The study of organizational adoption of administrative innovations has been generally guided by the imitation hypothesis. This hypothesis states that, within a relevant population of firms, an innovation is first adopted by a select few innovators who communicate and influence others to adopt it...

Based on a sample of 80 firms, this paper examines the risk/return performance of related and unrelated diversified firms at the level of accounting data. The results suggest that although on the average related diversified firms outperform unrelated diversified firms, related diversification...

Tacit knowledge and cumulative learning underlie an evolutionary theory of business firm development and strategy. As one test case of the theory, this study examines firms' applied research and development activities. Evolutionary theory suggests that firms within an industry will tend both to...

Organization structure acts as a lens on the environment, gathering information and shaping its flow through a firm to inform managers' choices. This shaping of information flow happens through an organization's operating units, which selectively process information from the environment, and...

This paper shows that business groups in emerging economies exert dual effects on innovation. While groups facilitate innovation by providing institutional infrastructure, groups also discourage innovation by creating entry barriers for nongroup firms and thereby inhibit the proliferation of new...

We present a theory for predicting how business firms form alliances to develop and sponsor technical standards. Our basic assumptions are that the utility of a firm for joining a particular standard-setting alliance increases with the size of the alliance and decreases with the presence of...

Modularity in product design and flexible supply chains is increasingly common in buyer-supplier relationships. Although the benefits of supply chain flexibility and component modularity for end-product manufacturers are accepted, little is known about their impact on suppliers. We advance the...

This paper compares the innovation performance of established pharmaceutical firms and biotech companies, controlling for differences in the scale and scope of research. We develop a structural model to analyze more than 3,000 drug research and development projects advanced to preclinical and...