Long Range Planning最新文献

Digitalization allows new entrants to enter and transform industries with new technologies or business models. Often, these new entrants introduce digital platforms that modify prevalent value creation and capture mechanisms to allow them to take on powerful keystone positions. While prior research has mostly analysed the organizational consequences for firms, we follow a growing field of interest studying the effects of digital platforms on business ecosystems and explore when and how platformization of a business ecosystem occurs. Our study of the platformization of the Dutch music industry from the 1990s to 2016 makes two contributions. First, we identify two mechanisms that drive the platformization of business ecosystems: digital transaction platforms reconfigure value capture as well as value creation, and translators – a new actor-type proficient in digital technologies – emerge that help incumbent keystone actors translate physical products into digital offerings. Second, we theorize this process as business ecosystem envelopment; a viable strategy for digital transaction platforms to absorb a traditional business ecosystem's focal offering without taking over its functionality.

Research on contractual governance has traditionally viewed exchange hazards as having mutual effects on contractual design at the transaction level. To advance our understanding of contracting decisions in interorganizational relationships, I depart from the traditional emphasis on the mutual aspects of interorganizational relationships by examining how exposure to idiosyncratic exchange hazards may impact the divergent contractual arrangement interests of each side of the dyad. Viewing the locus of exchange hazards and contract design as dyadic broadens the conventional emphasis on the add-on perspective of governing relationships to further emphasize how excluding contractual rights selectively may be an alternative way for controlling the threat of exchange hazards. Through an analysis of franchise disclosure documents and contracts for 136 restaurant franchise systems in the U.S., I found that, when confronted with exchange hazards, a firm can strengthen its own protection not only by enhancing contractual rights in its own interests but also by limiting contractual rights in favor of its partner. With a dyadic perspective, my paper sheds new light on the discriminating alignment principle and generates new insights into the strategic implications of intentionally leaving gaps in contracts.

Numerous scholars have suggested that the global technology-intensive sector has become hypercompetitive, yet few have tested this empirically. Those that have find seemingly conflicting evidence. Applying commonly used measures, we explore whether this could be due to hypercompetition being more time and context specific than previously thought. Based on data from the United States, Europe, Japan, and China covering 1980–2018, we find no indication of a generalized increase in business performance volatility in this sector across regions. We do find a declining stability in the performance of Japanese firms over the study period, but in US firms only leading up to the burst of the dotcom bubble. A structural break analysis helps us conclude that hypercompetition is a phenomenon limited in both location, time, and industry, linked to industry breakpoints across its life cycle.

Organizational members must constantly confront and manage numerous paradoxical tensions inherent in organizational life, such as exploration and exploitation. Although prior research suggests that a paradox mindset helps individuals navigate such tensions, we know little about how paradoxical leaders might engender such a mindset in their followers. To shed light on this issue, we differentiate between cognitive and behavioral influences on followers' paradox mindset development. Drawing on primary data from 273 employees, our study indicates that the two influences are interrelated, with behavioral mechanisms mediating the effects of cognitive mechanisms. Our study advances extant theory by providing insights into how paradoxical leaders guide employees to situationally engage with specific paradoxical tensions and influence followers’ paradox mindset in general.

Although many cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) by emerging-market multinationals (EMMs) are aimed at improving domestic operating performance, the conditions under which such CBAs are the most effective have been underexplored. Drawing on global strategy research on resource recombination and organizational learning, we propose that the effectiveness of domestic-improvement oriented CBAs crucially depends on EMMs' cross-cultural experience, as EMMs apply different forms of resource recombination to such CBAs as a function of that experience, with varying degrees of success. Specifically, we hypothesize a U-shaped relationship between an EMM's cross-cultural experience and the domestic productivity growth it realizes from a domestic-improvement oriented CBA, and that this relationship is steeper for acquisitions involving more intensive integration or relatively larger targets but flatter for acquirers from countries with larger institutional voids. Measuring both the depth and breadth of firms' cross-cultural experience, we obtain support for our hypotheses in a sample of 423 domestic-improvement oriented CBAs by manufacturing firms from 13 emerging economies, thereby shedding light on what determines the effectiveness of such CBAs.

