What’s in a name? Although Shakespeare claimed that a rose “by any other name would smell as sweet,” over the last five to ten years, significant research on category labels has shown the opposite to be true. This research finds that a company’s labeling strategy can have important...

Strategy scholars have long investigated entry timing advantages, in particular the mechanisms, environmental conditions and firm-level resources and capabilities that are associated with the success of early and late entrant competitors. Research has not been conclusive on the existence of...

Why some firms die while others survive? Survival has long been recognized as a basic goal for a manufacturing firm. At least in the long term, survival should be related to various measures of performance, such as market share and profitability. Advocates of population ecology have argued that...

This paper surveys recent research on the concept of a dominant product design. The point of departure for the survey is the idea that dominant designs occur which shift the terms of competition in an industry. A dominant design is defined as a specific path along a design hierarchy, which...

Services of different types have become increasingly important for product firms. While these firms mainly focus on products, managers and researchers lack a comprehensive framework to understand when to make significant investments in particular kinds of services. We identify three categories...

Technological innovation can disrupt the competitive landscape of an industry and the performance differential of incumbents and their challengers. The challenge for both is to adapt to their changing competitive conditions and environmental dynamics. Adaptation necessitates timely responses,...

This article lays out several hypotheses to establish a specific link between structural economic reforms and the competitive environment of firms. We test our hypotheses on data from the steel industry in three post-reform economies. We find that economic reforms tend to have a positive effect...

Most of the research on how platform leaders emerge, however, has neglected another factor: the potential role of services in this process. This chapter attempts to remedy that deficiency in the literature

This paper addresses the empirical verification of hypotheses that relate to the strategic use and implementation of manufacturing flexibility. We begin with a literature review and framework for analyzing different types of flexibility in manufacturing. Next, we examine some of the propositions...