Long Range Planning最新文献

It is often assumed that business model innovation drives firm performance, especially when firms operate in highly dynamic environments. However, despite the rise in research on business models, there is little systematic evidence of how various levels of environmental dynamism actually influence the performance effects of two basic types of business model innovation, namely replication (i.e., scaling up and improving an existing business model) and renewal (i.e., introducing a new business model). In this paper, we delineate a conceptual distinction between these two types of business model innovation and investigate how environmental dynamism impacts their performance outcomes. Based on a cross-industry survey that includes both SMEs and larger firms, we show that environmental dynamism weakens the positive effects of business model replication on firm performance. By contrast, in environments where the level of dynamism is intermediate, rather than high or low, environmental dynamism strengthens the performance effects of business model renewal. We discuss how these insights contribute to the business model innovation literature and how they can provide top managers with guidance on when and how to innovate a business model to turn it into a competitive advantage.

The age-related career concerns of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) have generated considerable research attention over the past 25 years. Despite theory that both very young and very old CEOs may have career concerns that encourage pursuit of short-term profitability at the expense of long-term investment, the vast majority of past studies have examined whether firms with CEOs who are nearing retirement undertake less long-term investment than other firms. Using 31 years of panel data for U.S.-based public firms making branded software products (SIC 7372), we hypothesize and find that the relationship between CEO age and R&D spending is curvilinear with firms managed by either younger or older CEOs spending less on R&D as compared to their middle-aged counterparts (i.e., an inverted U-shaped relationship). These findings are consistent with early career horizon theory and suggest that the career concerns of both young and old CEOs need to be considered by (1) researchers trying to understand the effects of CEOs on strategic decision making and (2) boards of directors attempting to focus CEOs on longer-term investment opportunities.

This study investigated the performance implications of private firms appointing their CEOs to serve as the firms' Communist Party Secretaries in China. Integrating insights from the corporate political strategy literature and institutional theory, this study used a panel dataset of Chinese privately controlled and listed firms covering 2008 through 2019 to investigate CEO/Communist Party Secretary duality as a special political strategy. The effect on firm performance was shown to vary depending on the institutional environment in which a firm operated. CEO/Communist Party Secretary duality enhanced firm performance for firms in less developed regions, where state logic was more influential. But it hampered firm performance in better developed regions, where market logic was more influential. Furthermore, indicators of firms’ inclination to state logic versus market logic were found to influence the effectiveness of CEO/Communist Party Secretary duality on firm performance.

Taking a social networks approach to the performance feedback model from the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF), we examine how a firm’s position within a strategic alliance network—and the structure surrounding that position—creates distinct pressures that differentially impact decision makers’ problemistic search intensity to social and historical underperformance. We test our predictions on a sample of 32,780 observations of the alliance networks of 4,726 firms and their R&D intensity from 2000–2015 and find results robust to numerous alternative specifications. Results indicate that highly centralized firms search more intensely in response to social underperformance and less intensely in response to historical underperformance. However, structural holes in the network reduce response intensity to social underperformance but increase response intensity to historical underperformance. We posit this is due to how altering one’s network cognitively shapes the perceived threat of status loss. Our study is both managerially and theoretically important, since firms increasingly rely on strategic alliances in the face of major disruptions including globalization, economic crises, and pandemics, and since strategic alliances are instrumental in shaping how firms set and respond to aspirational benchmarks.

We theorize that contingent on whether acquisitions put more emphasis on realizing cost versus revenue synergy, they require different degrees of post-acquisition integration due to their different resource reconfiguration requirements. We use data from 448 US-based acquirers and 1452 domestic acquisitions to find strong support for our theoretical conjecture. On the one hand, we find that for acquisitions that emphasize cost synergy more than revenue synergy, the degree of integration exerts a linear mediating effect on acquirer performance. That is, performance increases as the degree of integration increases. On the other hand, we find that for acquisitions that emphasize revenue synergy more than cost synergy, the degree of integration exerts an inverted U-shaped mediating effect. That is, performance is highest at intermediate degrees of integration. We advance research on post-acquisition integration by first demonstrating the importance of aligning the degree of integration with the synergy rationale in acquisitions (emphasis on cost or revenue synergy) to achieve high acquisition performance. Second, we introduce a novel, replicable approach for empirically operationalizing the degree of post-acquisition integration. We contribute to the resource reconfiguration lens of dynamic capabilities by showing that firms whose managers align the intended source of value creation with their approach to reconfiguration may achieve higher performance outcomes.

