Henri Schildt

Explorative and Exploitative Learning from External Corporate Ventures

This study examines the antecedents of explorative and exploitative learning of technological knowledge from external corporate ventures. We compare different forms of external corporate venturing, namely corporate venture capital investments, alliances, joint ventures, and acquisitions, as alternative avenues for interorganizational learning. Furthermore, we test the effects of multiple relational characteristics on the type of learning outcomes. Our empirical analysis is based on citations in patents filed by a sample of 110 largest U.S. public information and communications technology companies during the years 1992–2000. We find that corporate venturing mode and technological relatedness have significant effects on the likelihood of explorative learning.

Entrepreneurial Storytelling, Future Expectations, and the Paradox of Legitimacy

Prior research highlights storytelling as a means for entrepreneurs to establish venture legitimacy and gain stakeholder support. We extend this line of research by examining the role that projective stories play in setting expectations and the dynamics that ensue. Such attention highlights a paradox-the very expectations that are set through projective stories to gain venture legitimacy can also serve as the source of future disappointments. Because of inherent uncertainties that projective stories mask, ventures will likely deviate from their early projections, thereby disappointing stakeholders. This, in turn, can result in a loss of legitimacy. Recognizing that entrepreneurship is an ongoing process, we examine the constraints and possibilities of maintaining or regaining legitimacy through revised storytelling. We conclude the paper with implications for research on entrepreneurial storytelling as an ongoing process.

Who buys whom: information environments and organizational boundary spanning through acquisitions

Companies extend their boundaries through acquisitions to new industries, product lines, technologies, markets and geographic locations. Diversification research has focused predominantly on boundary extensions across industries. Using data on 167 intra-industry acquisitions in the pharmaceuticals industry between 1991 and 1996, we study boundary extension in an industry, integrating existing arguments to examine how proximity in intraindustry networks, geographic location, and technological domain influences the likelihood of acquisition. As expected, the proximity of two firms in these search contexts increases the likelihood that one will acquire the other, but the contexts are partial substitutes, proximity in one search context overcoming distance in other contexts.Thus, we find that while pharmaceutical companies are more likely to acquire technologically similar foreign companies, they are more likely to acquire technologically dissimilar alliance partners. Our results contribute to an improved understanding of who buys whom and in doing so, organizational boundary spanning through acquisitions.

Organizational Settlements: Theorizing How Organizations Respond to Institutional Complexity

Research on hybrid organizations and institutional complexity commonly depicts the presence of multiple logics within organizations as an exceptional situation. In this article, we argue that all organizations routinely adhere to multiple institutional logics. Institutional complexity only arises episodically, when organizations embrace a newly salient logic. We propose two concepts to develop this insight. First, we suggest the notion of organizational settlement to refer to the way in which organizations durably incorporate multiple logics. Second, we define organizational hybridization as a change process whereby organizations abandon their existing organizational settlement and transition to a new one, incorporating a newly salient logic. Overall, we propose a shift in attention from the exceptionality of hybrid configurations of multiple logics toward exploring the dynamics of transitions from one state of complexity to another.

Big data and organizational design – the brave new world of algorithmic management and computer augmented transparency

Big data and sophisticated algorithms enable software to handle increasingly complex tasks, such as detecting fraud, optimizing logistics routes, and even driving cars. Beyond technical tasks, algorithms enable new ways to organize work. In this article, I suggest a distinction of optimizing-oriented and open-ended systems leveraging big data and examine how they are shaping organizational design. The optimizing-oriented systems, typically based on numerical data, enable smarter control of well-defined tasks, including algorithmic management of human work. Open-ended systems, often based on textual data or visualizations, can provide answers to a broad range of managerial questions relevant to effective organizing, thereby enabling smarter and more responsive definition of tasks and allocation of resources and effort. Algorithms processing conversations that naturally take place in organizations can form ‘computer augmented transparency’, creating a host of potential benefits, but also threats. These developments are leading to a wave of innovation in organizational design and changes to institutionalized norms of the workplace.

Mergers and Acquisitions as a Response to Intra-Industry Dependence

A firms behavior is constrained by its access to resources owned or controlled by different constituencies in its environment. Mergers and acquisitions are one way to proactively manage these resource dependencies. Research on resource dependence reducing merger and acquisition patterns provides an important cornerstone of resource dependency theory and a basis of our present knowledge of the aggregate industry-level merger and acquisition patterns. However, due to the predominant focus on inter-industry merger and acquisition patterns in earlier research, much less is known as to whether the same logic could also be applied to explain intra-industry merger and acquisition patterns. In this chapter, we extend the resource dependence results to an intra-industry context. In particular, we show that mergers and acquisitions among pharmaceutical firms tend to take place among firms with technological and competitive interdependencies. To distinguish our finding from the competing resource scale and scope explanations, we show that the likelihood of a resource dependence reducing acquisition is moderated by the crowding of firms’ technological positions and prior alliance ties. Consistent with the resource dependence explanation, both weaken the effect of overlapping technological positions even though both alliance ties and crowding otherwise are positively related to merger and acquisition patterns in line with the social structural explanations.

Generative imitation, strategic distancing and optimal distinctiveness during the growth, decline and stabilization of Silicon Alley

Abstract We embrace a cultural perspective on entrepreneurship to examine the performative relationship between entrepreneurial narratives and the field discourse that unfolded during the emergence of the ‘new media’ field in New York city that came to be known as ‘Silicon Alley’. During growth, the accumulation of projective entrepreneurial narratives generated a field discourse from which entrepreneurs drew. However, because of the hype generated and the implementation challenges encountered by the ventures, the expectations set by the entrepreneurs remained unrealized, thereby leading to failures. The loss of legitimacy that accrued to these ventures spread to others through the cultural symbols shared by the ventures, which led to the collapse of the field. Opportunities based on cultural symbols considered valuable during early stages now became worthless. The Silicon Alley field eventually stabilized as entrepreneurs offered revised narratives to generate renewed growth. Based on these dynamics, we introduce generative imitation and strategic distancing as narrative-discursive possibilities to complement the notion of optimal distinctiveness. We propose that optimal distinctiveness best describes narrative-discursive possibilities and efforts when fields have stabilized, whereas generative imitation and strategic distancing better describe possibilities and efforts during growth and decline periods respectively.