Ishtiaq P. Mahmood

Two Faces: Effects of Business Groups on Innovation in Emerging Economies

This paper shows that business groups in emerging economies exert dual effects on innovation. While groups facilitate innovation by providing institutional infrastructure, groups also discourage innovation by creating entry barriers for nongroup firms and thereby inhibit the proliferation of new ideas. This pattern reflects an evolutionary process in which the interplay of the availability of innovation infrastructure and variety of ideas influences the level of innovation in an industry. We show that group market share has an inverted-U impact on innovation in industrial sectors of both Korea and Taiwan during the 1981--1995 period. Institutional differences between Korea and Taiwan in terms of market structure and industrial policies lead to different innovation thresholds, the point at which the marginal costs of increasing group share begin to dominate the marginal benefits in the two countries.

Technological Dynamism in Asia

We analyze innovation in emerging and newly industrialized economies over the past 30 years, with the emphasis being on Asian economies. We use US patent data to study how the innovative capabilities of Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have expanded in relation to emerging economies in Asia and Latin America. We then carry out a sector-level analysis of innovation for Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, India and China. We also study the relative importance of foreign multinationals, business groups, individuals, domestic firms and research institutes in innovation. Finally, we study the overall concentration of innovative activity in Asian economies.

Dynamic Inducements in R&D Investment: Market Signals and Network Locations

This research shows that alliance networks shape how firms respond to uncertainty-reducing information generated outside a network. Product awards signal the potential commercial success of the awa...

The Evolving Impact of Combinatorial Opportunities and Exhaustion on Innovation by Business Groups as Market Development Increases: The Case of Taiwan

Business groups are key sources of innovation in emerging market economies, but we understand little about why innovativeness differs across groups and over time. Variation in the density of intragroup buyer–supplier ties, which are common structural linkages among group affiliates, can help explain both cross-sectional and temporal heterogeneity of group innovativeness. We argue that greater buyer–supplier density within a group initially creates combinatorial opportunities that contribute to group innovativeness but ultimately generates combinatorial exhaustion that constrains innovation. Combinatorial exhaustion will set in at lower levels of density as the market environment becomes more developed because the opportunity costs of local search increase. The research introduces a dynamic argument to studies of business-group innovation. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.

Capital Market Development and Firm Restructuring During an Economic Shock

We conceptualize capital markets in terms of resource access and governance, and argue that more developed capital markets facilitate firm restructuring through more effective provision of capital and governance of transactions. We then develop a contingency model that specifies that the effects of capital market development on restructuring vary by (1) types of restructuring, (2) the nature of the economic environments, and (3) firms’ access to resources. We evaluate a broad range of restructuring actions among independent firms and business group affiliates in Singapore and South Korea before and during the economic shock of 1998–1999. Results support our predictions of the impact of capital market development and of contingencies, and highlight the value of incorporating an external capital markets perspective to complement internally focused theoretical explanations for firm restructuring.

Newcomers Slip-In? The Effects of Incumbent Competition Networks on Newcomer Entry

Research has primarily focused on explaining how firm-specific factors affect entry, leaving more room for understanding how incumbent competitive dynamics shapes new entry. In this paper we study ...