Team Familiarity and Productivity in Cardiac Surgery Operations: The Effect of Dispersion, Bottlenecks and Task Complexity

Fluid teams are commonly used by a variety of organizations to perform similar and repetitive yet highly critical and knowledge-intensive tasks. Such teams operate for a limited time, after which they dissolve and some of their members may work together again as part of another team. Using a granular dataset of 6,206 cardiac surgeries from a private hospital in Europe over seven years, our study offers a new and detailed account of how team familiarity (i.e., shared work experience) influences team productivity. We highlight the role of nuanced team composition dynamics beyond average team familiarity. We observe that teams with high dispersion of pairwise familiarity exhibit lower team productivity, and the existence of a "bottleneckpair" may significantly hinder overall knowledge transfer capability, thus, productivity of fluid teams. In addition, we find that the higher the percentage of familiarity gained from complex tasks, the higher the productivity of the team. Finally, our results suggest that the positive effect of average team familiarity on productivity is enhanced when performing more complicated tasks. Our study provides new operational insights to improve productivity of fluid teams with better team composition strategies

Sequential Innovation in Mobile App Development

PROBLEM DEFINITION: In today’s highly dynamic and competitive app markets, a significant portion of development takes place after the initial product launch via the addition of new features and the enhancement of existing products. In managing the sequential innovation process in mobile app development, two key operational questions arise. (i) What features and attributes should be added to existing products in successive versions? (ii) How should these features and attributes be implemented for greater market success? We investigate the implications of three different types of mobile app development activities on market performance. ACADEMIC/PRACTICAL RELEVANCE: Our study contributes to the operations management literature by providing an empirically based understanding of sequential innovation and its market performance implications in mobile app development, an important industry in terms of size, scope and potential. METHODOLOGY: Using a novel data set of mobile apps in the Productivity category, we leverage text-mining and information retrieval techniques to study the rich information in the release notes of apps. We then characterize product development activities at each version release and link these activities with app performance in a dynamic estimation model. We also incorporate an instrumental variables analysis to substantiate our findings. RESULTS: We find that greater update dissimilarity (i.e., dissimilarity of the features and attributes of a new update from those of previous updates) is associated with higher performance, especially in mature apps. We also find that the greater the product update market orientation (i.e., the greater the similarity of the focal firm’s new features and attributes with respect to the recent additions of its competitors), the higher is the market performance. This finding suggests that the market rewards those developers who have a responsive policy to their competitors’ product innovation efforts. Our results also suggest that a rapid introduction of updates dampens the potential market benefits that the mobile app developers might gain from market orientation. We find no evidence of a beneficial effect of product update scope (i.e., incorporating features and attributes from other product subcategories) on market performance. MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS: Our study offers managerial insights into mobile app development by exploring the sequential innovation characteristics that are associated with greater market success in pursuing and implementing new features and attributes

Task Variety in Professional Service Work: When It Helps and When It Hurts

In a wide range of professional service firms, individuals perform a variety of tasks which are highly cognitive and knowledge intensive yet repetitive in nature, providing significant opportunities for learning. In addition, individuals in such environments tend to enjoy considerable discretion in managing when and how they perform their tasks. In light of these observations, we investigate task allocation and timing strategies that may enhance or inhibit learning and productivity for professional service workers. Specifically, we focus on the role of task variety. We use a detailed dataset of 3273 coronary artery bypass surgeries in a private European hospital over 7 years to examine the effect of concurrent and non‐concurrent exposure to task variety on learning and productivity on a focal task. We find that while concurrent exposure to variety has a positive impact on focal productivity, non‐concurrent exposure to variety has a negative impact on it. Our results also suggest that short‐term exposure to variety amplifies these relationships

How Temporary Assignments Boost Innovation

When front-line manufacturing employees are exchanged between company sites, they contribute more valuable ideas

The Role of Customer Investor Involvement in Crowdfunding Success

Entrepreneurs increasingly use reward-based crowdfunding to finance innovation projects through a large number of customer investments. The existing academic literature has predominantly studied factors that drive crowd investments and whether crowdfunding predicts market success. However, we argue that the involvement of customers goes beyond the provision of capital. As investors, customers enter into a principal– agent relationship with entrepreneurs. Thus, entrepreneurs are often faced with a crowd of customer investors who try to influence product development. We show that entrepreneurs can benefit from this influence, because customer investors provide some of the support usually received from institutional investors. Greater involvement from customer investors thus increases funding success. This holds when we control for creator ability and project quality. The effect is driven by customers’ influence on product development and the reduction in agency costs for prospective customers. We also link the involvement of customer investors during crowdfunding to the crowdsourcing literature and show that its positive effect is augmented by the elicitation of external information through distant search

