Browsing by Author "Mitchell, William G"

How can firms gain competitive advantage from available technologies is a key question in strategy. In my dissertation, I develop new theory and provide evidence to show that a firm’s focus in selective technological areas may play a central role of creating competitive advantage in industries with rapid product turnover. Firms commit limited resources when selecting which technologies to develop, affecting the composition of their product portfolios and allowing some firms to subsequently capture greater value relative to others. I examine how firm attention to technologies within an industry affect their ability to swiftly incorporate them into products (essay 1); establish a theoretical foundation for firm-to-firm matching in the market for alliances (essay 2); develop an econometric methodology based on the insights from a firm-to-firm matching market (essay 3); and investigate how common technological interests attract partners in the market for interfirm collaboration (essay 4). Across four essays, I find that competitive advantage varies with the firm’s technological composition, its current focal area of technological development, and the collection of potential alliance partners. These findings contribute to understanding conditions under which a firm captures value from the component technologies scattered across its industry, and the key tradeoffs associated with allocating its technological focus.

This dissertation studies how organizations, when solving a specific problem, identify a set of potential solutions which we call "Search Space." By drawing from evolutionary theory and related literatures on strategic change, scholars have demonstrated differences in search mechanisms that explain how organizations choose solutions. However, we still face unanswered questions in understanding how organizations decide where to search, including how organizations identify a set of potential solutions or Search Space. This dissertation defines the concept of Search Space and identifies three factors - uncertainty, prior top managerial attention, and prior experience -that drive differences in Search Space. Additionally, this dissertation starts to disentangle why some firms' top managers are predisposed to paying more attention to new strategic areas by investigating the relationship between uncertainty and top managerial attention. Hypotheses first testing the effect of uncertainty, prior top managerial attention, and prior experience on size of Search Space, and second testing the effect of uncertainty on changes in top managerial attention are tested using data describing the U.S. renewable electricity sector from 2000 to 2010. We conduct both a cross-sectional analysis using data collected though a multiple respondent survey and a panel data analysis by tracking firms' memberships in renewable electricity trade groups. We find that uncertainty and prior top managerial attention increase size of Search Space, but related prior experience reduces size of Search Space. Additionally, uncertainty positively changes attention of top managers at headquarter units, but not at subsidiary units, towards renewable electricity. These results contribute to our understanding of how organizations start solving problems by deciding where to search; how the boundaries of top managerial attention direct Search Space; and how different types of top managers interpret uncertainty. Empirically, these results have important implications for how renewable policies should be structured and how firms develop new projects in the U.S. renewable electricity sector.

An abstract of a dissertation that examines different dimensions of legitimacy stemming from different sources, and how they condition the effects of each other. The traditional literature studies organizational legitimacy as a uni-dimensional phenomenon, however, there are multiple audiences with different systems of values that evaluate organizations and based on the fit with their values grant or withdraw legitimacy from the firm. This dissertation examines three different dimensions of legitimacy (i.e. social, market, and home country) and shows that they may substitute each other in affecting organizational outcomes. This is shown in a financial event study of additions and deletions from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, a qualitative study of the nature of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the emerging market of Russia, and a large-scale quantitative analysis of M&A deals, where the acquirer comes from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS).

Organizational researchers have long considered innovation a critical activity. While insightful regarding the nature of the innovation process and the rewards and risk associated with innovation, prior work has neglected the perspective that innovations function within a firm's wider product portfolio. This perspective enables assessment of when innovations truly generate value for firms and the mechanisms through which it does so. I propose a general theory for how innovation creates new value for a firm and apply this theory to understanding how new value from innovation is reflected in the changes it manifests in the diversity of a firm's product portfolio.

This dissertation addresses these issues by examining how innovation introductions drive two types of changes in the firm's portfolio - product portfolio and within-brand portfolio diversification - and how those changes influence the new value firms will capture. In addition, I examine the degree to which these outcomes are contingent upon the characteristics of the innovation itself. Thus, I address the inherent interdependencies in managing innovations while still capturing the influence of individual innovation characteristics.

The importance of this topic lies in both theory and practice. Theoretically, this work sheds light on the degree to which innovation value is a function of the value accrued to the innovation itself and its interdependency with the firm's overall product and brand portfolios. Practically, understanding how the new value from innovation incorporates the effect of the innovation on the firm's portfolio enables firms to grasp how decisions they make regarding innovation pipelines and in managing their overall portfolio influences their expected success.