Spillovers in Space: Does Geography Matter?

Using U.S. firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market (“horizontal”). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the distribution of a firm's inventor locations as well as its headquarters. We find that geographic location is important for productivity, as are technology (but not product) spillovers, and that both intra and inter–regional (counties) spillovers matter. The geographic location of a firm's researchers is more important than its headquarters. These benefits may be the reason why local policy makers compete so hard for the location of local R&D labs and high tech workers.     

Incentives through consumer learning about tastes

We consider a long-lived firm that faces an infinite sequence of finitely-lived consumers. In each period, the firm can exert either high or low effort, which is the firm's private information. When consumers learn about the firm's talent from the outcomes of previous transactions, there exists no equilibrium in which the firm always exerts high effort. However, when consumers learn about their own tastes, such an equilibrium can exist. Consumer learning about tastes therefore is an alternative to reputational concerns that produces stable incentives. We discuss the implications of this mechanism for advertising, advertising content, and consumer education.     

Performance implications of the buyer-supplier market orientation fit

Extant research examining the link between market orientation and performance offers few insights into how the interplay between a firm's market orientation (MO) and its key supplier's MO influences the firm's performance. Using archival and survey dyadic data from 876 firms (438 firm-supplier dyads), we explore the impact of MO fit (i.e., fit between the focal firm's MO and its supplier's MO) on the focal firm's performance (ROA). The findings indicate a direct and positive relationship between MO fit and ROA. This highlights the need for firms to focus both on their own MO and their key supplier's MO as sources of competitive advantage in today's business environment. The strength of the relationship between MO fit and ROA increases when the exchanged business volume increases between the focal firm and its supplier and when the respective relationship progresses in age. Furthermore, firms with MO fit perform best, followed by firms with higher supplier MO misfit (firm's MO is lower than its key supplier's MO), while firms with lower supplier MO misfit (firm's MO is higher than its key supplier's MO) are the laggards.     

Partners' centrality diversity and firm innovation performance: Evidence from China

While most studies of firm innovation with a social network perspective have focused on the focal firm's network structure, we explore the value of second-order social capital by examining partners' network structure to better understand firm innovation. Specifically, we examine how centrality diversity of the focal firm's network partners affects its innovation performance. A longitudinal study of Chinese publicly listed manufacturing firms from 2000 to 2016 indicates that partners' centrality diversity in a firm's board interlock network is positively related to that firm's innovation performance. We also find that the focal firm's knowledge breadth weakens the effect of partners' centrality diversity on innovation performance for the focal firm, while the proportion of non-independent ties between the focal firm and its network partners strengthens the effect.     

Inbound open innovation for enhanced performance: Enablers and opportunities

Open innovation, defined as a firm's purposive pursuit and integration of external inputs for new product development, offers an alternative perspective on innovation. Drawing on resource-based and capability theories, this study identifies key factors that enable inbound open innovation and increase its efficacy in a business-to-business context. Because open innovation relies on external connections, relational capability—that is, the firm's ability to make and manage relationships with other firms—should enhance the effects of inbound open innovation on firm performance. Two key resources may further enhance the moderating effects of relational capability: network spillovers that indicate knowledge-rich surroundings, and flexibility that allows for responsiveness and adaptability. The authors test these relationships with data from managers in 204 business-to-business high-tech firms, as well as secondary data pertaining to firm performance and flexibility. The results support the expectations that the ability to build interfirm relationships in a knowledge-rich environment increase the efficacy of inbound open innovation for gaining superior financial performance. Interestingly, additional analyses suggest an unexpected nonlinear interaction effect with flexibility. When firms possess strong relational capabilities and adopt an open innovation approach, they achieve higher financial performance if they have a low or a high level of flexibility. The theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.     

