Gary L. Lilien

Medical Innovation Revisited: Social Contagion versus Marketing Effort1

This article shows that Medical Innovation—the landmark study by Coleman, Katz, and Menzel—and several subsequent studies analyzing the diffusion of the drug tetracycline have confounded social contagion with marketing effects. The article describes the medical community’s understanding of tetracycline and how the drug was marketed. This situational analysis finds no reasons to expect social contagion; instead, aggressive marketing efforts may have played an important role. The Medical Innovation data set is reanalyzed and supplemented with newly collected advertising data. When marketing efforts are controlled for, contagion effects disappear. The article underscores the importance of controlling for potential confounds when studying the role of social contagion in innovation diffusion.

Technological Opportunism and Radical Technology Adoption: An Application to E-Business

Using the resource-based view of the firm, the authors hypothesize that differences in adoption of radical technologies among firms can be attributed to a sense-and-respond capability of firms with respect to new technologies, which is termed technological opportunism. Using survey data from senior managers in business-to-business firms, the authors study the adoption of e-business, a radical technology with the potential to alter business models. The authors first establish the distinctiveness of technological opportunism from related constructs, such as organizational innovativeness, and show that it offers a significantly better explanation of technology adoption than existing constructs do. In a follow-up survey of senior managers, the authors investigate the antecedents of technological opportunism and find that organizations can develop technological opportunism by taking specific actions such as focusing on the future, by having top management advocate new technologies, and by becoming more of an adhocracy culture and less of a hierarchy culture. The proposed technological opportunism construct can inform theory development on the relative emphasis on internal (research and development) versus external (buying, licensing) development of technologies and the complementarities in technology orientation and market orientation in the firm. The results can be used by managers who seek to develop the technological opportunism capability of their firms and by those in technology vendor firms who seek to develop segmentation strategies based on the technological opportunism capabilities of their customer firms.

Location, Location, Location: How Network Embeddedness Affects Project Success in Open Source Systems

The community-based model for software development in open source environments is becoming a viable alternative to traditional firm-based models. To better understand the workings of open source environments, we examine the effects of network embeddedness---or the nature of the relationship among projects and developers---on the success of open source projects. We find that considerable heterogeneity exists in the network embeddedness of open source projects and project managers. We use a visual representation of the affiliation network of projects and developers as well as a formal statistical analysis to demonstrate this heterogeneity and to investigate how these structures differ across projects and project managers. Our main results surround the effect of this differential network embeddedness on project success. We find that network embeddedness has strong and significant effects on both technical and commercial success, but that those effects are quite complex. We use latent class regression analysis to show that multiple regimes exist and that some of the effects of network embeddedness are positive under some regimes and negative under others. We use project age and number of page views to provide insights into the direction of the effect of network embeddedness on project success. Our findings show that different aspects of network embeddedness have powerful but subtle effects on project success and suggest that this is a rich environment for further study.

Informants in organizational marketing research: Why use multiple informants and how to aggregate responses

Organizational research frequently involves seeking judgmental response data from informants within organizations. This article discusses why using multiple informants improves the quality of response data and thereby the validity of research findings. The authors show that when there are multiple informants who disagree, responses aggregated with confidence- or competence-based weights outperform those with response data-based weights, which in turn provide significant gains in estimation accuracy over simply averaging informant reports. The proposed methods are effective, inexpensive, and easy to use in organizational marketing research.

First in, First out? The Effects of Network Externalities on Pioneer Survival

Network externalities are playing an increasingly important role in the economy, and they have significant implications for firms’ marketing strategies. The authors study the effects of network externalities in conjunction with other product and firm characteristics on the survival of pioneers. They apply an accelerated failure time model to data on 45 office products and consumer durables. The authors find evidence that network externalities have a negative main effect on the survival duration of pioneers. However, for more radical products and for technologically intense products, increases in network externalities are associated with increased survival duration. The larger the pioneer, the more network externalities increase its survival duration, whereas incumbent pioneers experience a decrease in survival duration compared with nonincumbents. The findings of this article contribute to theory in marketing strategy and have important implications for firms that are developing market entry strategies for products with network externalities.

New Industrial Product Performance: The Effects of Market Characteristics and Strategy

Theres no need to state again the complexity ofthe problem of achieving high pe

Determinants of new industrial product performance: a strategic re-examination of the empirical literature

ormance in the new product process. What we do need is a framework to help sort out the complexity, and that is what Eunsang Yoon and Gary Lilien provide in this article. They first dzferentiate between original and reformulated new products. Then they examine how patterns of R&D and marketing activities determine short and long-run success.

Research Traditions in Marketing

Research on the determinants of industrial innovation performance using a three-dimensional framework is examined. Those dimensions are: generality over innovations, decision focus, and managerial controllability. The major determinants identified are: strategic and organizational factors, including general managements support, business-project fit, and RD RD and market and environmental factors, including degree of competition and market growth. An empirical study of 112 industrial products confirms that dynamic interaction exists between these determinants and the launch time of the product. >

Should Firms Spend More on Research and Development and Advertising During Recessions

This book reviews the past twenty years of research in marketing by considering the different research streams together to understand, evaluate and criticize those various streams and to explore potential overlaps and divergence likely to emerge in the future. In addition, careful attention has been paid to represent a balance of European and North American scholarship in both quantitative and qualitative research traditions. The book is organized into quantitative and qualitative parts. The quantitative articles include such topics as marketing models, econometrics, productivity in marketing, diffusion of innovation and industrial marketing; the qualitative articles include consumer behavior, industrial marketing and industrial marketing networks, and perspectives on marketing from other sciences.

Industrial Market Segmentation by the Structure of the Purchasing Process

Whenever a recession occurs, there is a heated dialog among marketing academics and practitioners about the appropriate levels of marketing spending. In this article, the authors investigate whether firms should spend more on research and development (R&D) and advertising in recessions. They propose that the effects of changes in firms’ R&D and advertising spending in recessions on profits and stock returns are contingent on their market share, financial leverage, and product-market profile (i.e., business-to-consumer goods, business-to-business services, business-to-business goods, or business-to-consumer services). They estimate the model using a panel of more than 10,000 firm-years of publicly listed U.S. firms from 1969 to 2008, during which there were seven recessions. Their results support the contingency approach. The authors compute the marginal effects, which show how the effects of changes in R&D and advertising spending in recessions vary across firms. The marginal effects provide evidence of inadequate spending (e.g., 98% of business-to-consumer goods firms underspend on R&D), proactivity (e.g., 96% of business-to-business services firms are at approximately the right levels on advertising). and excess spending (e.g., 92% of business-to-consumer services firms overspend on advertising). Using the authors’ approach and publicly available data, managers can estimate the effects of their firms’ and competitors’ R&D and advertising spending on profits and stock returns in recessions.