Access to unique knowledge of a target firm is the strategic rationale for many firm acquisitions with the expectation of improving the acquirer's innovation performance. We argue that the acquisition price reflects opportunities for value creation through innovation and investigate whether acquirers pay not just for the target firm's knowledge but also for the opportunity to access localized knowledge when targets are embedded in the knowledge flows of their region. Accordingly, we integrate embeddedness theory with literature on the expectations for knowledge-based value creation in M&A. We hypothesize that target firms that are highly embedded in local knowledge flows have higher acquisition prices. Using data on 520 technology-oriented firm acquisitions in Europe between 2001 and 2010, we find that the acquisition price increases with the target firm's local embeddedness. The effects are weaker when an acquirer's knowledge base is closely related to the localized knowledge and stronger when the target's knowledge base is closely related to the localized knowledge, suggesting that local embeddedness conditions the ability of acquirer and target to absorb localized knowledge.

This study investigates whether and when differences in the financial and fiscal regulatory systems between the countries of acquirers and targets that engage in cross-border M&As influence rivals' corporate responses. Drawing on the institutional arbitrage and competitive dynamics logics, we argue that cross-border M&As that provide opportunities for financial institutional gains for the targets and fiscal institutional gains for the acquirers pose a threat to the rivals and hence provoke an increase in the number of rivals' corporate responses. Additionally, we argue that the effect of cross-border M&As providing financial and fiscal institutional arbitrage opportunities on the number of rivals' corporate responses gets stronger with rivals' awareness, motivation, and capability to respond. An analysis of a unique dataset of rivals’ corporate activities before and after large horizontal cross-border M&As of their competitors in the manufacturing industry between 1999 and 2014 provides support for our main theoretical arguments and provides some contingent considerations.

The survival and prosperity of firms are contingent on their ability to constantly adjust to the state and dynamics of their environments by swiftly embracing the right combination of generic exploration and exploitation strategies. We propose a novel theoretical model linking the pursuit of exploration and exploitation approaches with firm failure in the medium term, stressing the role of the firm life cycle that substantively shapes the underlying relationships. The model is empirically tested using the firm-level data from a large panel dataset from 1988 to 2019 across multiple industries, revealing the moderating impact of the five stages of the firm life cycle (and the transition period between them) on the relation between exploration/exploitation strategies and the likelihood of firm failure. The findings indicate that exploration has a significant negative impact on the likelihood of firm failure during the growth, maturity, and transition stages; however, it significantly increases the likelihood of firm failure in the introduction, shakeout, and decline stages. Exploitation, on the other hand, has a significant negative impact on the likelihood of firm failure in the introduction and maturity stages yet amplifies the probability of failure in the transition phase.

This study addresses the question of how strategists use intuiting practices in the process of sensing, navigating and creating strategic opportunities. Existing literature highlights the significant role and nature of intuition in strategy from a theoretical cognitive perspective, but does not examine intuition empirically as a practice utilised by strategists. We undertook a two-year longitudinal study of seven strategists in high-technology firms as they attempted to progress new strategic opportunities. Using abductive analysis of the resulting data, we found that when navigating novel opportunities the practitioners’ intuiting practices were predominantly based on unfolding creative and social types of intuition, as opposed to a rapid expertise-based intuition, previously thought to be the dominant type. We extend existing typologies to propose a dynamic cyclic model of unfolding intuiting practice in the opportunity navigation process. This model draws on dual process theory and includes phases of intimation, investigation, validation and incubation. We found that strategists cycle through these different phases in order to navigate novel spaces, leading to continuation or abandonment of the opportunity development.

Intra-industry alliance networks provide a firm with both collaborative opportunities and competitive challenges. When forming alliance networks within a particular industry, firms need to consider to which extent they compete in the same markets with their alliance network partners, who are also their industry peers. However, previous literature has not exhaustively addressed the antecedents of a firm's competitive behavior with their alliance network peers – i.e., a phenomenon we label ego-network competitiveness. This study draws on extensive panel data from the top global pharmaceuticals to examine this question. Combining behavioral and network perspectives, we test two competing hypotheses on how ego-network competitiveness varies relative to performance feedback and whether structural prominence moderates this relationship. Our results show that performance above and below aspirations increases ego-network competitiveness through high-intensity responses (i.e., problemistic and slack search). We also find that performance above aspirations increases ego-network competitiveness for firms with high structural prominence.