David F. Midgley

Innovativeness: The Concept and Its Measurement

The nature of innovativeness, and its relationship to adoption, are explored in this article. It is argued that innovativeness should be conceptualized at a higher level of abstraction, and that explicit recognition should be given to the complex communication processes intervening between this construct and observable behavior.

Knowledge Management: Philosophy, Processes, and Pitfalls

Based on a survey of 317 firms and in-depth cases on six firms, this article examines the management of the most intangible asset of the firm—its knowledge. This article examines the sources, uses, and outcomes of knowledge and shows how successful firms acquire and absorb more information and know-how. More importantly, these firms have more effective decision-making processes that enable them both to create new knowledge and to apply this knowledge to generating more innovation in products and processes. Greater levels of innovation in turn lead to improved market and financial performance. This article identifies eight key lessons for knowledge managers and demonstrates how rather than attempting to manage knowledge, firms should measure the change in the innovative outputs that arise from their knowledge management strategies and practices.

A Longitudinal Study of Product Form Innovation: The Interaction between Predispositions and Social Messages

In this article we simplify and apply our 1978 contingency model of adoption, in the simplified model, an individuals predisposition to innovate is modified by socially transmitted messages about the innovation, as well as by other situation specific factors. This model is used to make predictions about the future behavior of a sample of consumers that are tested with data collected during the diffusion of six innovations. While our findings support the model, especially with respect to the role of innovative individuals, they also demonstrate the need to develop explanations of rejection. Copyright 1993 by the University of Chicago.

E-Business: Revolution, Evolution, or Hype?

Will e-business ultimately represent a revolution in the way firms operate or rather does it represent a more normal evolution in the operations of some firms? Despite the bursting of the Internet stock bubble, it is important to answer this question. As the Internet continues to grow in size and capability, many firms are implementing Web-based applications and Internet-derived economic change continues to occur. If this change is revolutionary, now or in the near future, then many managers will be required to rethink their firm strategies and managerial responses in a profound way. On the other hand, if the change is simply evolutionary, it will apply more to some firms than to others, and pre-Internet strategies and managerial responses will still be appropriate in many circumstances. While it is premature to categorize e-business as revolutionary, e-business is not a silver bullet, rather it will be a useful tool for some firms and some tasks. There are a number of key questions firms should ask in order to make sense of e-business.

A Simple Mathematical Theory of Innovative Behavior

A mathematical theory of the adoption of new products is derived from extant behavioral knowledge and tested against first purchase data on low-risk, non-durable products.

Customer Relationship Management and Firm Performance

In this paper, we examine the impact of customer relationship management (CRM) on firm performance using a hierarchical construct model. Following the resource-based view of the firm, strategic CRM is conceptualized as an endogenously determined function of the organizations ability to harness and orchestrate lower-order capabilities that comprise physical assets, such as IT infrastructure, and organizational capabilities, such as human analytics (HA) and business architecture (BA). Our results reveal a positive and significant path between a superior CRM capability and firm performance. In turn, superior CRM capability is positively associated with HA and BA. However, our results suggest that the impact of IT infrastructure on superior CRM capability is indirect and fully mediated by HA and BA. We also find that CRM initiatives jointly emphasizing customer intimacy and cost reduction outperform those taking a less balanced approach. Overall, this paper helps explain why some CRM programs are more successful than others and what capabilities are required to support success.

A New Perspective on the Integration-Responsiveness Pressures Confronting Multinational Firms

The Integration-Responsiveness framework of Prahalad and Doz (1987) has been used extensively in the international business literature to typify the diverse and often-conflicting environmental pressures confronting firms as they expand worldwide. Although the IR framework has been successfully applied for over a decade, many theoretical and empirical studies have focused on the consequences of these pressures rather than the pressures themselves. Prahalad and Doz identified the economic, technological, political, customer and competitive factors that create the global integration and local responsiveness pressures on the diverse businesses and functions in MNEs. This article explains the methodology, including the procedure for data collection and analysis. The researchers conclude with a discussion of their findings and directions for future research, speculating as to the appropriate definition of the domain of IR pressures and the criteria they might use to validate measures of these.

e-Business strategy and firm performance: a latent class assessment of the drivers and impediments to success

Among many leading organizations, in all sectors of industry, commerce and government, there is considerable evidence of e-business being deployed to achieve strategic goals. Where this deployment has been most successful, there is a strong case that the organization has taken an integrated approach that both builds on the organizations strengths and pays careful attention to the process of change within the organization. However, in the literature most empirical work has either studied e-business strategy and performance from the perspective of strategy content – which highlights positioning and/or unique bundles of resources – or from the perspective of strategy process – which captures human influence and e-business implementation. In this study, we integrate these two perspectives to develop a more holistic understanding of the underlying drivers of e-business performance. Further, latent class modeling techniques are used to show that the variables in our study are heavily influenced by the unobservable heterogeneity across firms. Four distinct types of firms populate our data, and the relationship between performance and its underlying determinants varies greatly between them. The implication is that a single model cannot explain the relationship between environment, structure, feasibility, managerial beliefs and performance. This is critical to our understanding of e-business as it implies that there is far less homogeneity at the individual firm level than is normally assumed in the literature.

The Role of Knowledge Quality in Firm Performance

The role of knowledge in firm strategy and performance is well documented in the literature. There are numerous theoretical and empirical studies examining the relationship between knowledge and firm performance. The essence of these studies is that the higher the level of knowledge acquired or accumulated, the greater the level of firm innovation and performance.

External knowledge acquisition, creativity and learning in organisational problem solving

The role of knowledge in firm strategy and performance is well documented in existing literature. Numerous studies conclude that, in general, the higher the level of knowledge acquired, the greater the level of firm performance. In this study, we take a more micro-level approach. Specifically, we examine the impact of external knowledge on the processes of creativity and learning in problem solving. We also investigate the role of absorptive capacity in knowledge acquisition, creativity and learning. As we will show, simply having access to a pool of external knowledge is not enough. If the firm is to use this knowledge to improve its performance, it must be able to do the following: absorb that knowledge; act creatively upon that knowledge; create new knowledge from these activities.