April Franco

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER THROUGH INHERITANCE: SPIN- OUT GENERATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND SURVIVAL

We investigated how the knowledge capabilities of industry incumbents affected the generation, development, and performance of “spin-outs” (entrepreneurial ventures of ex-employees). Analyses of 1977–97 data from the disk drive industry supported our hypothesis that incumbents with both strong technological and market pioneering know-how generate fewer spin-outs than firms with strength in only one of these areas. Also, an incumbent’s capabilities at the time of a spin-out’s founding positively affect the spin-out’s knowledge capabilities and its probability of survival.

Swift and Smart: The Moderating Effects of Technological Capabilities on the Market Pioneering--Firm Survival Relationship

We extend the concept of first-mover advantage to the context of high-technology industries with multiple product generations, and propose that the notion of first-mover advantage needs to be viewed not only through a dynamic lens, but also in conjunction with technological capability. Our main finding is that first-mover advantages are best understood in tandem with the firms technological capabilities; early entry is beneficial only for pioneers that are technically strong. However, pioneers that are low on technological capabilities suffer from poor survival rates vis-a-vis market responders or nonentrants into new product generations.

Decentralized learning from failure

Abstract We study decentralized learning in organizations. Decentralization is captured through Crawford and Hallers [Learning how to cooperate: optimal play in repeated coordination games, Econometrica 58 (1990) 571–595] attainability constraints on strategies. We analyze a repeated game with imperfectly observable actions. A fixed subset of action profiles are successes and all others are failures. The location of successes is unknown. The game is played until either there is a success or the time horizon is reached. We partially characterize optimal attainable strategies in the infinite horizon game by showing that after any fixed time, agents will occasionally randomize while at the same time mixing probabilities cannot be uniformly bounded away from zero.

Incentives and the Structure of Teams

may, on their own, generate monotone matching predictions in the absence of complementarities or anti-complementarities in production technology. We also derive sufficient conditions on the primitives of the model leading to the optimality of positive and negative matching of team members.

What do I Take with Me: The Impact of Transfer and Replication of Resources on Parent and Spin-Out Firm Performance

Focusing on entrepreneurial ventures created by employees leaving a firm, our study examines the differential impact of knowledge transfer and knowledge spillovers on both parent and spin-out performance. While extant research often uses knowledge transfer and spillover interchangeably, our study distinguishes between the two based on the “rivalness” of the relevant knowledge. We theorize that both knowledge transfer (proxied by the size of the exiting employee team) and knowledge spillovers (proxied by the experience of the exiting employee team) will aid spin-out performance. However, knowledge transfer, being more rival, will have a greater adverse impact than knowledge spillovers on parent firm performance. Using U.S. Census Bureau linked employee-employer data from the legal services industry, we find support for our hypotheses. Our study thus contributes to extant literature by highlighting a key dimension of knowledge — rivalness — and the differential competitive dynamics effect of resources with varying degrees of rivalness.