Juan Alcacer

Juan Alcacer

James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration

James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration

Juan Alcacer received his Ph.D. in International Business and Strategy and an M.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan. He also holds an MBA in Finance and Economics from IESA. Before entering graduate school he worked as an associate at McKinsey & Co. in Latin America. Professor Alcacer’s research interests are in international strategies of firms in the telecommunications industry. His current research focuses primarily on the effect of competition on the location decisions of multinationals.

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Juan Alcacer
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Juan Alcacer is the James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He joined HBS in 2007 and has taught the required MBA strategy course, an elective on Global Strategy and PhD courses in Strategy and International Business. Within HBS Executive Education, he teaches in open-enrollment programs and chairs custom programs on competitive advantage, global strategic management, and corporate-level strategy. 

Professor Alcacer received the Greenhill Award for Outstanding Service to the HBS Community in 2019 for his work on Field Global Immersion, a required, experiential MBA course that develops students’ global intelligence and teamwork skills. [Each year, the course brings 900 students to 15 cities around the world to work on a product or service challenge]. Professor Alcacer also received the Teacher of the Year Award in 2003 at Stern Business School, New York University.

Professor Alcacer’s research and course development interests are in strategy, growth and innovation. His recent research focuses on growth and exit strategies, strategies to cope with major shifts in the environment (such as Brexit) and strategic decision-making under geopolitical and technological uncertainty. His early research examines location strategies, outsourcing, management of value chains across countries and global supplier-buyer relationships. He also studies cluster-based innovation and global intellectual property (IP) issues, with emphasis on the patent systems across countries. He has published his research in the American Journal of Sociology, Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy and Journal of International Business.

Professor Alcacer is a member of the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society, has served on numerous boards of academic journals and is an associate editor of Management Science. He has worked with many corporations on consulting and field-based projects.

Professor Alcacer received a PhD in International Business and Strategy from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He also received a MA in Economics from University of Michigan, an MBA from IESA and a Computer Engineering degree from the Universidad Simon Bolivar.

 

Featured Work
Learning by Supplying
Learning processes lie at the heart of our understanding of how firms build capabilities to generate and sustain competitive advantage: learning by doing, learning by exporting, learning from competitors, users, and alliance partners. In this paper we focus attention on another locus of learning that has received less attention from academics despite popular interest: learning by supplying. Using a detailed panel dataset on  supply relationships in the mobile telecommunications industry, we address the following questions: What factors contribute to a firm’s ability to learn by supplying and build technological and market capabilities? Does it matter  to whom the firm supplies? Is involvement  in product design important, or is manufacturing the key locus of learning? How does a supplier’s initial resource endowment play into the dynamic?  Our empirical analysis yields interesting findings that have implications for theory and practice, and that suggest new directions for future research.
Spatial Organization of Firms
Internal and external agglomeration economies and location choices through the value chain
We explore the impact of geographically bounded intra-firm spillovers (internal agglomeration economies) and geographically bounded inter-firm spillovers (external agglomeration economies) on firms’ location strategies. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database and the U.S. Cluster Mapping Project, we analyze organic expansions of biopharmaceutical firms (by both new establishments and employment increase in existing establishments) in the U.S. in 1993–2005. We consider all activities in the value chain and allow location choices to vary by R&D, manufacturing, and sales. Our findings suggest that (1) internal and external agglomeration economies have separate, positive impacts on location, with relevant differences by activity; (2) internal economies of agglomeration arise within an activity (e.g., among plants) and across activities (e.g., between manufacturing and sales); (3) the effects of internal economies  across and within activities vary by activity and type of organic expansion; and (4) across-activity internal economies are asymmetric.
Location Choices under Strategic Interactions
The literature on location choices has mostly emphasized the impact of location and firm characteristics. However, most industries with a significant presence of multi-location firms are oligopolistic in nature, which suggests that strategic interaction among firms plays an important role in firms’ decision-making processes. This paper explores how strategic interaction among competitors affects firms’ geographic expansion across time and markets. Specifically, we build a model in which two firms that differ in their capabilities enter sequentially into two markets with different potentials for profit. The model is solved using game theory under three learning scenarios that capture the ability of a firm to transfer its capabilities across markets: no learning, local learning, and global learning. Three equilibrium strategies arise: accommodate, marginalize, and collocate. We identify how these strategies emerge depending on the tradeoff between the opportunity costs of absence (giving competitors a lead in a market) and the entrenchment benefits (the cost advantage firms develop through learning-by-doing when they enter early). Both the opportunity costs of absence and the entrenchment benefits vary according to initial relative firm capabilities, relative market profitability, and learning rates. Our model offers a comprehensive approach to understanding the drivers of firm location choices by modeling not only the impact of location and firm heterogeneity, but also the strategic interaction among firms.
Books
Journal Articles
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Awards & Honors
Received the 2024 HBS Student Association Faculty Teaching Award for exceptional contributions to the experience of the graduating class.
Received the Meritorious Service Award from Management Science in 2013 for excellence in quality and timeliness of editorial work, in the role of Associate Editor.
Awarded Best Paper at the DRUID 2013 Conference in Barcelona, Spain, for "Spatial Organization of Firms: Location Choices through the Value Chain" (with Mercedes Delgado).
Recipient of the 2016 Michigan Ross Distinguished PhD Alumni Award.
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