Profit-sharing between an open-source firm and application developers — Maximizing profits from applications and in-application advertisements

More and more for-profit organizations are promoting their products using open-source strategies. In Google's Android open-source project, the open-source firm and application developers share profits from the sales of paid applications and advertisements in free applications. Recently, the open-source strategy has received considerable attention in the literature. However, the profit-sharing model and in-application advertisements have not been well studied in the context of an open-source business. These are critical gaps in the literature, since the open-source firm may utilize a profit-sharing scheme to exercise non-coercive power and to grow the user network and advertising business. We propose a model to understand how the profit-share percentage and the percentage of paid applications, in relation to the size of the user network, affect the open-source firm's profits from applications and in-application advertisements. Our study shows that growing the user network does not necessarily increase the open-source firm's profit. Further, the study suggests that the optimal profit-share percentage maximizing the open-source firm's profit from advertisements is lower than that maximizing the profit from applications. Additionally, our study illustrates a potential threat of application developers' opportunistic behavior against the open-source firm.     

Whether and when do alliance terminations pay off?

Engaging in multiple strategic alliances, a firm forms an alliance portfolio. While a larger alliance portfolio signals investors a firm's ability to exploit new opportunities and improve financial performance, having multiple alliances may also undermine financial performance due to a firm's limited ability to effectively manage these alliances. Announcing an alliance termination, a firm signals an intention to increase the effectiveness of a larger alliance portfolio. This article examines the extent to which alliance termination announcements create value for firms with multiple alliances. Building on the resource-based view of the firm and organizational learning literature, the paper hypothesizes a U-shaped relationship between alliance portfolio size and a firm's cumulative abnormal stock return following an alliance termination announcement. This effect is moderated by the amount of a firm's alternative resources and partner-specific experience that affect its ability to effectively manage multiple alliances. The results show that alliance termination announcements create firm value when an alliance portfolio is large.     

Firm Characteristics and NPD Program Success: The Significant Influence of Global Discovery Management

Managing new product development (NPD) with a global point of view is argued to be essential in current business more than ever. Accordingly, many firms are trying to revitalize their NPD processes to make them more global. Therefore, examining global NPD management is one of the top priorities for research. While scholars have examined global launch management, there has been scant attention on the direct effect of global discovery management on NPD success. Therefore, this study investigates how a globally managed discovery phase enhances a firm's overall NPD success. Drawing upon the resource‐based view (RBV) and using Kotabe's ( 1990 ) generic model for market success in global competition as the overarching framework, this study examines four drivers of NPD success: global discovery management, the firm's “global footprint,” its inbound knowledge sourcing practices (i.e., “open innovation proclivity”), and nationality of the teams (i.e., “cross‐national global NPD team use”). The hypotheses are tested using a sample of 255 business units from multiple industries, headquartered worldwide, and surveyed during the 2012 PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS). The PLM‐SEM analyses show that, of the four drivers examined, only global discovery management strongly influences a firm's NPD program success. The findings enhance our understanding of the particularities in global NPD. Based on the study's results, suggestions are provided as to how multinationals can leverage their international operations in the course of their front‐end activities.     

Location,governance, and strategic determinants of japanese manufacturing investment in the united states

A firm's decision to manufacture abroad depends on location, governance, and strategic factors. Governance factors are firm-specific. In spite of this, most empirical studies of foreign direct investment (FDI) have been conducted at the industry level (making it impossible to look at firm-specific determinants), and only a handful have considered governance, location, and strategic factors simultaneously. This paper is the first large sample study of the determinants of foreign direct investment at the product and firm-level. It examines the impact of location and governance factors, and of four types of strategic interactions, on a Japanese firm's propensity to manufacture in the U.S. The results support the view that foreign direct investment is explained by location, governance, and strategic variables. Economies of scale and trade barriers encourage Japanese FDI in the U.S. The larger a Japanese firm's R & D expenditures, the greater the probability it will manufacture in the U.S., but this is not the case for advertising expenditures. Some strategic factors are also important: Japanese firms with medium domestic market shares have the highest propensity to invest in the U.S. There is evidence of follow-the-leader behavior between firms of rival enterprise groups, but none of ‘exchange-of-threat’ between American and Japanese firms. Japanese investors are also attracted by concentrated and high-growth U.S. industries.     

