Competitive Implications of Interfirm Mobility

This paper examines the competitive consequences of interfirm mobility. Because the loss of key members (defined as top decision makers) to competing firms may amount to a replication of a firm’s higher-order routines, we investigate the conditions under which interfirm mobility triggers transfer of routines across organizational boundaries. We examine membership lists pertinent to the Dutch accounting industry to study key member exits and firm dissolutions over the period 1880–1986. We exploit information on the type of membership migration (individual versus collective) and the competitive saliency of the destination firm as inferred from the recipient status (incumbent versus start-up) and its geographic location (same versus different province). The dissolution risk is highest when collective interfirm mobility results in a new venture within the same geographic area. The theoretical implications of this study are discussed

Knowledge Flows Through Social Networks in a Cluster Interfirm versus University-Industry Contacts

Knowledge spillovers from a university to the local industry play an important role in clusters, but we know little about these spillovers. This paper examines empirically the extent of university-industry informal contacts. Furthermore, it analyses the characteristics of an engineer that acquire knowledge from informal contacts with university researchers. The university-industry contacts are compared with results for interfirm contacts. The research shows that the interfirm informal contacts are more numerous than university informal contacts. Likewise, knowledge is more frequently acquired from other firms than through university-industry contacts. Engineers that have participated in formal projects with university researchers and engineers that are educated at the university have a higher likelihood of acquiring knowledge from informal contacts with university researchers.Knowledge flows; informal contacts

"Interregional mobility, productivity and the value of patents for prolific inventors in France, Germany and the U.K"

Regional creative resources include inventors. Policies conducive to inventors’ productivity or attracting productive inventors promote regional development. We build on prior work on inventor mobility and productivity, analyzing German, French and British patents filed in the US by 7,500 “prolific” inventors (fifteen or more inventions). We measure inventor mobility across regions, companies and technologies. We analyze the relationships among mobility, productivity and value. We find geographic mobility increases inventor productivity in the UK and France but not in Germany and geographic mobility is not related to the value of inventions except in Germany where it has a negative effect.Patents, inventor mobility, prolific inventors

Occupations, Organizations, and Boundaryless Careers

[Excerpt] The central premise of this chapter is that, as organizations become less important in defining career pathways and boundaries, occupations will become increasingly more important. While occupational demarcations have always had a significant, albeit often unacknowledged, impact on individual career patterns, the significance of such demarcations for careers is likely to be heightened by current trends in employment relationships. In this chapter, then, I review the sociological literature on occupational labor markets and on the structure of professional occupations, in an effort to shed light on a number of issues associated with occupationally based careers. Of specific concern are three questions: What kinds of job and occupational characteristics foster such careers? When occupations become the major locus of careers, what are the consequences for organizations? And finally, what are some of the key career-management issues for individuals pursuing occupation-ally based careers

Winners and losers in the global economy : recent trends in the international division of labour and policy challenges

Globalised markets and production patterns offer favourable opportunities to raise world income. Yet globalisation also fuels conflicts about the distribution of welfare gains within and across countries. Various developing economies are poorly prepared to meet the challenge of fiercer competition on world goods and factor markets. In industrialised countries, low-skilled workers face mounting adjustment pressures. Multilateral trade liberalisation represents a "win-win strategy", with only a few possible exceptions in the short run. The neomercantilist notion that the removal of trade barriers is a concession to foreign trading partners is grossly fallacious. Income gains are mainly due to the countries' own liberalisation measures. Developing countries could have raised their share in world welfare gains if they had committed themselves more strongly to binding trade liberalisation during the Uruguay Round negotiations. Foreign trade and direct investment patterns reveal that the international division of labour is progressing not only in a regional context but also on a truly global scale. The opportunities for new competitors for foreign capital and technology transfers depend on domestic economic policies in the first place. Exogenous factors such as the recent revival of regional integration, autonomous locational decisions taken by multilateral corporations, and technological developments cannot be blamed for failures in benefiting from globalisation. The strikingly different economic performance of developing countries in globalised markets and production is clearly related to the progress made with respect to macroeconomic stabilisation, physical and human capital formation, and openness towards world goods and capital markets. Asian-type success stories could be repeated elsewhere, once governments have become aware that they can no longer pursue economic policies of their own liking. The Triad of the EU, Japan and the United States will come under fiercer adjustment pressure if more developing countries become involved in globalisation. Industrialised countries have little choice but to promote human capital formation in order to strengthen their comparative advantages in skill-intensive lines of production. Adjustment needs have been handled most effectively in Japan so far. By contrast, high unemployment in the EU, especially of low-skilled workers, appears to be the price that has to be paid for insufficient wage flexibility and structural change. --

Worker Training in a Restructuring Economy: Evidence from the Russian Transition

We use 1994-1998 data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to measure the incidence and determinants of several types of worker training and to estimate the effects of training on workers' interindustry, interfirm, and occupational mobility, their labor force transitions, and their wage growth in Russia compared to the U.S. We hypothesize that the shock of economic liberalization in Russia may raise the benefits of training, particularly retraining for new jobs, but uncertainty concerning the revaluation of skills may raise the costs, with an overall ambiguous effect on the amount of training undertaken. The RLMS indicates a lower rate of formal training than studies have found for the U.S., suggesting that the second effect dominates. Previous schooling is estimated to affect the probability of training positively, but the relationship is much stronger for additional training in the same field than for retraining for new fields, consistent with the hypothesis that schooling and training are complementary but become more substitutable in a restructuring environment. Foreign ownership of the firm also positively affects the probability of undertaking training, providing evidence of active restructuring by foreigner investors. Additional training in workers' current fields is estimated to reduce mobility and earnings, suggesting inertial programs from the pre-transition era. Retraining in new fields increases all types of worker mobility and has higher returns than those typically observed for training in the U.S., but it also raises the variance of earnings and the probability of employment, consistent with a search view of such retraining. Given the large returns to retraining, the efforts of Russian workers to learn new skills may increase as uncertainty is resolved and restructuring proceeds.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39715/3/wp331.pd

Disentangling Competition Among Platform Driven Strategic Groups: A Comparative Case Study Of Uk Mobile Payment Platforms

In platform-driven markets, competitive advantage is derived from superior platform design and configurations. For this reason, platform owners strive to create unique and inimitable platform configurals to maintain and extend their competitiveness within network economies. To disentangle firm competition within platform-driven markets, we opted for the UK mobile payment market as our empirical setting. By embracing the theoretical lens of strategic groups and digital platforms, this study supplements prior research by deriving a taxonomy of platform-driven strategic groups that is grounded on competitive attributes of platform- driven markets; namely interfirm modularity and strategic linkages