Anant Mishra

Do Participation Strategy and Experience Impact the Likelihood of Winning in Unblind Innovation Contests

Innovation contests are increasingly adopting a format where submissions are viewable by all contestants and the information structure changes during the contest. In such an “unblind�? format, contestants must weigh the costs of revealing their submissions against the benefits of improving their submissions through emerging information. We take a closer look at how contestants solve problems in innovation contests with public submission of solutions—i.e., unblind contests, by examining the implications of their submission behavior for contest outcomes. We analyze the submission behavior in terms of three dimensions: the position of first submission by the contestant, the number of submissions the contestant makes, and the length of active participation by the contestant. The econometric analysis of a large dataset of unblind innovation contests and participating contestants indicates that, despite the potential for free riding and intellectual property loss from disclosure of submissions, contestants who have a lower position of first submission are more likely to succeed in the contest. Further, we find some evidence of a curvilinear relationship between a contestant’s number of submissions and her likelihood of success, indicating a potential “quality-quantity�? tradeoff in unblind innovation contests. Finally, our findings indicate that increasing the length of participation in a contest has a positive effect on a contestant’s likelihood of success. Departing from prior studies on innovation contests, where a contestant’s success is assumed to be a function of her prior experience and problem-solving skills, our study provides new empirical evidence that, in innovation contests with public submissions, the submission behavior of a contestant also plays an explanatory role in a contestant’s success.

Project Quality: The Achilles Heel of Offshore Technology Projects?

Technology projects today are being increasingly executed in project sourcing structures that span country boundaries. However, the performance implications of such offshoring efforts are often ambiguous vis-à-vis those that are executed within country boundaries. Further, little is known about project execution capabilities that may be central to improving the performance of offshore technology projects. This study attempts to shed light on the above issues using data from technology projects distributed within and across country boundaries. The study findings are twofold. First, a comparative analysis of project performance across 702 technology projects reveals that projects executed offshore realize significantly lower performance related to quality and technical goals compared with projects executed within country boundaries. Second, a subsequent in-depth analysis of the offshore technology projects in the sample highlights the enabling but differential performance effects of project execution capabilities. Specifically, we find that while risk management planning capability is central to improving project adherence to schedule and budgetary goals, agile project management capability is central to improving project adherence to quality and technical goals in technology projects executed offshore. The study concludes with a discussion of the findings, implications for technology research and practice, limitations, and directions for future research.

Exogenous Demand Shocks and New Product Introductions: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in India’s Vaccine Markets

This paper examines the relationship between exogenous demand shocks and market structure in India’s influenza vaccine markets. Using a novel dataset of detailed purchasing information for vaccines in the country, and exploiting the occurrence of the 2009-10 global H1N1 pandemic as an exogenous demand shock, we provide evidence of heterogeneous responses to the shock by domestic and multinational vaccine manufacturers in the influenza vaccine market relative to our control group of all other vaccine markets. We find that such a shock results in reversal of market structure for influenza vaccines in India, with a decline in market share of multinational vaccine manufacturers and significant gains in market share of domestic vaccine manufacturers. This reversal of the market structure is driven by increased innovation efforts by domestic vaccine manufacturers, whose effects persist even after the shock is over. Finally, we examine the role of targeted policy instruments aimed at stimulating innovation in domestic vaccine manufacturers. Our results remain robust to the use of alternative controls, synthetic controls, and various estimation methodologies. They provide new evidence regarding the role of demand shocks in creating differential incentives for domestic and multinational vaccine manufacturers to innovate in an emerging economy context. In addition, our results offer useful insights into the role of policy regarding pandemic preparedness in emerging markets facing adverse welfare effects from pandemics.

Aligning Partnering Strategy, Partner Governance and Partner Management in R&D Projects: The Impact of Contract Choice

Firms increasingly look outside their organizational boundaries to identify partners that can improve the effectiveness of RD whereas in others they are used to improve the performance or quality of the final product. How should these variations in partnering strategy impact the governance and management choices made within projects? We examine this question using data on 172 RD and second, how this choice subsequently affects the relationship between partner integration and partnering performance in the project. The performance measures studied here focus specifically on partnering contributions to project costs and product quality. Our results indicate that the choice of contract is a function of the partnering strategy for a project, more flexible contracts being preferred in projects that seek long-run capability-based benefits and have broader scope of partnering relationships. These choices, in turn, impact the benefits associated with partner integration; while higher levels of partner integration are always associated with higher costs, they enable partners to contribute toward higher product quality only in projects that use more flexible contracts. We further show that in projects where partnering strategy and contract choice are misaligned, partner integration has no impact on product quality despite increasing project costs. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and suggest new directions for future research.