This paper’s argument is that founding team composition—in particular, members’ prior company affiliations—shapes new firm behaviors. Firms with founding teams whose members have worked at the same company engage in exploitation because they have shared understandings and can act quickly. Conversely, founding teams whose members have worked at many different companies have unique ideas and contacts that encourage exploration. In addition, firms whose founding teams have both common and diverse prior company affiliations have advantages that allow them to grow. The results suggest team composition is an important antecedent of exploitative and explorative behavior and firm ambidexterity. The terms “exploration ” and “exploitation ” have been used broadly to capture a wide array of firm actions and behaviors. The concepts are central to studies of adaptation, organizational learning, and

the Division of Research of Harvard Business School for generous funding. Errors remain our own. Patterned Interactions in Complex Systems: Implications for Exploration Abstract: Scholars who view organizational, social, and technological systems as sets of interdependent decisions have increasingly used simulation models from the biological and physical sciences to examine system behavior. These models shed light on an enduring managerial question: how much exploration is necessary to discover a good configuration of decisions? The models suggest that, as interactions across decisions intensify and local optima proliferate, broader exploration is required. The models typically assume, however, that the interactions among decisions are distributed randomly. Contrary to this assumption, recent empirical studies of real organizational, social, and technological systems show that interactions among decisions are highly patterned. Patterns such as centralization, small-world connections, power-law distributions, hierarchy, and preferential attachment are common. We embed such patterns into an NK simulation model and obtain dramatic results: holding fixed the total number of interactions among decisions, a shift in the pattern of interaction can alter the number of local optima by more than an order of magnitude. Thus, broader exploration is far more valuable in the face of some interaction patterns than in the face of others. We develop simple, intuitive rules of thumb that allow a decision maker to examine two interaction patterns and determine which requires greater investment in broad exploration

Given the crucial role of process modeling in product development (PD) project management research and practice, and the variety of models proposed in the literature, a survey of the PD process modeling literature is timely and valuable. In this work, we focus on the activity network-based process models that support PD project management and present a comprehensive survey of the literature published in the last decade. To organize our survey, we use a framework based on the

Regular Paper This paper provides a foundation for modeling the set of activities and their relationships by which systems are engineered, or, more broadly, by which products and services are developed. It provides background, motivations, and formal definitions for process modeling in this specialized environment. We treat the process itself as a kind of system that can be engineered. However, while product systems must be created, the process systems for developing complex products must, to a greater extent, be discovered and induced. Then, they tend to be reused, either formally as standard processes, or informally by the workforce. We distinguish and clarify several important concepts in modeling processes, including: product development versus repetitive business processes, descriptive versus prescriptive processes, activities as actions versus deliverables as interactions, standard versus deployed processes, centralized versus decentralized process modeling, “as is ” versus “to be ” process modeling, and multiple phases in product development. We also present a basically simple yet highly extendable and generalized framework for modeling product development processes. The framework enables building a single model to support a variety of purposes, including project planning (scheduling, budgeting, resource loading, and risk management) and control, and it provides the scaffolding for knowledge management and organizational

This article examines the relationship of employee perceptions of information privacy in their work organizations and important psychological and behavioral outcomes. A model is presented in which information privacy predicts psychological empowerment, which in turn predicts discretionary behaviors on the job, including creative performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Results from two studies (Study 1 single organization, N = 310; Study 2 multiple organizations, N = 303) confirm that information privacy entails judgments of information gathering control, information handling control, and legitimacy. Moreover, a model linking information privacy to empowerment, and empowerment to creative performance and OCBs was supported. Findings are discussed in light of organizational attempts to control employees through the gathering and handling of their personal information. Information Privacy in Organizations 3 Information Privacy in Organizations: Empowering Creative and Extra-role Performance Information privacy concerns are growing amongst workers who face increasingly invasive information collection and dissemination demands from their organizations. At the same

