Creating corporate entrepreneurship

This paper demonstrates how the various types of corporate entrepreneurship–individual managers, business renewal and Schumpeterian, or industry, leadership–share five ‘bundles’ of attributes. Each type can exist in one firm, though at different times as the common attributes change their role and relative importance. External and internal triggers for change are examined for a sample of 10 firms in 4 European industries. The data suggest a provocative conclusion: troubled firms in hostile environments can shed past behaviors, adopt policies fostering entrepreneurship and accumulate innovative resource bundles that provide a platform on which industry leadership can be built.     

The red queen in organizational evolution

We propose that competitive success and failure evolve through an ecology of organizational learning. An organization facing competition is likely to engage in a search for ways to improve performance. When successful, this search results in learning that is likely to increase the organization's competitive strength, which in turn triggers learning in its rivals—consequently making them stronger competitors and so again triggering learning in the first organization. We elaborate the conditions under which this self-reinforcing process, known in evolutionary theory as the ‘Red Queen,’ is likely to be adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive consequences are predicted only for recently experienced learning. Experience in the more distant past of an organization's life, by contrast, is predicted to backfire into a ‘competency trap.’ We predict maladaptive consequences when organizations face many, varied cohorts of rivals. We empirically distinguish these effects using ecological models of competition. Estimates of organizational failure rales reveal a Red Queen among Illinois banks, and support our predictions.     

The three faces of corporate renewal: Institution,revolution, and evolution

We examine corporate renewal by taking a structural approach and focusing on the routines and rules that are part of large, established, bureaucratic organizations. We characterize approaches to the management of innovation in terms of three different themes–institutional, revolutional, and evolutional strategies. The first two approaches involve intentional efforts to encourage innovation, either within the current organizational paradigm (institutionalizing innovation) or moving away from it (revolutionary innovation), while the evolutional approach involves less conscious efforts to manage what is viewed as a random, probabilistic process. This paper uses simulation methodology to explore the effectiveness of these strategies on organizational innovation, performance, and resources. The behavior of the simulated organizational units is guided by assumptions of a learning model. Results indicate that innovation strategies sometimes have unintended effects that are both positive and negative in nature. Several lessons on managing innovation are offered.     

Replication using templates: Does the unit learn from itself,the template,or both?

Research Summary : Replication of practices is an important value-creating strategy for multi-unit firms, yet they often struggle to share knowledge internally across locations. Drawing on the replication and learning literatures and using data from a Fortune 100 retail chain that implemented a new restocking practice in 280 stores, I examine whether and how templates influence unit learning when replicating new practices. Stores were divided into districts, each with one randomly chosen template and 6–10 replicating stores. A replicating store's prior performance relative to that of its template influences the extent to which the store learns from the template versus from its own experience. These findings suggest that replication involves simultaneously and dynamically learning from both transferred knowledge and knowledge gained from experience. Managerial Summary : Transferring valuable practices within the firm is an important yet difficult task for many firm types, especially multi-unit firms. One way that firms choose to transfer practices is through the use of templates—working examples of the new practice that act as models. Using data from a Fortune 100 retail chain, I show that the use of templates affects the way in which units learn to implement the practice. Because managers face tradeoffs when devoting attention to implementing the new practice, they must balance learning from the template with incorporating their own local experience with the new practice. Overall, my results suggest that choosing many templates is less important than choosing a few templates with superior performance for firms whose units or contexts are similar.     

基于组织承诺的组织创新气氛与个体创新行为关系研究

员工的主动创新行为是推动组织创新以适应环境变化的原动力.然而在知识经济背景下,一些组织出现人才流动率过高、员工主动创新行为不足等问题,严重制约了组织的持续稳定发展.组织承诺因为能够有效预测员工的离职行为而受到学者们越来越广泛的重视.本研究根据员工在组织留任的不同动机,将组织承诺分为积极的情感承诺和消极的继续承诺,并以组织承诺为中介变量,研究组织创新气氛对员工创新行为的作用机理;揭示在组织创新气氛影响下,员工创新行为产生的内在机制,进而找到有效改善员工创新行为,促进组织创新与发展的途径.     

Do leading or lagging firms learn more from exporting?

An interesting theoretical debate arises when considering firm heterogeneity in learning from exporting. One perspective intimates that technologically lagging firms stand to benefit more from exporting because exposure to technological knowledge in foreign markets allows these firms to close the gap with their more technologically endowed counterparts. A contrasting perspective posits that technologically superior firms benefit more from exporting since these firms are better equipped to translate knowledge acquired in foreign markets into innovation. Using a sample of 1,744 Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990–1997, this study empirically investigates how exporting differentially influences the patent output of technologically leading versus technologically lagging firms. We find that exporting is associated with the ex post increase in innovative productivity for both technologically leading and lagging firms. However, subsequent to exporting, technologically leading firms apply for more patents than technologically lagging firms. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

组织设计：战略选择、组织结构和制度

探讨了组织设计的理论难点问题。文章作者总结了战略选择、组织结构和制度化等多个视角的理论观点,认为战略选择、组织结构和制度都是组织设计中需要重点加以考虑的变量。强调处于变动的、互动中的组织战略与结构之间关系是组织的常态。当内外环境变量发生变化时,组织战略与结构也要随之发生变化,组织战略与组织结构必须作出相应的反应。     

OPPORTUNITY AND CONSTRAINT: ORGANIZATIONS’ LEARNING FROM THE OPERATING AND COMPETITIVE EXPERIENCE OF INDUSTRIES

Organizational learning is central to a number of strategic theories. Recent arguments, however, identify risks associated with learning from own experience in the form of overattention to the short term and local conditions. The experience of the industry may offer opportunities for organizational learning that the experience of the organization does not, because industry experience is more varied, and not tied to the path-dependent history of any one organization. We investigate the influence of own experience and of two types of industry experience on the failure rates of U.S. hotel chains. The two types of industry experience are operating experience, which is a discounted sum of the units operated by U.S. hotel chains in the history of the industry, and competitive experience, which is a discounted sum of the number of failures of U.S. hotel chains in the history of the industry. We find that (a) organizations initially benefit from their own experience, but are harmed in the long run, (b) generalist organizations are more weakly affected by their own experience than specialists, (c) organizations benefit from their industry’s operating experience, accumulated both before and after the organization’s entry, and (d) organizations benefit from their industry’s competitive experience, but only after the organization’s entry. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

信息时代的企业组织变革研究

随着信息时代和全球经济一体化的到来,企业面临的竞争压力越来越大,企业要想更好地获得发展,就需要进行相应的组织变革,以适应环境的变化。文章首先从企业内外部环境的变化,分析信息时代企业组织变革的必要性,进而探讨了企业组织的变革方向,即扁平化、虚拟化、网络化、柔性化的发展趋势。