Maria Chiara Di Guardo

M&A and the profile of inventive activity

This article examines the effect of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on the profile of merging firms’ inventive activity. The authors conceive of the inventive process as a recombinant search, whose outcome can be characterized along two complementary dimensions, which define its profile: its depth of impact on subsequent inventions, and its breadth of impact across different scientific domains. The profile of firms’ inventive activity depends on two main factors: the resources available to be recombined and the organizational incentives that guide the recombination process. In turn, these factors significantly depend on the upstream, technological resources available and on firms’ downstream, product-market related assets. Importantly, both of these factors may change in the aftermath of M&A, as their specific institutional features facilitate the exchange and redeployment of upstream and downstream resources. The authors then discuss how variations in the profile of firms’ inventive activity in the aftermath of an M&A reflect the diversity of upstream and downstream resources redeployed by the M&A deal. They test their hypotheses with a panel of firms from the US medical devices and photographic equipment industry. The study finds that diversity in merging firms’ downstream resources exerts a positive impact on post-acquisition profile of inventive activities, whereas diversity in knowledge bases does not seem to exert a significant direct effect on the two qualitative dimensions of inventive activity considered. Yet, technological diversity displays a positive effect in deals characterized by high market relatedness.

Data-driven journal meta-ranking in business and management

Ranking journals is a longstanding problem and can be addressed quantitatively, qualitatively or using a combination of both approaches. In the last decades, the Impact Factor (i.e., the most known quantitative approach) has been widely questioned, and other indices have thus been developed and become popular. Previous studies have reported strengths and weaknesses of each index, and devised meta-indices to rank journals in a certain field of study. However, the proposed meta-indices exhibit some intrinsic limitations: (1) the indices to be combined are not always chosen according to well-grounded principles; (2) combination methods are usually unweighted; and (3) some of the proposed meta-indices are parametric, which requires assuming a specific underlying data distribution. We propose a data-driven methodology that linearly combines an arbitrary number of indices to produce an aggregated ranking, using different techniques from statistics and machine learning to estimate the combining weights. We additionally consider correlations between indices and meta-indices, to quantitatively evaluate their differences. Finally, we empirically show that the considered meta-indices are also robust to significant perturbations of the values of the combined indices.

Features of top-rated gold open access journals: An analysis of the scopus database

The goal is to identify the features of top-rated gold open access (OA) journals by testing seven main variables: languages, countries, years of activity and years in the DOAJ repository, publication fee, the field of study, whether the journal has been launched as OA or converted, and the type of publisher.

Disentangling the Strategic Use of Social Media in the Insurance Industry: A Value Co-Creation Perspective

Abstract Purpose Despite the fundamental role that digital social media could play in the process of consumer co-creation, academic research on this topic is still in its infancy. The overall aim of the chapter is to consider how digital social media can be used by firms to encourage and sustain co-creation behavior. Design/methodology/approach We draw a multiple case analyses, focusing on the insurance industry, particularly on the Italian insurance market. Findings We particularly extend the literature on value co-creation by proposing a composite framework that enables us to grasp the different strategies that firms implement in their different manners of employing digital social media. Practical implications We set forth a research agenda for managerial scholars that can help understand how social media should be incorporated in the day-to-day operations of insurance companies.

The Concurrent Impact of Cultural, Political, and Spatial Distances on International Mergers and Acquisitions

The paper explores the concurrent effects of cultural, political, and spatial distances on M&A flows occurring between any two countries belonging to the whole European Union (27 States) or to the European Neighbors group (16 States) over the period 2000-2011 . By employing zero-inflated negative binomial specifications, entailing both a binary and count process, we adequately model the two different mechanisms which may generate zero observations in the cross-border bilateral deals. Zeros may be due to either the lack of any transactions or unsuccessful negotiations. We find robust evidence that the multi-dimensional distance between two countries negatively affects the probability that they will engage in M&A deals, while the recurrence rate of these deals is positively related to population, gross domestic product, and technological capital and negatively related to geographical distance.

