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

Platform selection for complex systems: building automation systems

Automation systems for buildings interconnect components and technologies from the information technology industry and the telecommunications industry. In these industries, existing platforms and new platforms (that are designed to make building automation systems work) compete for market acceptance and consequently several platform battles among suppliers for building automation networking are being waged. It is unclear what the outcome of these battles will be and also which factors are important in achieving platform dominance. Taking the fuzziness of decision makers’ judgments into account, a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making methodology called the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process is applied to investigate the importance of such factors in platform battles for building automation networking. We present the relative importance of the factors for three types of platforms (subsystem platforms, system platforms, and evolved subsystem platforms). The results provide a first indication that the set of important factors differs per type of platform. For example, when focusing on other stakeholders, for subsystem platforms, the previous installed base is of importance; for system platforms, the diversity of the network of stakeholders is essential; and for evolved subsystem platforms, the judiciary is an important factor.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Economics of Technology and InnovationTransport and Logistic