Incumbent Responses to an Entrant with a New Business Model: Resource Co-Deployment and Resource Re-Deployment Strategies

The constructs of re-deployment and co-deployment have been central to discussions of scope economies in diversified firms. We argue however that these constructs are also significant in the context of single business firms. Increasingly, changes in technology and demand preferences have provided opportunities for entrants to attack incumbents with a different business model, one that may neutralize the incumbent’s advantage for at least some set of customers (e.g. Netflix versus Blockbuster). In such a context incumbents often respond by modifying their business model. We note that several of the business model-altering responses of the incumbent can be characterized in terms of co-deployment and re-deployment benefits and costs, where co-deployment benefits/cost apply to the scope economies/diseconomies in running multiple business-models within the same firm and re-deployment benefits/costs apply to the implications of moving assets from one business model to another. We then examine the set of strategic choices faced by the incumbent in competing with an entrant with a different business model. We identify five set of factors that are likely to influence the decision to choose between these alternatives – uncertainty spawned by the new business model, market segment targeted by the new model, the within-business-across-business-model co-deployment and re-deployment benefits and costs, the across-business co-deployment and re-deployment benefits and costs, and the incumbent’s prior performance history. Although some of these choices have seen some work, most remain relatively underexplored in the strategy literature. We highlight the potential for research in this area with a set of propositions that identify key conditions that should hold true for a particular strategic choice to be picked by an incumbent

How a firm's domestic footprint and domestic environmental uncertainties jointly shape added cultural distances : the roles of resource dependence and headquarters attention

Even though many firms conduct most of their business domestically, international management research has remained remarkably silent on the role of a firm's domestic footprint in its internationalization strategy. We shed light on that role by exploring how the size of a firm's domestic footprint influences the cultural distance that the firm adds to its country portfolio when expanding internationally. Integrating resource dependence theory and the attention‐based view, we hypothesize that a firm's domestic footprint has a negative relationship with added cultural distance (ACD), and that domestic policy uncertainty strengthens this relationship whereas domestic demand uncertainty weakens it. We find robust support for our hypotheses in a sample of the world's largest retailers covering the period 2000–07, indicating that a firm's domestic footprint and domestic environmental uncertainties jointly shape cross‐cultural expansion strategies. Our findings suggest that ACDs reflect headquarters executives' desire to avoid ineffective foreign expansions, hinting at possible biases in studies of the performance effects of distance

An effective scalable SQL engine for NoSQL databases

NoSQL databases were initially devised to support a few concrete extreme scale applications. Since the specificity and scale of the target systems justified the investment of manually crafting application code their limited query and indexing capabilities were not a major im- pediment. However, with a considerable number of mature alternatives now available there is an increasing willingness to use NoSQL databases in a wider and more diverse spectrum of applications and, to most of them, hand-crafted query code is not an enticing trade-off. In this paper we address this shortcoming of current NoSQL databases with an effective approach for executing SQL queries while preserving their scalability and schema flexibility. We show how a full-fledged SQL engine can be integrated atop of HBase leading to an ANSI SQL compli- ant database. Under a standard TPC-C workload our prototype scales linearly with the number of nodes in the system and outperforms a NoSQL TPC-C implementation optimized for HBase.(undefined

On the expressiveness and trade-offs of large scale tuple stores

Proceedings of On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (OTM)Massive-scale distributed computing is a challenge at our doorstep. The current exponential growth of data calls for massive-scale capabilities of storage and processing. This is being acknowledged by several major Internet players embracing the cloud computing model and offering first generation distributed tuple stores. Having all started from similar requirements, these systems ended up providing a similar service: A simple tuple store interface, that allows applications to insert, query, and remove individual elements. Further- more, while availability is commonly assumed to be sustained by the massive scale itself, data consistency and freshness is usually severely hindered. By doing so, these services focus on a specific narrow trade-off between consistency, availability, performance, scale, and migration cost, that is much less attractive to common business needs. In this paper we introduce DataDroplets, a novel tuple store that shifts the current trade-off towards the needs of common business users, pro- viding additional consistency guarantees and higher level data process- ing primitives smoothing the migration path for existing applications. We present a detailed comparison between DataDroplets and existing systems regarding their data model, architecture and trade-offs. Prelim- inary results of the system's performance under a realistic workload are also presented

The changing rationale for governance choices: early vs. late adopters of global services sourcing

This article studies how the logic of firm governance choices varies as a function of the time of adoption of particular sourcing practices. Using data on the diffusion of global business services sourcing as a management practice from early experiments in the 1980s through 2011, we show that the extent to which governance choices are affected by process commoditization, availability of external service capabilities, and past governance choices depends on whether firms are early or late adopters. Findings inform research on governance choice dynamics specifically in highly diverse and evolving firm populations

Differences that matter: hiring modes and demographic (dis)similarity in executive selection

Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have long acknowledged the importance of understanding the antecedents of top management team (TMT) composition. Yet, research on how and why firms select executives who are demographically dissimilar to incumbent TMT members remains limited. We take a step toward answering these questions by employing a sample of 575 individual-level executive appointments at 170 large European firms between 2005 and 2009. Drawing on the person-group fit perspective, we argue that firms are more likely to appoint socio-demographically dissimilar executives through internal promotion – while external hires are more likely to socio-demographically resemble incumbent top managers. Our results support the hypothesized relationship. They also show that this relationship is influenced by the level of administrative complexity and environmental uncertainty facing the firm. Overall, our theory and results enhance our understanding of ‘why top management teams are composed the way they are’, by highlighting the impact of internal and external hiring modes in the selection of demographically (dis)similar executives

Economic liberalization and the antecedents of top management teams: evidence from Turkish 'big' business

There has been an increased interest in the last two decades in top management teams (TMTs) of business firms. Much of the research, however, has been US-based and concerned primarily with TMT effects on organizational outcomes. The present study aims to expand this literature by examining the antecedents of top team composition in the context of macro-level economic change in a late-industrializing country. The post-1980 trade and market reforms in Turkey provided the empirical setting. Drawing upon the literatures on TMT and chief executive characteristics together with punctuated equilibrium models of change and institutional theory, the article develops the argument that which firm-level factors affect which attributes of TMT formations varies across the early and late stages of economic liberalization. Results of the empirical investigation of 71 of the largest industrial firms in Turkey broadly supported the hypotheses derived from this premise. In the early stages of economic liberalization the average age and average organizational tenure of TMTs were related to the export orientation of firms, whereas in later stages, firm performance became a major predictor of these team attributes. Educational background characteristics of teams appeared to be under stronger institutional pressures, altering in different ways in the face of macro-level change

Five configurations of opportunism in international market entry

We investigate the conditions under which opportunism occurs in international market entry. Examining 133 entries into new markets by 38 Chinese exporters, we uncover instances of opportunistic behaviour on the part of importers. We study five variables affecting such behaviour: managerial experience, market entry share, market distance, young age, and network size. While we find no single variable on its own associated with opportunism, we do find that in concert they form five configurations of opportunism. In one configuration, even older firms with experienced managers and a large network are subject to partners behaving opportunistically when they are entering a distant market. We conclude that simplistic predictions based on the presence of a single antecedent should make way for a configurational approach whereby a set of conditions must be in place for opportunism to materialize