Aseem Kaul

Structural Recombination and Innovation: Unlocking Intraorganizational Knowledge Synergy Through Structural Change

This paper examines how structural recombination of business units within a firm impacts subsequent firm innovation. We argue that structural recombination is both a means for firms to unlock the potential for intraorganizational knowledge recombination and a source of disruption to the firms existing knowledge resources, so that the overall effect of structural recombination on innovation will depend on the balance between these two effects. Structural recombination will have a positive effect on innovation where there are substantial intraorganizational knowledge synergies, where path dependence is low, and where knowledge resources are of high quality, limiting disruption. Results from a 20-year panel of 71 firms operating in the U.S. medical sector confirm these arguments. The study thus provides a contingent view of the effects of structural recombination on firm innovation while highlighting the role of structural recombination in realizing untapped knowledge synergies within the firm.

Entrepreneurial Action, Unique Assets, and Appropriation Risk: Firms as a Means of Appropriating Profit from Capability Creation

This paper examines organizational boundary choice from an entrepreneurial perspective. Entrepreneurs create new profit opportunities by recombining existing assets into novel combinations based on their subjective judgment under conditions of uncertainty. In doing so, they become vulnerable to ex post appropriation by owners of uniquely complementary assets, especially where ex ante uncertainty translates into ex post causal ambiguity. Firms are a means by which entrepreneurs overcome this problem, maximizing the appropriation of pure profits from their actions. The paper formalizes this insight in an integrative model of entrepreneurial governance choice, highlighting the trade-off between the risk of appropriation and the incremental cost of asset ownership. Comparative statics from this model provide predictions about the conditions under which hierarchical governance will be preferred. In particular, they suggest that firms are preferred where entrepreneurial action results in the creation of combinations of assets that are rare, valuable, and difficult to imitate i.e., the creation of strategic capabilities. The paper thus contributes to work on the dynamics of capabilities and transaction costs, highlighting the structurally uncertain nature of capability creation and its implications for the theory of the firm.

Global Sourcing and Foreign Knowledge Seeking

We develop and test a rigorous theoretical account of firm global sourcing decisions, distinguishing the antecedents of offshore integration from those of offshore outsourcing. Although traditional theories of global sourcing focus on lowering costs, we argue that as high-performing firms seek to develop new capabilities by tapping into foreign knowledge, they will increasingly turn to offshore integration to reap colocation benefits and overcome expropriation challenges. By contrast, offshore outsourcing will be preferred by less profitable firms seeking to tap into low-cost inputs, especially as investments in information technology lower monitoring costs. Empirical analysis of a comprehensive panel of cross-border product transfers by U.S. manufacturing multinational corporations from 1989 to 2004 reveals support for these arguments. Our study thus highlights the effect of foreign knowledge seeking on global sourcing and helps explain recent trends in this increasingly important phenomenon, especially ...

Who Does Private Equity Buy? Evidence on the Role of Private Equity From Buyouts of Divested Businesses

We examine the role of non-venture private equity firms in the market for divested businesses, comparing targets bought by such firms to those bought by corporate acquirers. We argue that a combination of vigilant monitoring, high-powered incentives, patient capital and business independence makes private equity firms uniquely suited to correcting underinvestment problems in public corporations, and that they will therefore systematically target divested businesses that are outside their parents’ core area, whose rivals invest more in long-term strategic assets than their parents, and whose parents have weak managerial incentives both overall and at the divisional level. Results from a sample of 1,711 divestments confirm these predictions. Our study contributes to our understanding of private equity ownership, highlighting its advantage as an alternate governance form.

Private Action in Public Interest: The Comparative Governance of Social Issues

We develop a theoretical framework to define the comparatively efficient organizational form for dealing with a social issue, based on the market frictions associated with it. Specifically, we argue that for-profits have an advantage in undertaking innovation and coordinating production economies, non-profits in playing a fiduciary role given ex post information asymmetry, self governing collectives in dealing with bounded externalities through private ordering, and state bureaucracies in governing general externalities. We build on these arguments to develop a mapping between combinations of these market frictions and the comparatively efficient arrangements to govern them, including a variety of hybrid arrangements such as private-public partnerships, social enterprises, corporate social responsibility, etc. Our framework thus contributes to research in strategy, organizations, and public policy.

Adaptation on Multiple Landscapes: Relatedness, Complexity, and Inter-Temporal Coordination Costs

We study the effect of coordination between businesses on the adaptation of diversified firms. Using a simulation based approach, we show that coordination between businesses limits adaptation, causing the relative performance of diversified firms to decline relative to their focused counterparts over time, with this effect being strongest for moderate levels of relatedness between, and complexity within, businesses. Given complexity, firms diversifying into moderately related businesses may therefore be better off limiting coordination between businesses to a few key activities—if they diversify at all—sacrificing short run synergies for long run flexibility. Our study thus offers a novel argument for conglomerate diversification, while linking work on the costs of coordination in diversified firms to the literature on organizational adaptation.We introduce and examine the concept of inter-temporal coordination costs, i.e., the reduction in a firm’s ability to adapt within businesses as a result of its attempts to capture synergies across businesses. Using a modified NK model of search across two landscapes, we show that these costs have an inverted-U relationship with the relatedness between landscapes, and this relationship is moderated by complexity. We further extend the model to examine entry into new markets, and use it to define conditions under which diversifying entrants may be at an advantage relative to either de novo start-ups or entrepreneurial spin-outs. Our study complements and extends recent work on inter-temporal economies of scope, while offering new insights for the literature on diversification, new market entry, and firm adaptation.

Succession and Synchronicity in Corporate Modes of Reconfiguration: Make, Buy, Ally, Divest

This symposium explores the conditions under which firms pursue a combination of different modes of reconfiguration. Two studies in this symposium focus on experience as the antecedent for choosing...