Does technology and Innovation Management improve Market Position? Empirical Evidence from Innovating Firms in South Africa

There is a growing recognition of the central role of technology and knowledge management for market success of organizations. Little is empirically know, however, about this relationship. Drawing on the South African Innovation Survey, a unique dataset on innovative behavior of South African firms in manufacturing and services, this paper investigates the question to what extent and in which ways do technology and innovation management activities affect firms’ market position. Findings show that conducting technology strategy activities pays out. Moreover, especially a combination of internal and external technology audits seems to be beneficial for organizational performance

Untangling the effects of overexploration and overexploitation on organizational performance: The moderating role of environmental dynamism

Because a firm's optimal knowledge search behavior is determined by unique firm and industry conditions, organizational performance should be contingent oil the degree to which a firm's actual level of knowledge search deviates from the optimal level. It is thus hypothesized that deviation from the optimal search, in the form of either overexploitation or overexploration, is detrimental to organizational performance. Furthermore, the negative effect of search deviation oil organizational performance varies with environmental dynamism: that is, overexploitation is expected to become more harmful. whereas overexploration becomes less so with all increase in environmental dynamism. The empirical analyses yield results consistent with these arguments. Implications for research and practice are correspondingly discussed

Exploring Strategy Implementation Consistency Over Time: The Moderating Effects of Industry Velocity and Firm Performance

In this paper we empirically investigate the temporal development of a firm’s strategy implementation consistency (SIC), i.e. the alignment between firms’ resource allocation decisions (RAD) and their articulated corporate concept (Noda and Bower, 1996; Burgelman and Grove, 1996; Love et al., 2002; Mintzberg, 1978). Doing so, we test whether (1) SIC is more likely to increase or decline over time, (2) whether firms competing in (low) high-velocity environments in fact show different temporal patterns in SIC, and (3) whether overperforming firms succeed in conserving their level of SIC. For our analysis we draw on 6238 RAD of 20 publicly listed firms with European origin over a period of 4–6 years. Applying maximum likelihood ordered logit estimation, our results indicate that the likelihood of an alignment of RAD and a firm’s corporate concept decreases over time. In line with scholars’ perception of high-velocity environments, we find that the firms in our sample competing under such conditions show no clear trend in SIC. These firms tend to “zig-zag” over time – swaying off and pulling back to their strategic course independent of the timing of the announcement of a corporate concept. We also find that overperforming firms are unsuccessful in preserving their SIC at the same level over time. Based on the empirical findings the paper discusses implications for theory and derives suggestions for corporate level managers on how to balance SIC and strategic flexibility. Copyright Springer 2006corporate concept, resource allocation decisions, strategy formation, strategy implementation consistency,