Believing one's own press: the causes and consequences of CEO celebrity

This theoretical article introduces the construct of CEO celebrity in order to explain how the tendency of journalists to attribute a firm's actions and outcomes to the volition of its CEO affects such firm. In the model developed here, journalists celebrate a CEO whose firm takes strategic actions that are distinctive and consistent by attributing such actions and performance to the firm's CEO. In so doing, journalists over‐attribute a firm's actions and outcomes to the disposition of its CEO rather than to broader situational factors. A CEO who internalizes such celebrity will also tend to believe this over‐attribution and become overconfident about the efficacy of her past actions and future abilities. Hubris arises when CEO overconfidence results in problematic firm decisions, including undue persistence with actions that produce celebrity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ADVERTISING SUNK COSTS AND CREDIBLE SPATIAL PREEMPTION

Large sunk investments in advertising allow managers to credibly preempt potential entrants by introducing new products prior to anticipated increases in market growth. Previous investment in advertising can lower a firm's cost to introduce new products allowing it to credibly preempt potential entrants. Entrants may not have enough residual share to find it profitable to enter later, and incumbents find it profitable to keep new products in the market even if entrants choose to enter. I present empirical evidence from the RTE cereal industry.     

Foreign Entry and Firm Advertising Intensity: Evidence from China

This paper investigates the determinants of advertising intensity at the firm level by focusing on the role of foreign entry. In a monopolistically competitive market with heterogeneous firms, we show that foreign entry affects the expected advertising intensity of domestic firms through its impact on the cost of resources, brand image, and productivity spillovers and its impact on firms’ exit behaviour. Then, using comprehensive firm-level data from China’s manufacturing sector between 2005 and 2007, we test this hypothesis and find that foreign entry significantly affects advertising intensity.     

Rent appropriation of knowledge‐based assets and firm performance when institutions are weak: A study of Chinese publicly listed firms

Research summary : A firm's strategic investments in knowledge‐based assets through research and development (R&D) can generate economic rents for the firm, and thus are expected to affect positively a firm's financial performance. However, weak protection of minority shareholders, weak property rights, and ineffective law enforcement can allow those rents to be appropriated disproportionately by a firm's powerful insiders such as large owners and top managers. Recent data on Chinese publicly listed firms during 2007–2012 were used to demonstrate that the expected positive relationship between knowledge assets and performance is weaker in transition economies when a firm's ownership is highly concentrated and its managers have wide discretion. Moreover, rent appropriation by insiders was shown to vary with the levels of institutional development in which a firm operates. Managerial summary : Investing in knowledge‐based intangible assets (e.g., R&D) is an important value‐creation activity for the firm. Such value creation process can be facilitated by large shareholders and powerful managers, who can then take an advantageous position with critical insider information on these valuable intangible assets and therefore enjoy more opportunities to appropriate more value from them, leaving less value for other minority shareholders. The value distribution becomes increasingly skewed against minority shareholders when the institutional protection for them is weak. Indeed, in a large sample of Chinese publicly listed firms, we found that R&D investment becomes less positively associated with firm financial performance with the presence of large shareholders, high managerial equity, or CEO/Chairman duality, especially in Chinese provinces with weak institutional development. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring strategic performance

This paper demonstrates the inadequacy of traditional measures, that are based on a firm's profitability, for evaluating its strategic performance. Two other measures, one that attempts to assess the quality of a firm's transformations (and not merely its outcomes) and the other that attempts to measure the satisfaction of all of the firm's stakeholders (and not merely its stockholders), are shown here to be important discriminators of strategic performance. The performances of seven ‘excellent’ firms from the computer industry, featured in the recent book by Peters and Waterman, are contrasted with that of seven ‘non-excellent’ firms from the same industry, to develop a framework for measuring strategic performance.     

Linking big data analytical intelligence to customer relationship management performance

This study investigates the driving forces of a firm's assimilation of big data analytical intelligence (BDAI) and how the assimilation of BDAI improve customer relationship management (CRM) performance. Drawing on the resource-based view, this study argues that a firm's data-driven culture and the competitive pressure it faces in the industry motivate a firm's assimilation of BDAI. As a firm resource, BDAI enables an organization to develop superior mass-customization capability, which in turn positively influences its CRM performance. In addition, this study proposes that a firm's marketing capability can moderate the impact of BDAI assimilation on its mass-customization capability. Using survey data collected from 147 business-to-business companies, this study finds support for most of the hypotheses. The findings of this study uncover compelling insights about the dynamics involved in the process of using BDAI to improve CRM performance.     

