holding excess numbers of employees who possess important tacit knowledge that is specific to firms may benefit the firm. We find that the value of these excess resources increases as firms face competitive pressures and decreases when firms' operational choices facilitate the standardization of workflows. We obtain initial empirical evidence for our predictions by testing them on a novel dataset comprising six years of data for 4,070 manufacturing plants in Mexico. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Managing New Product Development Teams in a Globally Dispersed NPD Program

Globalization is a major market trend today, one characterized by both increased international competition as well as extensive opportunities for firms to expand their operations beyond current boundaries. Effectively dealing with this important change, however, makes the management of global new product development (NPD) a major concern. To ensure success in this complex and competitive endeavor, companies must rely on global NPD teams that make use of the talents and knowledge available in different parts of the global organization. Thus, cohesive and well‐functioning global NPD teams become a critical capability by which firms can effectively leverage this much more diverse set of perspectives, experiences, and cultural sensitivities for the global NPD effort. The present research addresses the global NPD team and its impact on performance from both an antecedent and a contingency perspective. Using the resource‐based view (RBV) as a theoretical framework, the study clarifies how the internal, or behavioral, environment of the firm—specifically, resource commitment and senior management involvement—and the global NPD team are interrelated and contribute to global NPD program performance. In addition, the proposed performance relationships are viewed as being contingent on certain explicit, or strategic, factors. In particular, the degree of global dispersion of the firm's NPD effort is seen as influencing the management approach and thus altering the relationships among company background resources, team, and performance. For the empirical analysis, data are collected through a survey of 467 corporate global new product programs (North America and Europe, business‐to‐business). A structural model testing for the hypothesized effects was substantially supported. The results show that creating and effectively managing global NPD teams offers opportunities for leveraging a diverse but unique combination of talents and knowledge‐based resources, thereby enhancing the firm's ability to achieve a sustained competitive advantage in international markets. To function effectively, the global NPD team must be nested in a corporate environment in which there is a commitment of sufficient resources and where senior management plays an active role in leading, championing, and coordinating the global NPD effort. This need for commitment and global team integration becomes even more important for success as the NPD effort becomes more globally dispersed.     

How constraints and knowledge impact open innovation

Laursen and Salter (2006) examined the impact of a firm's search strategy for external knowledge on innovative performance. Based on organizational learning and open innovation literature, we extend the model hypothesizing that the search strategy itself is impacted by firm context. That is, both ‘constraints on the application of firm resources’ and the ‘abundance of external knowledge’ have a direct impact on innovative performance and a firm's search strategy in terms of breadth and depth. Based on a survey of Swiss‐based firms, we find that constraints decrease and external knowledge increases innovative performance. Although constraints lead to a broader but shallower search, external knowledge is associated with the breadth and the depth of the search in a U‐shaped relationship. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Augmented Service Offering: A Conceptualization and Study of Its Impact on New Service Success

Unlike companies that produce tangible goods, service firms typically cannot rely on product advantage as a means for ensuring the success of a new service. Developing a competitive response to a tangible product may require significant investments of time and effort. In many cases, however, competitors can easily duplicate the core elements of a firm's new service. This fundamental difference between new products and new services means that managers who hope to find the keys to new-service success must look to factors other than sustainable product advantage. Chris Storey and Christopher Easingwood suggest that managers must understand the totality of the service offering from the customer's perspective. They explain that the purchase of a service is influenced not only by the service itself, but also by such factors as the service firm's reputation and the quality of the customer's interaction with the firm's systems and staff—in other words, by the augmented service offering (ASO). Using the results of a study they conducted in the consumer financial services industry in the U.K., they identify the components of the ASO, and they examine the relative contributions of these components to the success of new services. In their model, the ASO comprises three elements: the service product, service augmentation, and marketing support. The core of the ASO—the service product—includes such dimensions as product quality, product distinctiveness, and perceived risk. The study's results suggest that improvements in the service product open up new opportunities for the firm, but have only modest effects on sales and profitability. Rounding out the ASO model are service augmentation and marketing support. Service augmentation encompasses such dimensions as distribution strength, staff-customer interactions, and reputation. The customer recognizes and responds to these elements of the ASO, but they are not part of the product core. Marketing support involves those marketing and management actions that affect the quality of the product and its augmentation, even though customers typically are not aware of them. These elements include knowledge of the marketplace, training of contact staff, and internal marketing. Enhanced service augmentation has significant effects on profitability and sales for the firms in this study, but it does not offer enhanced opportunities. The marketing support elements contribute significantly to all aspects of performance for the firms in this study.     

