| The Role of Emergent Initiatives in Strategic Renewal |
| | Floyd, Steven W. | U. of Connecticut | steven@sba.uconn.edu | 860 486 3389 |
| | Wooldridge, Bill | U. of Massachusetts, Amherst | wooldridge@mgmt.umass.edu | 413 545 5697 |
| | Although it has become central in strategic renewal research, the concept of emergent strategic initiative has not received a great deal of theoretical scrutiny. Existing theory combines evolutionary, political and cognitive logics to characterize the renewal process, and this provides a useful framework for understanding the context in which emergent strategic initiatives develop. To date, however, theory has yet to offer a systematic explanation of (1) where strategic initiatives come from, (2) how they develop and (3) what they contribute to the development of organizational capabilities.
Building on prior research, this paper identifies four key processes associated with the development of strategic initiatives: interpretation, articulation, elaboration and ratification. Emergent strategic initiatives are born when a middle manager's interpretation of an idea links it to a strategic issue. Issues become initiatives when an informal social network forms around a central actor, who is also frequently a middle manager. As the middle manager articulates the idea, the tacit or subjective knowledge associated with it becomes more explicit. This reduces the initiative's reliance on a single actor and facilitates the elaboration of the emergent social network. Cooperation among sub-units triggers reconsideration of existing functional level knowledge and reconfiguration of patterns of coordination among sub-units. This leads to the development of new procedural knowledge in the form of emergent organizational routines. Finally, ratification involves both substantive links to official strategy and process links to the political dynamics within top management. |
| | Keywords: Emergent initiatives; Strategic renewal; Strategic initiatives |
| Ephemeral Resources and Firm Knowledge Stocks: The Case of the Contingent Workforce |
| | Matusik, Sharon F. | Rice U. | matusik@rice.edu | (713) 737-6139 |
| | In recent decades, the flexibility of firm boundaries has increased dramatically. The diverse array of corporate partnering creates conditions where firms rely on resources they have relatively little control over. These ephemeral arrangements provide easier access to external public knowledge, but at the same time may allow more rapid dissemination of a firm’s unique stock of knowledge, dissipating a firm’s source of competitive advantage. The purpose of this study is to investigate how ephemeral arrangements affect the ability of firms to accumulate, protect, and create valuable knowledge.
This article builds and tests a model that explicates the relationships between a firm’s use of contingent work in core value creation functions and its knowledge stocks. Contingent work in core functions was chosen because it presents the most direct view of the relationship between a firm and an ephemeral resource, unadulterated by extraneous firm-level variables related to the ephemeral resource.
Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, this research finds that the magnitude of contingent work does not exhibit a significant direct effect on knowledge stocks, rather how these ephemeral resources are integrated within the firm is significant. This research contributes to the strategic management field by addressing the delicate balance between increased access to stocks of public knowledge and the increased risk of private proprietary knowledge dissemination inherent in an age of flexible firm boundaries. This paper also makes a contribution by distinguishing theoretically and empirically between public vs. private knowledge stocks.
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| | Keywords: knowledge; firm boundaries |
| The Antecedents and Consequences of Innovation Search: A Longitudinal Study |
| | Ahuja, Gautam | U. of Texas, Austin | ahuja@bus.utexas.edu | (512)-471-7526 |
| | Katila, Riitta | U. of Texas, Austin | rkatila@mail.utexas.edu | (512)-471-3676 |
| | This study examines the antecedents and consequences of innovation search. We define innovation search as the firm’s environmental scanning activities aimed at improving its current technology, and use technological innovation and search literatures to build our arguments. This paper extends research on innovation search in three ways. First, prior research on innovation search has focused largely on the degree to which firms search across the landscape of possible technologies to develop innovations. In this study we identify two additional dimensions on which firms may differ in their innovation search behavior: the degree to which they search across the science-base, and across geographic boundaries. Second, we show that variations in search behavior on these three dimensions, technology, science, and geography, have an impact on the innovative output of firms. Finally, we examine the determinants of these three kinds of search. We ask, given the positive effects of these search behaviors on the innovative output of firms, why do all firms not adopt the optimal levels of innovation search. Thus, we build an integrated model of search that identifies its critical dimensions, and examines both its antecedents and consequences. The hypotheses based on this model are tested with longitudinal data. Finally, we discuss the implications of this research for evolutionary and resource-based theories of the firm.
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| | Keywords: search; innovation; chemical industry |
| Knowledge creation through organizational routines |
| | McFadyen, Ann | Texas A&M U. | amcfadyen@tamu.edu | (409) 845 9622 |
| | Cannella, Jr., Albert A. | Texas A&M U. | bert-cannella@tamu.edu | (409) 845-0329 |
| | Empirical research has indicated that the creation of new technological knowledge is a primary driver of economic and organizational growth. While the importance of organizational inventive activity has been established, we know little about how an organization may encourage and facilitate inventive activity. Research has indicated that inventive activity cannot be forced; however, it can be encouraged (Amabile, 1988; Woodman, 1995).
While the creative act of inventing itself cannot be routinized, the activity directed toward encouraging and facilitating inventive activity can be routinized (Nelson & Winter, 1982). This paper proposes organizational routines that encourage and facilitate inventive activity. Given that knowledge and knowledge creation are central to invention and that evidence exists that the majority of significant inventions are created by organizations, this paper emphasizes those organizational routines that influence the creation and development of the organizational knowledge base.
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| | Keywords: knowledge; inventive activity; organizational routines |
| Inventor productivity as a function of knowledge renewal |
| | McFadyen, Ann | Texas A&M U. | amcfadyen@tamu.edu | (409) 845 9622 |
| | Cannella, Jr., Albert A. | Texas A&M U. | bert-cannella@tamu.edu | (409) 845-0329 |
| | Inventions are an important source of economic and organizational growth, yet little is understood about the career productivity patterns of organizational inventors. This paper investigates inventive activity at the organizational inventor level from a knowledge-based perspective, building on existing creativity and human capital theories. While research on creativity and human capital recognizes knowledge as an important input, these approaches have treated knowledge as static. The knowledge-based view, in contrast, treats knowledge as dynamic. This paper develops propositions that integrate knowledge-based theory with creativity and human capital approaches to explain inventor career productivity patterns. |
| | Keywords: knowledge; invention; productivity |