Fixed vs. Flexible Pricing in a Competitive Market

We study the selection and dynamics of two popular pricing policies—fixed price and flexible price—in competitive markets. Our paper extends previous work in marketing, for example, Desai and Purohit (2004) by focusing on decentralized markets with a dynamic and fully competitive framework while also considering possible noneconomic aspects of bargaining. We construct and analyze a competitive search model, which allows us to endogenize the expected demand depending on pricing rules and posted prices. Our analysis reveals that fixed and flexible pricing policies generally coexist in the same marketplace, and each policy comes with its own list price and customer demographics. More specifically, if customers dislike haggling, then fixed pricing emerges as the unique equilibrium, but if customers get some additional satisfaction from the bargaining process, then both policies are offered, and the unique equilibrium exhibits full segmentation: haggler customers avoid fixed-price firms and exclusively shop at flexible firms, whereas nonhaggler customers do the opposite. We also find that prices increase in customer satisfaction, implying that sellers take advantage of the positive utility enjoyed by hagglers in the form of higher prices. Finally, considering the presence of seasonal cycles in most markets, we analyze a scenario in which market demand goes through periodic ups and downs and find that equilibrium prices remain mostly stable despite significant fluctuations in demand. This finding suggests a plausible competition-based explanation for the stability of prices

The Role of Customer Investor Involvement in Crowdfunding Success

Entrepreneurs increasingly use reward-based crowdfunding to finance innovation projects through a large number of customer investments. The existing academic literature has predominantly studied the process and the efficiency of these crowd investments. However, we argue that the involvement of customers goes beyond the provision of capital. As investors, customers enter a principal-agent relationship with project creators. As a result, project creators are often confronted with a crowd of customer investors who try to influence the development of product ideas. We show that project creators can actually benefit from this influence, as customer investors partly substitute for the support usually received from conventional investors. Greater involvement of customer investors thus increases the likelihood of funding success. This holds when we control for creator ability and project quality. However, the positive effect of involvement is lower for teams, because customers face lower agency costs when they invest in team projects. We also link the involvement of customer investors during crowdfunding to the crowdsourcing literature and show that its positive effect can be attributed to the elicitation of external information through distant search

Product Development in Crowdfunding: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Crowdfunding goes beyond raising funds. Entrepreneurs often use crowdfunding to solicit feedback from customers to improve their products, and may therefore prefer to launch crowdfunding campaigns for a basic version of their products with few or no enhancements (i.e., limited features). Yet, customers may not be persuaded by a campaign if a product appears too basic. In view of this trade-off, a key question for an entrepreneur is how far a product should be enhanced before launching a crowdfunding campaign. Analyzing a game-theoretical model and testing its predictions empirically, we study how a product's level of enhancement at campaign launch influences both whether an entrepreneur continues to improve the product during the campaign and whether the campaign is successful. We show that as the product's level of enhancement at campaign launch increases, the likelihood of product improvement during a campaign at first increases (because customers are more likely to provide feedback) and then decreases (because of increased production cost for the entrepreneur). Furthermore, although our theoretical model intuitively predicts that the likelihood of campaign success will always increase when an entrepreneur launches a campaign for a more enhanced product, our empirical analysis shows that the likelihood of campaign success first increases and then decreases. This counterintuitive result may be due to customers being overwhelmed with the complexity of highly enhanced products. Finally, while crowdfunding experts believe that products should be enhanced as much as possible before a campaign, we show that this is not always the best strategy

Workforce Mobility and Innovation Outcomes

Employee ideas are a valuable starting point to improve operational efficiency. Organizations therefore systematically tap into employee knowledge. In this paper we empirically investigate how moves between problems and sites affect the innovation value created by employee ideas for the organization. We document that the dynamic effects of problem switches differ fundamentally from the effects of site switches: The innovation outcomes of problem switching employees follow a concave inverse u-shaped pattern, whereas the innovation outcomes of site switching employees follow a convex u-shaped pattern over time. Our findings first contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of workforce mobility and its effects on innovation outcomes. Furthermore, using an evolutionary lens, we develop a search-based framework that coherently explains the dynamics of innovation outcomes. We thus contribute to search theory by theoretically linking worker mobility, search behaviour and innovation outcomes

In-House Globalization: The Role of Globally Distributed Design and Product Architecture on Product Development Performance

Changes in the global economy and technological advances are stimulating increased geographic distribution of new product design and development efforts. For large organizations that design and develop complex products, this geographic distribution has added a new layer of complexity to product development operations. In this empirical study of a large auto manufacturer, we examine the operational performance implications of splitting the design of vehicle subsystems across multiple geographic locations. Our results indicate that global distribution diminishes the chance of completing tasks on time and degrades subsystem design quality. Finally, by examining the interplay between subsystem centrality and global distribution, we found that higher centrality in the product architecture amplifies the impact of global distribution on subsystem error rates