Francisco Polidoro

Letting Rivals Come Close or Warding Them Off? The Effects of Substitution Threat on Imitation Deterrence

A resource-based theory postulate is that firms must defend their resources against imitation to sustain competitive advantage. However, by deterring imitation, firms may induce rivals to create su...

Organizational Oscillation Between Learning and Forgetting: The Dual Role of Serious Errors

We know that organizations change over time as a result of their ability to learn and their tendency to forget. What we know less about, however, is why they might change back, despite evidence suggesting that this occurs. In this paper, we develop and test a model of organizational oscillation that explains why firms cycle through periods of learning and periods of forgetting. In particular, we identify a dual role for serious errors, which push firms toward a focus on safety while also pulling them away from other foci, such as efficiency or innovation. Although existing learning research recognizes errors as disruptive, this dual effect has not been theorized. We also demonstrate that, over time, the effect of a serious error on safety weakens, allowing alternative activities to emerge that lead to subsequent errors. We draw on qualitative data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Challenger and Columbia accidents to build theory about why organizations oscillate between safety and ...

Path-dependent Routines in the Evaluation of Novelty: The Effects of Innovators’ New Knowledge Use on Brokerage Firms’ Coverage:

This paper examines how path dependencies in evaluation routines affect a brokerage firm’s decision to provide coverage to a company that builds on new knowledge. Companies depend on brokerage firms to gain access to external resources, as a brokerage firm’s coverage is a valuable form of recognition that may lower a company’s cost of capital and increase its value. Yet path dependencies in a brokerage firm’s evaluation routines may make it less likely to cover a company whose inventive activities build on different knowledge than it used in the past. Using data on 183 U.S. publicly traded medical device companies from 1993 to 2006, we examine how a company’s use of new knowledge affects a brokerage firm’s decision to cover the company. Our results suggest that a company may face a tension between exploration and resource dependence, as after it overcomes internal path dependencies that hinder exploration and successfully uses new knowledge, it may still fail to gain the attention of outside organizations on which it depends to access relevant resources due to externally borne path dependencies in the routines these outside organizations use to evaluate novelty. Also, in contrast with existing literature suggesting that brokerage firms have homogenous expectations for which strategies are appropriate for different types of companies, our results highlight that brokerage firms differ in how they respond to companies’ inventive activities based on factors such as their prior exposure to new knowledge, prior evaluation of the companies’ downstream product markets, and scope of technological expertise.

Technology Coupling and Diffusion of Innovation: Evidence from Open Source Software Development

In contrast with the existing literature that focuses on the social process of innovation diffusion, this study asks the question: how the diffusion process of an innovation can be affected by its own technological attributes? We seek to address this question by focusing on how a technology is linked to its upstream and downstream complementary technologies. Based on the literature on product modularity and technology ecosystems, we argue that upstream technology coupling harms the diffusion of an innovation as it increases the technology’s performance uncertainty and exerts higher hurdles of learning for users. Meanwhile, stable coupling with one or a few major downstream complementary technologies not only stimulates diffusion, but also attenuates the negative effect of upstream linkage. The empirical analysis on the diffusion of open source computer program libraries, based on a unique data set of over 110,000 open source software programs and over 7 million usage by software developers, provides stron...