Team Familiarity and Productivity in Cardiac Surgery Operations: The Effect of Dispersion, Bottlenecks and Task Complexity

Fluid teams are commonly used by a variety of organizations to perform similar and repetitive yet highly critical and knowledge-intensive tasks. Such teams operate for a limited time, after which they dissolve and some of their members may work together again as part of another team. Using a granular dataset of 6,206 cardiac surgeries from a private hospital in Europe over seven years, our study offers a new and detailed account of how team familiarity (i.e., shared work experience) influences team productivity. We highlight the role of nuanced team composition dynamics beyond average team familiarity. We observe that teams with high dispersion of pairwise familiarity exhibit lower team productivity, and the existence of a "bottleneckpair" may significantly hinder overall knowledge transfer capability, thus, productivity of fluid teams. In addition, we find that the higher the percentage of familiarity gained from complex tasks, the higher the productivity of the team. Finally, our results suggest that the positive effect of average team familiarity on productivity is enhanced when performing more complicated tasks. Our study provides new operational insights to improve productivity of fluid teams with better team composition strategies

How Temporary Assignments Boost Innovation

When front-line manufacturing employees are exchanged between company sites, they contribute more valuable ideas

Workforce Mobility and Innovation Outcomes

Employee ideas are a valuable starting point to improve operational efficiency. Organizations therefore systematically tap into employee knowledge. In this paper we empirically investigate how moves between problems and sites affect the innovation value created by employee ideas for the organization. We document that the dynamic effects of problem switches differ fundamentally from the effects of site switches: The innovation outcomes of problem switching employees follow a concave inverse u-shaped pattern, whereas the innovation outcomes of site switching employees follow a convex u-shaped pattern over time. Our findings first contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of workforce mobility and its effects on innovation outcomes. Furthermore, using an evolutionary lens, we develop a search-based framework that coherently explains the dynamics of innovation outcomes. We thus contribute to search theory by theoretically linking worker mobility, search behaviour and innovation outcomes

Product Development in Crowdfunding: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Problem definition: Crowdfunding goes beyond raising funds. Entrepreneurs often use crowdfunding to solicit feedback from customers in order to improve their products, and may therefore prefer to launch their crowdfunding campaigns using basic versions of their products with fewer features. However, customers may not be persuaded by a campaign if the product appears to be underdeveloped. In view of this trade-off, a key question for entrepreneurs is how much to develop a product before launching a crowdfunding cam- paign. / Methodology/results: Analyzing a game-theoretical model and testing its predictions empirically, we study: 1) how the development level of a product at campaign launch, measured by the initial number of product features, in uences whether customers will make comments that help entrepreneurs improve the product; 2) whether entrepreneurs continue to improve the product during the campaign; and 3) whether the campaign is successful. We show that, as the number of product features at campaign launch increases, the likelihood that customers will make comments and that the product will be improved during the campaign first increases but then decreases. Furthermore, the likelihood of campaign success first increases but then decreases with the number of product features at campaign launch. Finally, by analyzing the interactions between customer feedback, product improvement, and campaign success, we show that customer feedback motivates entrepreneurs to improve the product during the campaign. Moreover, entrepreneurs should take account of the initial number of features and customer feedback when improving the product, because oth- erwise product improvements can harm campaign success. / Managerial implications: Our study provides practical insights on how entrepreneurs can use crowdfunding to aid product development and improve- ment. Specifically, entrepreneurs should avoid overdeveloping their products before crowdfunding campaigns because, as well as decreasing the chance of campaign success, this could hinder their ability to save devel- opment costs (e.g., market research costs) through involving customers in product development

The Role of Customer Investor Involvement in Crowdfunding Success

Entrepreneurs increasingly use reward-based crowdfunding to finance innovation projects through a large number of customer investments. The existing academic literature has predominantly studied factors that drive crowd investments and whether crowdfunding predicts market success. However, we argue that the involvement of customers goes beyond the provision of capital. As investors, customers enter into a principal–agent relationship with entrepreneurs. Thus, entrepreneurs are often faced with a crowd of customer investors who try to influence product development. We show that entrepreneurs can benefit from this influence, because customer investors provide some of the support usually received from institutional investors. Greater involvement from customer investors thus increases funding success. This holds when we control for creator ability and project quality. The effect is driven by customers’ influence on product development and the reduction in agency costs for prospective customers. We also link the involvement of customer investors during crowdfunding to the crowdsourcing literature and show that its positive effect is augmented by the elicitation of external information through distant search