Value-Co-creation Through Multichannels Distributions: The Nike ID Case

Information Technology (IT) development, in recent years, deeply changed the relationship between firm and customer, leading to an important shift in their respective roles. Nowadays, the customer has to be seen as a key player of this relationship, carrying out an active and important contribution in the phase of product development. Despite a growing interest for this topic, the importance of how and why some specific organizations seem to be more effective at executing channel interactions and co-creating value with customers remains underspecified. To address this gap, we try to explain, through a case analysis, the multi-channel strategy that Nike developed with the so called “ID service” in the Italian market scenario and how its basic principles can be a foundation to generate value over time through customer collaboration. In particular, this study explores the role of IT-enabled value co-creation in this domain.

Analysing the Intellectual Structure of E-Service Research

Despite the importance that e-service is gaining among firms and public administrations, academic research on this topic is still in its infancy (Santos, 2003), and relatively little work has been carried out. Although prior analyses have examined the rise and fall of specific theories or research topics within the e-service research field (Rust & Lemon, 2001; Rust & Kannan, 2002; Javalgi et al., 2004; Scupola et al., 2009), they have rarely focused on fundamental questions such as: what types of articles have been influential in e-service research? Does the e-service research field have different subfields, and what is the relationship, if any, among them? The purpose of this study is to answer the above-mentioned questions by using a bibliometric approach. The analysis, by identifying relevant concepts and theories that have emerged in the field of e-service, may help interested researchers identify how they can contribute to the field of e-service – by adding and enriching emerging groups or acting as bridges across groups.

Using a distance measure to operationalise patent originality

ABSTRACT We introduce a distance measure to operationalise Trajtenberg, Henderson, and Jaffe’s [1997. “University Versus Corporate Patents: A Window on the Basicness of Invention.” Economics of Innovation and New Technology 5: 19–50] originality construct (an ex-ante indicator of firms’ technological capabilities). Our measure captures (1) technological diversity, (2) technology distance from patent antecedents, and (3) degree of novelty per each patented innovation. The V-score measure uses the Derwent World Patent Index system to classify technologies hierarchically – making similarities and differences pronounced. Power is gained by using all of the technology-classification codes describing a focal patent’s claims when calculating whether its technology space was incrementally different or radical from those of its antecedent patents (and identifying whether its technology-class code combinations were commonplace at the time when the patent application was made). Our V-score’s prediction of firms’ performance is contrasted with Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg’s [2001. Hall, B. H., A. B. Jaffe, and M. Trajtenberg. 2001. The NBER Patent Citations Data File: Lessons, Insights and Methodological Tools. NBER Working Paper No. 8498] Herfindahl measure of the same originality construct. Results indicate that the distance measure of technological content produces differently signed results when evaluating patents’ performance effects or predicting a firm’s trajectory.

Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Communities Design: a Cross Case Analysis

While a great amount of literature has focused on the effects of open innovation and crowdsourcing strategy on firms’ competition and generation of ideas, we know little about how to design an IT artifact to manage the supporting of creativity among on line communities. Defining an interpretative framework which is based on the Design Theory concept, this paper aims to contribute to this body of knowledge by means of a cross-case study, focused on the design evaluation of two crowdsourcing-supporting IT platforms. We develop a theoretical framework for crowdsourcing communities, aimed to identify how the design characteristics shape the competition to generate new ideas, thereby influencing the crowdsourcing strategy.

Combining Exploitation and Exploration Through Crowdsourcing: The Case of Starbucks

In this paper, we explore the concept of crowdsourcing as a driver of the ambidexterity innovations capabilities and as a strategic tool to combine exploitation and exploration strategies in the innovation generation process. In doing so, we focus on the case of Starbucks Corporation, an international coffee and coffeehouse chain considered the largest coffeehouse company in the world.