Institutional logics and interorganizational learning in technological arenas: Evidence from standard-setting organizations in the mobile handset industry

© 2015, INFORMS. Conceptualizing standard-setting organizations (SSOs) as technological arenas within which firms from different countries interact and learn, we offer insights into the interplay between firms' institutional logics and their interorganizational learning outcomes. We suggest that firms' interorganizational learning is embedded in their macrolevel country contexts, characterized by more corporatist versus less corporatist (pluralist) institutional logics. Whereas corporatism spurs coordinated approaches, pluralism engenders competitive interactions that affect the extent to which firms span organizational and technological boundaries and learn from each other. We test our theory using longitudinal analysis of 181 dyads involving 26 firms participating in 17 SSOs in the global mobile handset industry. We find that interorganizational learning, as measured by patent citations, involving corporatist firm dyads significantly increases when the dominant logic within the arena is also corporatist. By making cooperative schemas more accessible, a dominant corporatist logic also enhances interorganizational learning across technologically distant dyads. When a pluralist logic dominates the arena, corporatist dyads learn less because firms in the dyad activate a contradictory logic that decouples them from their natural processes for interorganizational learning. These findings highlight the implications of institutional logics for interorganizational learning outcomes and provide insights into how firms attend to institutional contradictions in arenas that provide opportunities for interorganizational learning

Influence of Institutional Differences on Firm Innovation from International Alliances

This paper explores the contribution of the institutional perspective in understanding firm innovation returns from international alliances. It argues that formal and informal national institutions are of different nature, and give rise to explicit and tacit differences respectively between alliance partners. Partners exhibit different attitudes and abilities to negotiate and address such differences in leveraging the innovation potential of international alliances. As a result, we expect such differences to have distinct effects on partners' innovation performance: a) the effect of informal institutional differences is approximating sigmoid (S-shaped), with innovation performance slightly increasing first, then improving further and finally reaching a flattening plateau as informal institutional difference between partners increase; and b) the effect of formal institutional differences resembles an inverted U. Support is provided for both our contentions in a longitudinal sample of 110 UK biopharmaceutical firms. The paper contributes to existing understanding of firm innovation performance from international alliances, and broadly, to the management of internationalization in alliance portfolios

How national institutions influence technology policies and firms' knowledge-building strategies: A study of fuel cell innovation across industrialized countries

The central thesis advanced in this study is that firms' knowledge-building strategies can be usefully explained by the variations in their national institutional contexts. Using an inductive approach, a study of fuel cell innovation across the U.S., France, Japan and Norway demonstrates how countries' socio-political institutions - characterized by their levels of statism and corporatism - contribute to variations in technology policies pertaining to investment, collaboration, internationalization, and diversity. These technology policies are sources of advantages (and disadvantages) for firms, with implications for their knowledge-building strategies. The proposed theoretical framework is especially relevant in the context of industry emergence and R&D internationalization.Statism Corporatism Technology policies Knowledge-building Fuel cells

Public-Private and Private-Private Collaboration as Pathways for Socially Beneficial Innovation:Evidence from Antimicrobial Drug Development Tasks

Although public-private collaboration abounds in addressing societal grand challenges, little is known about its performance relative to private sector collaboration. Drawing from the innovation collaboration literature, and qualitative insights from interviews and contracts, we argue that collaboration risk impairs task performance of public-private relative to private-private collaboration. We attribute this lower task performance to two collaboration risk mechanisms: cooperation problems arising from misaligned social versus economic incentives, and coordination problems due to differences in organizational governance and processes. We test our hypotheses using the development history of 2496 antimicrobial drugs in the period 1995-2019. After accounting for endogenous selection into collaboration, we find that in general, public-private collaboration is less effective than private-private collaboration. However, this performance gap reduces for innovation tasks under high technological uncertainty, i.e., in the discovery stage and for developing new mechanisms of drug action. To probe the distinctive cooperation and coordination mechanisms, we also examine innovation task efficiency. Our findings reveal a wider gap in task effectiveness but not efficiency between public-private and private-private collaboration, suggesting more significant cooperation than coordination problems. Our theoretical and practical insights pertain to whether, when and how public-private and private-private collaboration offer viable pathways for socially beneficial innovation tasks

Platform ecosystems as meta-organizations: Implications for platform strategies

Research summary Platform ecosystems have spurred new products and services, sparked innovation, and improved economic efficiency in various industries and technology sectors. A distinctive feature of the platform architecture is its modular and interdependent system of core and complementary components bound together by design rules and an overarching value proposition. Accordingly, we conceptualize platforms as meta-organizations, or "organizations of organizations" that are less formal and less hierarchical structures than firms, and yet more closely coupled than traditional markets. To function successfully, however, platforms require coordination among multiple participants not all of whose interests are aligned. These organizational features of platforms raise many interesting and complex strategic challenges and hold implications for how platforms compete. In this paper, we discuss some of the most salient features of platform ecosystems as meta-organizations, specifically in terms of the sources of authority or power in the ecosystem, the motivation and incentives a platform creates to attract participants, and its governance and coordination structures. We then consider how papers appearing in this special issue inform us about the effects of these features on platform competition along three distinct dimensions: (a) with traditional incumbents as platforms enter and establish themselves in new markets, (b) with other platforms to secure an advantageous market position, and (c) with the different participants on the platform to share the value that has been created jointly. We close by identifying some promising directions for future research. Managerial summary Platform ecosystems have spurred new products and services, sparked innovation, and improved economic efficiency in various industries and technology sectors. A distinctive feature of the platform architecture is its modular and interdependent system of core and complementary components bound together by design rules and an overarching value proposition. This makes platform ecosystems an organizational form on its own (a "meta-organization"), neither possessing the hierarchical instruments of a firm, nor the largely uncoordinated decisionmaking of markets. Successful platform ecosystems require coordination among multiple participants with possibly conflicting interests. We discuss some of the most salient features of platform ecosystems as meta-organizations, specifically in terms of the sources of authority or power in the ecosystem, the motivation and incentives a platform creates to attract participants, and its governance and coordination structures. These features affect how platform ecosystems compete: i) with a traditional incumbent, ii) with other platform ecosystems, and iii) between different participants of the same platform ecosystem. The articles published in this special issue speak to different aspects of platform competition from the perspective of organization design