Heterogeneity in turnover: The effect of relative compensation dispersion of firms on the mobility and entrepreneurship of extreme performers

We explore the strategic implications of firm compensation dispersion on the heterogeneous turnover outcomes of employee mobility and entrepreneurship. We theorize that individuals' turnover decisions are affected by the interaction of individual performance with the firm's compensation dispersion relative to its competitors. We test our theory using linked employer-employee data from the legal services industry. We find that individuals with extreme high performance are less likely to leave firms that offer higher compensation dispersion than competitors, however, if they do leave these employers, they are more likely to create new ventures. In contrast, employees with extreme low performance are more likely to leave firms with more compensation dispersion than competitors, and these individuals are less likely to engage in new venture creation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The persistence of knowledge‐based advantage: an empirical test for product performance and technological knowledge

Resource‐based theory maintains that intrinsic characteristics of resources and capabilities, such as their tacitness, complexity, and specificity, prevent imitation and thereby prolong exceptional performance. There is little direct evidence to verify these claims, yet a substantial literature encourages firms to formulate competitive strategies around resources with these attributes. Further, work outside the resource‐based tradition suggests that these attributes can slow innovation, and it is not clear when this effect outweighs the benefits of inimitability. This paper seeks to clarify whether and how the complexity, tacitness, and specificity of a firm's knowledge affect the persistence of its performance advantages. We find that the complexity and tacitness of technological knowledge are useful for defending a firm's major product improvements from imitation, but not for protecting its minor improvements. The design specificity of technological knowledge delayed imitation of minor improvements in this study. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Examining the effect of complexity in strategic group knowledge structures on firm performance

A developing stream of research in the strategy field explores the competitive structure of industries from the perspective of industry participants. This work has demonstrated that managers develop strategic group knowledge structures in order to make sense of their competitive environment. This study extends this line of research by examining the complexity evident in the strategic group knowledge structures developed by firms' top management teams and assessing the relationship between complexity in these knowledge structures and subsequent firm performance. Specifically, we examine the complexity of top managers' knowledge structures regarding their competition using a sample of 76 top management teams from banks in three U.S. cities. Using hierarchical regression, we find a significant relationship between the complexity of cognitive strategic groups and subsequent firm performance. These results suggest that the structure of the cognitive templates that top managers use to understand their environment and the actions of their competitor influence the degree of strategic success of their firm. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of exit barriers upon strategic flexibility

The conceptual construct, exit barriers, is expanded using both statistical findings and the results of field studies. The immobility of resources, it is suggested, can be overcome by helping marginal competitors to exit from potentially volatile businesses. The implementation of such tactics can be adapted to the firm's own strategic commitment and to the nature of the business in question, although it is expected that firms which might consider purchasing the physical and intangible assets of competitors in order to help them to scale high exit barriers, must themselves perceive the business to be of sufficiently high strategic importance to do so.     

Enhancing organizational sensemaking: An examination of the interactive effects of sales capabilities and marketing dashboards

Current marketing research highlights the direct effects of marketing resources on firm performance. Few studies, however, examine how such resources interact with one another and contribute to the strategic actions, such as sensemaking. In this study, we investigate how sales capabilities and performance monitoring via marketing dashboards influence a firm's sensemaking. The results from our study suggest that sales capability and the use of marketing dashboards not only contribute directly, but also have an interactive effect, highlighting the importance of integrating both sales and marketing operations. Further, we find evidence that sensemaking influences cost control and enhances customer relationship performance, suggesting that sensemaking has the potential to simultaneously impact both cost efficiency and growth.     

Configurations of resources and capabilities and their performance implications: an exploratory study on technology ventures

As one of the most widely accepted theoretical perspectives in strategy, the resource‐based view (RBV) suggests that a firm's resources underlie its ability to achieve competitive advantage. However, much of the extant work in this stream has examined the characteristics that resources must have in order to yield rents, while efforts to specify the crucial link between resources and value creation have been sparse. As a consequence, current theory is not sufficiently clear on how different kinds of resources and capabilities contribute to performance, nor does it clarify how firms can combine different resources and capabilities to achieve superior performance outcomes. Analyzing data obtained from 230 technology ventures with partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling and cluster analysis, this study seeks to improve understanding of the resource‐performance link in two main ways. Based on a careful measurement of resources and capabilities in a well‐defined functional area (sales and distribution), we first show how these resources and capabilities contribute to performance in that functional area. Second, we identify four clusters of firms that deploy different configurations of resources and capabilities. Among the four configurational solutions, two are associated with superior (equifinal) performance outcomes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of desire for control on monitoring decisions and performance outcomes in strategic alliances

Strategic alliances are fraught with risks, such as the uncontrolled disclosure of core knowledge via opportunistic learning. The usefulness of monitoring in policing opportunism notwithstanding, a contrasting view is that monitoring mechanisms can themselves manifest the dark side of strategic alliances. The present study argues that a novel dark personality trait—the focal firm's desire for control—may influence key decisions pertaining to how to monitor strategic alliances, which in turn can negatively impact performance outcomes. Our conceptual model was developed and tested, based on a survey of 404 strategic alliances. The results demonstrate that a focal firm's desire for control is positively associated with process monitoring as well as output monitoring. The firm's use of process monitoring to oversee the counterpart drives its performance outcomes only if there is a low level of information exchange between the alliance partners; as such, information exchange norms substitute for process monitoring. By contrast, the focal firm's use of outcome monitoring is negatively linked to performance unless complemented by a high level of information exchange. Key implications for alliance management and future research are derived from the findings.