Understanding the impact of symbolic and substantive environmental actions on organizational reputation

Research in corporate environmental practices has shown that stakeholders impose coercive and normative forces that drive firms to perform environmental protection actions. However, limited attention has been placed on how different constituents of stakeholders value the firm's environmental actions. By focusing on industry peers as a constituent of stakeholders, we examine how the firm's environmental actions impact its reputation. Based on institutional theory and signaling theory we propose that symbolic environmental actions negatively affect reputation, whereas substantive actions improve firm's reputation among its peers. Building on the notion of signaling process, the authors also observe that a firm's reporting practices moderate positively the negative effect of symbolic actions. Data from a sample of 213 publicly traded firms operating in polluting industries from 2006 to 2013 support these results. The findings emphasize the danger of using symbolic actions to signal environmental commitment in a context of high-involvement information search and opportunistic behaviors.     

Explorative search for a high‐impact innovation: the role of technological status in the global pharmaceutical industry

Extant studies suggest that the potential benefits arising from exploration are associated with access to diverse and distant knowledge across organizational and technological boundaries. However, exploration is not sufficient to assure if innovation actually occurs. Our study identifies exploration into two types, organizational and technological, and argues that the innovative effect of a firm's explorative search beyond organizational and technological boundaries is best leveraged by its technological status in an industry. Data derived from the global pharmaceutical industry indicate that a firm's search across organizational boundaries has a positive effect on its innovation impact, and such effect is strengthened when the firm is high in its technological status. However, the firm's search moving beyond its technological boundary increases innovation impact only for the group of high technological status but decreases it for the low‐status group. It appears that, in the global pharmaceutical industry, a firm's technological status is most critical to exploit knowledge from distant technology domains.     

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.     

Alliance portfolios and firm performance: A study of value creation and appropriation in the U.S. software industry

This study reveals the multifaceted contribution of alliance portfolios to firms' market performance. Extending prior research that has stressed the value‐creation effect of network resources, it uncovers how prominent partners may undermine a firm's capacity to appropriate value from its alliance portfolio. Analysis of a comprehensive panel dataset of 367 software firms and their 20,779 alliances suggests that the contribution of network resources to value creation varies with the complementarity of those resources. Furthermore, the relative bargaining power of partners in the alliance portfolio constrains the firm's appropriation capacity, especially when many of these partners compete in the focal firm's industry. In turn, the firm's market performance improves with the intensity of competition among partners in its alliance portfolio. These findings advance network research by highlighting the trade‐offs that alliance portfolios impose on firms that seek to manage and leverage their alliances. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Product Change Intensity, Product Advantage, and Market Performance: An Empirical Investigation of the PC Industry

Product change decisions, such as the frequency of new product introductions, can impact product performance characteristics, sales, and market share of several generations of products and, therefore, a firm's long‐term survival and growth. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of a firm's product change frequency, also referred to as product change intensity. A conceptual model linking a firm's product change intensity to its product advantage—and, in turn, to its market performance—with strategic product change orientation and technology competence as moderating effects, was used as a foundation for the study's hypotheses. These were tested using hierarchical and linear regressions, based on survey data collected from 55 U.S. companies in the personal computer (PC) industry. The analysis confirmed that a PC firm's product rate of change is positively associated with its product advantage and that its product advantage, in turn, is positively associated with its market share and growth performance. However, the hypothesized moderating effects were not confirmed. Rather, a firm's product change orientation and its level of technology competence are more likely to have a direct impact on product advantage. The implications of these findings are that, in general, firms that release new products frequently will have them viewed more favorably by the market than products with lower change intensities. Also, firms with higher levels of competence in the product technology domain tend to create products with greater market attraction. Finally, more radical changes to PC product architectures may pay off better than relatively minor changes. These results may not apply to other industries due to the specific design of personal computers and the nature of this fast‐paced market. Neither do the findings necessarily apply to all firms regardless of those firms' specific product and market strategies. More research is necessary to understand how a firm's adopted strategy, and the industry in which it operates, affect the relationships demonstrated in this study.