Second-Order Competences And Schumpeterian Rents

The commentaries to our focal article were both interesting and stimulating. As we generally agreed with the major points raised in the commentaries, we use this response to frame an on-going tension point or challenge regarding team definitions, highlight a few unifying themes that weave through our initial article and the commentaries, and discuss the transition from research to informed practice. The past few decades have been exciting times for team researchers and practitioners, and the time is ripe for new energies and approaches. © 2012 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology

New Product Exploration Under Environmental Turbulence

This study identifies two organizational factors that foster explorative products, willingness to cannibalize and futureoriented market scanning, and examines whether the relationships of these factors with exploration are contingent on environmental turbulence in customer, competitor, and technological sectors. The study analyzes data from 145 U.S. public manufacturing firms to examine the relationship between the two organizational factors and the degree to which the firms pursue explorative new products-new products that are meaningfully distinct from competing alternatives. Results suggest that both willingness to cannibalize and future-oriented market scanning promote explorative new products. The relationship of willingness to cannibalize with explorative products is stronger under customer turbulence. In contrast, the relationship of future-oriented market scanning with explorative products is weaker under customer and competitive turbulence and stronger under technological turbulence. The study concludes that the two organizational factors promote explorative new products, but their effectiveness is contingent on turbulence in different sectors of the firm\u27s environment. © 2011 INFORMS

Overcoming the inertia of organizational competence: Olivetti’s transition from mechanical to electronic technology

This historical case study of Olivetti, the Italian office products firm, argues that technological competence becomes socially embedded in a firm over time as it is legitimized, backed by powerful agents, and supported by resource allocation. Paradoxically, these three building blocks of a competence—legitimacy, power, and resources—both promote inertia and enable change. Inertia can be overcome when firms employ three levers of transition: organizationally separating an emerging technology to protect it, co-opting legitimacy by using the new technology to serve the incumbent technology, and diverting resources for the emerging technology’s development. Over time, the emerging technology achieves enough legitimacy, power, and resources in the firm to overtake, and ultimately displace, the incumbent competence. We develop an integrative model of technology transition that contributes to literature on resources, dynamic capabilities, competence-destroying change, and ambidexterity