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- 2023
- Working Paper
Organizational Responses to Product Cycles
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicolas Torres
Product cycles entail the mass production of new—and often increasingly complex—products on a regular basis. How do firms manage these changes? We use granular daily data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Becoming a Learning Organization While Enhancing Performance: The Case of LEGO
By: Thomas Borup Kristensen, Henrik Saabye and Amy Edmondson
Purpose - The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with
leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a
knowledge work context for the purpose... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Corporate Strategy and the Theory of the Firm in the Digital Age
By: Markus Menz, Sven Kunisch, Julian Birkinshaw, David J. Collis, Nicolai J. Foss, Robert E. Hoskisson and John Prescott
The purpose of this article is to reinvigorate research in the intersection of corporate strategy and the theory of the firm in light of the rapid advancement of digital technologies. Using the theory of the firm as an interpretive lens, we focus our analysis on the... View Details
- Article
Making a Difference: Developing Actionable Knowledge for Practice and Theory
By: Michael Beer
There is a widely acknowledged gap between academic research and practice. While the field of organizational studies and development has had an impact on management practice in some organizations, it has had only a modest impact on widely accepted management practice... View Details
- April 2020
- Article
Long-term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of U.S. Manufacturers 1959–2015
By: Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni
Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a potential indicator of organizational “fitness” within a competitive environment, firm growth is also a central concern to... View Details
Keywords: Firm Growth; Organizations; Growth and Development; Theory; Analysis; Production; Data and Data Sets
- Article
Organizational Innovation in the Multinational Enterprise: Internalization Theory and Business History
By: Teresa da Silva Lopes, Mark Casson and Geoffrey Jones
This article engages in a methodological experiment by using historical evidence to challenge a common misperception about internalization theory. The theory has often been criticized for maintaining that it assumes a hierarchically organized MNE based on knowledge... View Details
- June 2017 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
Organizing for Performance: Four Vignettes
By: Robert Simons
This case provides four examples of organizations with very different business strategies: Walmart, Starbucks, Harvard Business School, and Google. To support their varying strategies, each of these organizations requires a specific configuration to provide the most... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory
By: Ethan Bernstein
Observation is key to management scholarship and practice. Yet a holistic view of its role in management has been elusive, in part due to shifting terminology. The current popularity of the term “transparency” provides the occasion for a thorough review, which finds... View Details
Keywords: Transparency; Privacy; Observation; Tracking; Monitoring; Surveillance; Learning; Control; Disclosure; Process Visibility; Organizations; Theory; Information Technology; Relationships; Measurement and Metrics; Management Practices and Processes; Leadership; Law; Knowledge; Human Resources; Communication
- Article
Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows
By: Samer Faraj, Georg von Krogh, Eric Monteiro and Karim R. Lakhani
Online communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the... View Details
- June 2016
- Article
Wicked Problem Solvers: Lessons from Successful Cross-industry Teams
By: Amy C. Edmondson
Companies today increasingly rely on teams that span many industries for radical innovation, especially to solve “wicked problems.” So leaders have to understand how to promote collaboration when roles are uncertain, goals are shifting, expertise and organizational... View Details
- March 2016
- Article
Environmental Demands and the Emergence of Social Structure: Technological Dynamism and Interorganizational Network Forms
By: Adam Tatarynowicz, Maxim Sytch and Ranjay Gulati
This study investigates the origins of variation in the structures of interorganizational networks across industries. We combine empirical analyses of existing interorganizational networks in six industries with an agent-based simulation model of network emergence.... View Details
- 2016
- Book
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
A Normative Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategy, Know-How, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971), attempts to... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Deep Smarts as the Underpinnings of Dynamic Capabilities
By: Dorothy A. Leonard and Michelle Barton
Both ordinary and dynamic capabilities depend upon the deep smarts, i.e., business-critical, experience-based knowledge, held in the heads of an organization’s top talent. This chapter examines the links between individual and organizational capabilities and presents... View Details
- September–October 2015
- Article
Facts and Figuring: An Experimental Investigation of Network Structure and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces
By: Jesse Shore, Ethan Bernstein and David Lazer
Using data from a novel laboratory experiment on complex problem solving in which we varied the structure of 16-person networks, we investigate how an organization's network structure shapes performance of problem-solving tasks. Problem solving, we argue, involves both... View Details
Keywords: Networks; Experiments; Clustering; Problem Solving; Exploration And Exploitation; Knowledge; Search; Collaboration; Collaboration Structures; Transparency; Communication; Communication Technology; Information; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Performance Effectiveness; Theory; Information Industry; Information Technology Industry; Public Administration Industry; Technology Industry; Service Industry
- 2015
- Chapter
Innovating without Information Constraints: Organization, Communities, and Innovation when Information Costs Approach Zero
By: Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman
Innovation has traditionally taken place within an organization's boundaries and/or with selected partners. This Chandlerian approach to innovation has been rooted in transaction costs, organizational boundaries, and information processing challenges associated with... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities
How do firms create and capture value in large technical systems? In this paper, I argue that the points of both value creation and value capture are the system's bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved. Once the problem is... View Details
- November 2013
- Article
Learning from My Successes and from Others' Failures: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery
By: D. KC, B. Staats and F. Gino
Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
How the Zebra Got Its Stripes: Imprinting of Individuals and Hybrid Social Ventures
By: Matthew Lee and Julie Battilana
Hybrid organizations that combine multiple, existing organizational forms are frequently proposed as a source of organizational innovation, yet little is known about the origins of such organizations. We propose that individual founders of hybrid organizations acquire... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Reflected Knowledge and Trust in Global Collaboration
By: Mark Mortensen and Tsedal Neeley
Scholars argue that direct knowledge about distant colleagues is crucial for fostering trust in global collaboration. However, their arguments focus mainly on how trust accrues from knowledge about distant collaborators' personal characteristics, relationships, and... View Details