An important reason why individuals join groups or communities is to satisfy their needs for identity. Firms might exploit this societal tendency to gain a competitive advantage. Using the strategic approach adopted by Kiehl’s, a U.S. cosmetic producer and retailer, as a source of inspiration...

In recent decades, a new social condition has emerged, in which human beings increasingly seek to strengthen their identity by belonging to communities. The role of these communities as providers of identity may offer a powerful construct for explaining and interpreting a vast array of firm...

This paper seeks to explore the drivers of startups’ survival in turbulent industries, characterized by high rates of entry and exit, fragmented market shares, and a rapid pace of product innovation. Specifically, the paper aims to underscore the role played by post-entry product strategies,...

Drawing on the resource-based theory of the firm, this paper investigates the role played by firm assets both upstream and downstream, in the software and the hardware dimensions, to explain the rate of product introduction in open source software (OSS). Using a selfassembled database of firms...

This paper seeks to explore the drivers of startups' survival in turbulent industries, characterized by high rates of entry and exit, fragmented market shares, and a rapid pace of product innovation. Specifically, the paper aims to underscore the role played by post-entry product strategies,...

The paper analyses the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new niche in the software industry. Using a Chandlerian perspective, this work reports the main facts about firm entry and growth, with a particular focus on start-up strategies and actions. Since scale economies do not...

This paper analyzes the birth of the Encryption Software Industry (ESI), a new market niche in the software industry. This work will report the main facts of entry and exit process, focusing on firm post-entry performance, on the different phases of competition during the industry evolution, and...

This paper employs an original dataset for 146 US metropolitan areas to test some propositions that characterize two different models of organizing firms and industries: the managerial firm, epitomized by the work of Alfred Chandler, and the entrepreneurial system, recently highlighted by many...

This paper investigates the relationships between firm organization attributes, namely a structure á la Chandler, and their inward looking or exploitation attitude in R&D and innovation. We argue that because of sunk costs and learning processes an inward looking behavior is a consequence of...

This study analyzes incumbent entry timing decisions in new markets in the case of Encryption Software (ES). In ES first technological movers were slow to enter the downstream market, losing their initial advantages to the benefit of newcomers. This work tests the hypothesis that this...