Supplier's involvement and success of radical new product development in new ventures

Supplier involvement is essential to a new venture seeking to develop a radical innovation. Despite this, prior literature has not adequately addressed supplier involvement in radical innovation, nor what the antecedents to increased supplier involvement are. We build and test a conceptual model of the antecedents and new product performance outcomes of supplier involvement in the development of radical innovation by new ventures. Antecedent variables (supplier's specific investments and the new venture's qualification of the supplier's abilities) are drawn from the transaction cost analysis literature. We include new venture's relative power and new venture's level of commitment to the supplier as contingency conditions. We develop a set of hypotheses relating supplier involvement to radical innovation performance, relating the antecedent variables to supplier involvement, and also testing the interaction effects of the two contingency conditions. We gather data from both new ventures and their major suppliers for 173 recent radical innovation projects, and use hierarchical regression analysis to test our hypotheses. We find that the contingency conditions moderate achieved levels of supplier involvement, and also find a direct relationship between achieved level of involvement and performance. We conclude with theoretical contributions and managerial implications.     

Candidates’ Education and Turnout: Evidence from Italian Municipal Elections

We analyze the impact that the educational level of candidates running for the position of mayor has on electoral turnout by using a large dataset for Italian municipal elections held between 1993 and 2011. We firstly estimate a municipality fixed effects model and show that the median education of candidates standing in an election is positively correlated with turnout. To handle endogeneity issues arising from the unobservable time variant features of electoral races, we build on the literature which shows that politicians’ educational level is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design on the basis of the fact that the wages of mayors in Italy increase non‐monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous increase in the median educational level of candidates, induced by a higher wage, leads to an increase in turnout of about 1 percentage point.     

Canonical correlation analysis of unobserved relationships in the new product process

Previous studies of success and failure in new product development have examined the effects of numerous variables upon new product outcomes. Some of these variables are controllable by the firm; many are not. This study employs canonical correlation analysis to investigate the nature of the interactions within and between two sets of variables (controllable and environmental) in the new product process. Several insightful implications for new product management are obtained and presented. Among these is the need for production and marketing synergy in new product development     

The impact of industry environment on early market entry decisions by B2B managers in the U.S. and Japan

Managers form simplified mental models to cope with market environment uncertainties and to process information. A critical decision is whether to enter a high-potential market early. Large innovation and development investments involved in this decision increase uncertainty. We examine the importance ascribed by U.S. and Japanese managers to competitive forces when making early market entry decisions. We expect that the competitive forces will have different effects on the likelihood of early market entry in the U.S. versus Japan due to cultural and business environment differences, and we thereby develop several propositions. We develop a decision-making exercise simulating early market entry decisions, and tested our propositions with managers in medium to large business-to-business (B2B) firms from both countries. We assessed impacts of the competitive market forces on entry strategy selection via relative weights, repeated-measures analysis of variance, and frequency analysis. Our findings revealed differences in the mental models of Japanese and U.S. managers. Buyer power had a larger effect on the decision to make an early market entry for Japanese managers, while threat of new firm entry had a larger effect for U.S. managers; these findings were consistent with our propositions. We also found several areas of agreement between U.S. and Japanese managers. We conclude with theoretical implications and recommendations to B2B management.     

Teoria dell'utilita'«SSB» e scelta tra distribuzioni di probabilita'

Summary In this paper we apply the SSB theory to the problem of choice among probability distributions. We propose a criterion of choice based on the SSB model and establish a necessary and sufficient condition for it.Finally, a comparison with the usual first order stochastic dominance rule is made.

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Lavoro eseguito nell'ambito del Contributo C.N.R. n. 85.001164.10     

Individual-level antecedents of the entrepreneurial approach: the role of different types of passion in the Italian craft brewing industry

Using an inductive, qualitative approach involving fifty-five entrepreneurs in the Italian craft brew industry we explore the relationship between alternative entrepreneurial logics of action based on effectuation and causation principles and two types of passion – respectively, passion for the product and passion for growth. Our findings suggest entrepreneurs led by a passion for product prioritize decisions made according to the principles of effectuation, while those led by a passion for growth rely predominantly on causal logic. Moreover, such relations do impact the direction pursued by their ventures favouring, in turn, homogenous and heterogeneous strategies. Important practical and theoretical implications to both effectuation theory and passion are drawn from our findings, and possible avenues for future research are depicted.