Dmitry Sharapov

Innovation and Leadership: When Does CMO Leadership Improve Performance From Innovation?

Ensuring that organizational innovation generates value increasingly requires effective marketing management. Prior studies, however, report conflicting effects of chief marketing officer (CMO) leadership on how well the firm exploits innovation. These inconsistencies may be associated with firm-level innovation effort, customer focus, and industry type. We analyze archival data from 587 interviews with global CEOs to explain the effect of CMO leadership on outcomes of organizational innovation. CMO leadership of the firm’s primary innovation mode is positively associated with product–market innovation effort but not marginal revenue from innovation. CMO leadership also moderates the relationship between customer focus and innovation revenue. Predictive validity testing shows that these effects are especially important for service firms. The benefits of CMO-led innovation have specific limitations that firms must consider for organization-wide innovation efforts.

Going Off-Piste: The Role of Status in Launching Unsponsored R&D Projects

Many established organizations rely on unsponsored R&D projects to sustain and support corporate renewal. These ideas that emerge from dark corners of the organization are often the result of inven...

Whom Should a Leader Imitate in Multiple Competitor Settings? A Contingency Perspective

Can a leaders imitation of rival competitors lead to superior performance in multiple-competitor settings, and, if so, which rival should the leaders imitative efforts be focused on? Building on prior work on the performance consequences of imitation strategies from competitive dynamics and neo-computational scholars, this paper examines the effectiveness of different imitation strategies pursued by a leader in a multiple-competitor setting subject to exogenous environmental shocks. Findings from an NK simulation model of a three-competitor setting suggest that a leaders imitation of either the rival closest to her in terms of performance to date (her challenger) or of the rival closest to her in terms of position on the landscape (her neighbor) can outperform an independent search strategy in all environments apart from those in which large changes occur frequently. This is because an imitative leader may benefit from ratcheting dynamics that occur as a result of their focal rival being forced into distant search by the leaders imitative behavior, leaving the leader with the opportunity to make productive minor changes to their rivals configuration. The effectiveness of the challenger-imitation strategy relative to one of neighbor-imitation is found to decrease with increasing magnitude of environmental changes, and to increase with their increasing frequency. We proceed to evaluate the external validity of these findings using fine-grained data on multiple-competitor (fleet) sailing races from the Americas Cup World Series 2011-2013, and find support for the propositions emerging from the simulation results.