This article examines the relationship of employee perceptions of information privacy in their work organizations and important psychological and behavioral outcomes. A model is presented in which information privacy predicts psychological empowerment, which in turn predicts discretionary behaviors on the job, including creative performance and organizational citizenship behavior. Results from two studies (Study 1 single organization, N = 310; Study 2 multiple organizations, N = 303) confirm that information privacy entails judgments of information gathering control, information handling control, and legitimacy. Moreover, a model linking information privacy to empowerment, and empowerment to creative performance and OCBs was supported. Findings are discussed in light of organizational attempts to control employees through the gathering and handling of their personal information. Information Privacy in Organizations 3 Information Privacy in Organizations: Empowering Creative and Extra-role Performance Information privacy concerns are growing amongst workers who face increasingly invasive information collection and dissemination demands from their organizations. At the same time, organizations have an increasing need to monitor and control members who may (either

Policy makers must choose from a vast and diverse set of policy instruments when stimulating innovation in low-carbon energy technologies is a goal. Drawing on earlier debates in the economics of innovation, energy technology studies frequently distinguish between “demand pull,” government actions that enlarge the market for a new technology, and “technology push,” those that influence the supply of new knowledge. While many have criticized the reduction of the complex process of innovation to two causal factors, the notion per se that policy can induce investment—and consequent improvements—in technologies by creating markets for them enjoys support from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This paper uses the case of wind power in California from 1975 to 2001 to evaluate this hypothesis. Both the California state and U.S. federal governments implemented several demand-side policies relevant to wind power. By increasing the profitability of wind power, these incentives stimulated rapid investment in and diffusion of the technology. They also provided opportunities for important incremental improvements in the technology through learning-by-using. Demand created by these policies was less effective in stimulating inventive activity, as measured with patents; patenting activity declined as investment in new wind power development increased during the mid-1980s. Analysis of the most frequently cited patents shows that their decline during that period is almost entirely attributable to a precipitous drop in patents that provided alternatives to the increasingly dominant 3-blade, upwind, horizontal-axis design.

Technological diversification at the level of the firm, i.e. the expansion of a firm’s technology base into a wide range of technology fields, is found to be a prevailing phenomenon in all three major industrialized regions: US, Europe and Japan, prompting the term multi-technology corporation. Whereas previous studies have provided insights into the composition of technology portfolios of multi-technology firms, little is known about the link between technological diversification and firms ’ technological performance. Against a backdrop of the technology and innovation management literature, this article investigates the relationship between technological diversification and technological performance, taking into account the moderating role of technological coherence in firms ’ technology portfolios. Hereby, technological coherence is defined as the degree to which technologies in a technology portfolio are technologically related. In order to measure the technological coherence of portfolios, a measure of technological relatedness of technology fields is constructed based on patent citation patterns found in 450,000 EPO patent grants. Two hypotheses are presented in this article: (1) Technological diversification has an inverted U-shaped relationship with technological performance; and (2) Technological coherence moderates the relationship between technological diversification and technological performance positively. These hypotheses are tested empirically using a panel dataset (1995-2003) on patent

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And I really mean it! This paper is still very much in a preliminary state – more the sketch of a paper than the finished thing. In particular, I am acutely aware that I have attempted to summarize – or at least draw from – several large and disparate literatures. In the process there is a very real risk that I have neglected important papers and/or mischaracterized existing research. If you find this to be the case, please let me know. I welcome your comments. 1 While there is widespread agreement in the strategy literature that organizational competencies are a potentially potent source of sustainable competitive advantage, our understanding of how they are developed and why they are difficult to imitate remains incomplete. This paper develops the hypothesis that many (most?) strategically important organizational competencies are the fruit of “relational contracts ” – implicit agreements both within and across firm boundaries that serve to support “the way we behave around here ”-- that have been developed through an evolutionary process that has taken both time and sustained managerial attention. We argue that the construction of a relational contract requires all parties to understand “the