Environmental capabilities and corporate strategy

Green thinking that would have met with nothing but contempt three decades ago is now firmly on the agenda of corporate boardrooms. Green thinking is increasingly having a clear impact upon how companies in a wide range of sectors across diverse geographies formulate and implement their long-term strategy and short- to medium-term tactics

Why external R&D collaboration is not always good for business

For the past 15 years, companies have been told that they should open up their labs and learn to conduct research in more co-operative ways. Most authorities agree that collaboration helps bring in fresh perspectives, extends budgets further by enabling companies and institutions to pool their resources, and generally accelerates their pace of innovation. But does it really

Do industry downturns affect whether firms should innovate?

__Abstract__ It is almost taken as religious dogma that innovation in business is an inherently good thing. Adapt or die, we are endlessly told. Change or perish. Only the fittest will survive. But what form should innovation take

Aspiration formation and attention rules

Research Summary: The behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF) proposes that firm behavior is goal-directed and that organizational aspirations are a function of prior historical aspirations, past performance, and the performance of others. Despite the centrality of aspirations in the BTOF, little is known about aspiration formation and why firms favor one aspiration type over others, that is, attention rules. Drawing on the attention-based view, we posit that attention rules are shaped by environmental volatility over time and vary by locus of attention across firms. Data from US manufacturing firms managing their toxic chemical waste provide evidence for attention-rule adaptation. Managerial Summary: Firms must set aspirations, measure, and improve their toxic waste levels to avoid costly economic, regulatory, and environmental hazards. Although aspirations play a vital role in driving firm behavior, we still have limited understanding of how managers allocate their attention to various performance feedback during aspiration formation. We argue that attention allocation differs for managers across organizational hierarchy exposed to varying degrees of environmental volatility. Greater volatility of the business environment steers managerial attention from the performance of others toward their own historical aspirations. We also suggest that the attention of managers at higher levels of the organizational structure are directed from their own historical aspirations toward performance of others. We find corroborating evidence for our conjectures.</p

Postcards from the Edge: A Review of the Business and Environment Literature

Environmental issues, while of growing interest, have been outside the main focus of business scholarship. This position on the periphery may have been a good thing. It allowed scholars of business and the environment to consider unusual theories and evaluate overlooked phenomenon. In doing so, they created a body of research that provides new insights on two topics of mainstream interest -- the sources of competitive advantage and the origin and function of self-regulatory institutions

Market Feedback and Team Commitment in Radical Product Innovation Process

Previous research has considered how exploratory market learning processes moderate market and technological uncertainty in radical product development. Scholars argue that new product development (NPD) teams may increase the chances of success of radically new projects by acquiring, assimilating and implementing new information from market feedback. However, research has not tackled how information is assimilated by the NPD team and to what extent the process of information implementation occurs. In this article, we begin to fill the need for such research by investigating the interaction between internal team values (beliefs and possibly ideology) and external market feedback / information in radical projects. Via the lens of a 2-year longitudinal participant-observation study, we suggest that information assimilation is not automatic, but rather influenced in interesting ways by internal team values. The findings imply that shared team values act as a selective assimilation mechanism determining whether a development team will act on user feedback. Furthermore, the type of information (e.g., functional vs. conceptual feedback) processed by the development team acts as a moderating factor on the relationship between the team values and information processing

The influence of industry downturns on the propensity of product versus process innovation

This article sheds light on how industry fluctuations affect firms' propensity to innovate. We test two seemingly conflicting arguments that suggest how firms are more or less inclined to engage in innovation activities during industry fluctuations. By studying a panel of 622 Italian manufacturing firms during the period 1995-2003, we show how differentiating between product and process innovation may help reconcile the theory of opportunity cost of innovation with the cash-flow effect argument. We find that industry downturns are related to product and process innovation in different ways: firms tend to invest in product innovation rather than process innovation in downturns. The findings have implications for both theory (showing when the opportunity cost of innovation dominates) and research design (showing the importance of both the input and output measures in innovation studies and how they might influence the results

The Strategic Determinants of Tardy Entry: Is Timeliness Next to Godliness?

Previous research has considered extensively the causes and effects of market entry order and timing. It has neglected, however, the timeliness of such entry — the degree to which a firm delivered a new product on the date it had set for its release. In this article, we begin to fill the need for such research by evaluating some strategic explanations for why a firm might miss a scheduled entry date. We then test whether such “tardy entry” influences sales performance in the new market

Evidence on social and financial performance: mapping the empirical garden of forking paths

Worldwide, almost 30% of professionally managed assets are invested in funds that use social performance as a screening or selection criteria. Scholars have encouraged such investment by contending that social and financial gain are linked, but reviews of empirical research on the connection between social and financial performance have been inconclusive. In fact, six of the most influential articles on the subject reach conflicting conclusions despite using the same sources of data and appearing in the same peer-reviewed journal. Some scholars opine that no synthesis of these disparate findings is feasible, but we use new ideas from epistemology and statistics to show how it can be done. We conclude that the interpretation of the evidence depends on empirical assumptions, particularly about the location of meaningful variance: differences between firms imply a positive relationship, but year-to-year differences within-firm histories imply a negative association between social and financial performance."Accepted manuscrip

Remote collaboration and innovative performance:the moderating role of R&D intensity

Collaboration with geographically distant partners may enhance a firm’s innovative performance. In practice, however, this may be complicated as personal contacts are more limited so that effective search and transfer of remote partners’ tacit knowledge is hampered. We tested the potential moderating role of R&D intensity which, by indicating technology-oriented absorptive capacity, may mitigate the problems associated with remote collaboration. Drawing on survey data of 248 high-tech small firms, we find that remote collaboration is positively related with innovation performance, but at low R&D intensity, the relationship vanishes