What lessons could the humid shores of the Caribbean, the freezing heights of the Himalayas, or the farthest reaches of Earth's atmosphere hold for your company or organization? Although those places couldn't be more different, all were the scenes of disastrous outcomes brought on by a weakness to which all...
We analyze platform competition for content in the presence of strategic interactions between content distributors and content providers. We provide a model of bargaining and price competition within these industries, and show that whether or not a piece of content ends up exclusive to one platform depends crucially on whether...
This paper explores the importance of cross-border social networks for entrepreneurship in developing countries by examining ties between the Indian expatriate community and local entrepreneurs in India's software industry. It was found that entrepreneurs located outside software hubs - in cities where monitoring and information flow on prospective clients is...
This paper combines new and old institutionalism to explain enduring differences in organizational strategies. We propose that differences in the influence of corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different external pressures and thus adopt different management practices. Specifically, we argue that external constituents who interact with particularly influential corporate...
Ratings of corporations' environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of "Socially responsible" investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential employees. In one of the first studies to assess these ratings, we examine how well the most widely used ratings - those of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research...
Designers often seek modular architectures to better accommodate expected changes and to enable parallel development. However, we lack a formal theory and model of modularity and software evolution, which can be used for description, prediction, and prescription. According to Baldwin and Clark's theory, modular architectures add value to system designs...
Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of coagglomeration and use data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database from 1972...
In this paper we use highly disaggregated data on trade in capital goods to study differences in the price of capital across countries. Our strategy is motivated by the fact that most countries import the bulk of machinery equipment from a small number of industrialized countries. We find the price...
Trust in buyer-supplier relationships is sometimes regarded as a competitive advantage because trust can increase the gains from trade for firms and their suppliers. This paper documents a particular type of competitive advantage conferred by trust. Using adoption rates of a new product as a case study, it was shown...
This paper uses concepts from the theory of the firm and MIS research to argue that some types of Information Technology IT will be deployed only within hierarchical governance structures. This argument introduces a contingency into the 'Electronic markets hypothesis,' which holds that greater use of IT is unidirectionally associated...
The Balanced Scorecard offers a previously unrecognized benefit: a new way of looking at the traditional organizational structure of cost and profit centers. Every unit, by contributing to effective strategy execution, has the opportunity to support and create profit. This capability has important implications for specifying objectives and evaluating the...
We use an economic model to study the optimal management of know-how, defined here as employee-generated information about the performance of specific solutions to problems that may or will recur in the future. We derive three main results. First, information about successes is typically more useful than information about failures,...
Multi-Sided Platforms MSPs, which bring together two or more interdependent groups of customers, have risen to economic and business prominence in many industries. This paper first lays out a simple micro-founded framework which aims to organize academic and managerial thinking about MSPs. It argues that any MSP performs one or...
This paper details the construction of a firm-year panel dataset combining the NBER Patent Dataset with the Industry R&D (Research& Development) Survey conducted by the Census Bureau and National Science Foundation. The developed platform offers an unprecedented view of the R&D-to-patenting innovation process and a close analysis of the strengths...
This paper describes a dynamic strategy that can be employed by firms capable of architectural innovation. The strategy involves using knowledge of the bottlenecks in an architecture together with the modular operator "Splitting" to shrink the "Footprint" of the firm's inhouse activities. Modules not in the footprint are outsourced -...
To better understand how business school students view the relationship between law and business, we used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique ZMET to elicit the unconscious thoughts and feelings of twelve students about the role of law in starting and running a business in the United States. Our study revealed...
This paper contributes to research on organizational learning by investigating specific learning activities undertaken by improvement project teams in hospital intensive care units and proposing an integrative model to explain implementation success. Organizational learning is important in this context because medical knowledge changes constantly, and hospital care units must learn...
This paper embeds legal considerations in mainstream management theory and frameworks. It proposes a systems approach to law and management that explains how law affects the competitive environment, the firm's resources, and the activities in the value chain. This is a dynamic model that recognizes that firms and markets are...
There is no shortage of published ideas on how best to manage innovation. Empower employees. Encourage initiative. Cultivate risk taking. Managers need more than such generic advice because there are many different kinds of innovation and each requires a profoundly different managerial approach. This article reveals how to forge ahead...
How often has it been said that public education in the United States should be run more like a business? This exhortation urges American public schools to apply the same management, leadership and organizational approaches to public education that have been used to create the iconic state of global business....
