Spinoff Entry in High-tech Industries: Motives and Consequences

Various theories have been advanced for why employees leave incumbent firms to found firms in the same industry, which we call spinoffs. We review the accumulating evidence about spinoffs in various high-tech industries, highlighting the central role often played by disagreements. Because existing theories have ignored them, we develop the foundations of a model of spinoff formation driven by disagreements. Doing so proves to be rather challenging, because disagreements are not possible among rational actors that talk to each other. We introduce a minimal degree of non-rationality, based on the concept of solipsism, and ask whether such a concept is capable of generating predictions consistent with the empirical literature.Spinoffs, Technological change, learning, disagreements

Submarkets and the Evolution of Market Structure

We construct a model of industry evolution in which the central force for change is the creation and destruction of submarkets. Firms expand when they are able to exploit new opportunities that arrive in the form of submarkets; they contract and ultimately exit when the submarkets in which they operate are destroyed. This simple framework can transparently explain a wide range of well-known regularities about industry dynamics, most notably the subtle relationships between size, age, growth, and survival. Data on the laser industry, where submarkets are prominent, further illustrate the ability of the model to explain distinctive patterns in the evolution of industries and firms.Spinoffs, firm growth, survival, firm age, market structure, industry evolution, technological change

Disagreements and Intra-Industry Spinoffs

A growing empirical literature on spinoff formation has begun to reveal some striking regularities about which firms are most likely to spawn spinoffs, when they are most likely to spawn them, and the relationship between the quality of the parent firm and its spinoffs. Deeper investigations into the causes of spinoffs have highlighted the importance of strategic disagreements in driving some employees to resign and found a new venture. Motivated by this literature, we construct a new theory of spinoff formation driven by strategic disagree-ments, and explore how well it explains the emerging empirical regularities.Spinoffs, learning, strategic disagreement