Open innovation can support firms looking to deploy strategic agility through product innovations during periods of market and technological change. However, existing research lacks a comprehensive understanding of the microfoundations that underlie strategic agility in the context of open innovation. We address this gap using an in-depth analysis of a firm's open innovation activities in support of new product development (NPD). Our analysis reveals that open innovation can help leverage NPD processes to drive technological innovations in response to changing market conditions. Under such circumstances, open innovation enables firms to deploy strategic agility by continually developing the product portfolio. Our study reveals six mechanisms that enable three mutually complementary practices of agility: knowledge-based agility at the firm-environment interface, behavioural agility in the firm's decision-making process, and organisational agility in the internal NPD process. We theorise the interplay between the mechanisms that constitute each practice and, in doing so, shed light on how they contribute to firm-level strategic agility.

Startups are crucial job creators and drivers of economic growth. Research on startups has predominantly targeted high-growth startups, while a comprehensive understanding of alternative growth journeys remains limited. Addressing this gap, we employ the theory of early firm growth and the time-calibrated theory of entrepreneurial action to examine 416 biotech startups. We use time series cluster analysis to unveil four heterogeneous new venture growth trajectories. These are characterized by unique timings, paces, and sequences of financial, human, and innovative resource-related activities. This study contributes to new venture growth research, particularly in science-based high-tech startups, with its nuanced understanding of diverse growth pathways, including intriguing notions of early failure, growth reversal, and high and moderate steady growth.

We explain why some traditional companies fail to sense new digital technologies when facing an identical scenario of digital transformation. Our objective is to investigate situations where discontinuous changes steaming from digital transformation are actively rejected, in the sense that they are not perceived as a strategic issue, i.e., a threat or opportunity. We draw on a mixed-method research design comprising two sequential studies. The first study is based on Delphi's Technique, which uses a panel of specialists to build the most likely future scenarios in the medium term for the language education industry. The second one is a qualitative comparative study with eleven traditional firms. Their senior executives were first asked for their spontaneous sensing of emerging technologies and later asked to provide their assessment of the most likely future scenarios. Our contribution lies in developing a conceptual model that proposes a structural “schema-driven” explanation of why firm-level structures – concrete, contextual and knowledge – can hinder perception and attention. Active rejection is prompted not by the absence of attentional structures, but by their specific attributes. This expands the dominant ontology of issues, asserting their existence independently of an organization's epistemological experience, and adds to the theoretical understanding regarding the constraints of the sensing dynamic capability in digital transformation.

Decision makers switch between analytical-rational and intuitive-experiential approaches to decision making, a phenomenon termed “cognitive gear switching.” Such switching is crucial for decision making in any organization. However, how decision makers switch between the intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational approaches, the interplay between these approaches and contextual factors remains poorly understood. We study this in the context of decisions made in ongoing product-development projects, where we distinguish between the decision-making behavior of project managers and other project members. We show that project managers are more likely to switch decision-making approaches when faced with project uncertainty and, in such cases, to favor the analytical-rational approach. As such, we define project managers as “conditional cognitive switchers” and the strategy used as “rationally stepping up.”

This study examines the effects of rival firms' negative earnings surprises on focal firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment. I theorize that rival firms' negative earnings surprises attract stronger scrutiny by shareholders in the focal firm, which exposes short-term pressure on the focal firm and makes it limit investments in socially responsible activities. I find that rival firms' negative earnings surprises decrease a firm's CSR engagement, and the effects are stronger when the focal firm has poorer financial performance, when market uncertainty is lower, and when rival firms that experience negative earnings surprises receive a greater amount of media coverage and more consistent news tone.