Michael Gibbert

The ‘‘What’’ and ‘‘How’’ of Case Study Rigor: Three Strategies Based on Published Work

To provide evidence-based strategies for ensuring rigor of case studies, the authors examine what rigor types authors report and how they report them by content analyzing all case studies published 1995—2000 in 10 management journals. Comparing practices in articles addressing rigor extensively and less extensively, the authors reveal three strategies for insuring rigor. First, very few case study authors explicitly label the rigor criteria in terms of the concepts commonly used in the positivist tradition (construct, internal, and external validity, as well as reliability). Despite this, papers addressing rigor extensively do report concrete research actions taken to ensure methodological rigor. Second, papers addressing rigor extensively prioritized rigor types: more, and more detailed, strategies were reported for ensuring internal and construct validity than for external validity. Third, emergent strategies used in the field were reported, such as setbacks and serendipities, that necessitated changes to the originally planned research procedures. Authors focus squarely on the concrete research actions taken, carefully relaying them to the reader so that the reader may appreciate the logic and purpose of trade-off decisions in the context of the specific case study.

Generalizing About Uniqueness An Essay on an Apparent Paradox in the Resource-Based View

Firm-idiosyncratic resources are at the heart of the resource-based view. A hallmark of empirical research findings supporting or falsifying a theory is generalizability. Generalizability demands that research findings are not idiosyncratic to the firm or sample of firms studied. The author develops a typology for mapping the apparently paradoxical relationship between resource idiosyncrasy and generalizability of research findings. Implications for empirical work are then deduced to advance our understanding of the resource-based “view” as a theory.

Rejuvenating corporate intellectual capital by co‐opting customer competence

Предлагается подход, использование которого поможет предприятиям, уже занимающим определенное положение на рынке, обновлять свой интеллектуальный капитал в реальном режиме времени. Подход основан на внешней оценке компетентности компании, которая дает объективную картину и может помочь фирме сохранять и укреплять свои позиции.

Constraints as sources of radical innovation? Insights from jet propulsion development

Abstract In popular parlance, ‘necessity is the mother of innovation’.Yet, in innovation management and organizational behavior in general, there is little systematic study into the enabling role of constraints in innovation. In fact, constraints in terms of knowledge or resources are typically connoted negatively, and in order to limit their negative impact on innovation, such constraints need to be overcome.This article contributes to the prevailing notion of overcoming knowledge and resource constraints by discussing four historical cases in the early phases of jet propulsion development.We detail enabling effects of constraints on innovation by drawing on Gidden’s structuration theory, and discuss implications for innovation management.

Information overload or search-amplified risk? Set size and order effects on decisions from experience

How do changes in choice-set size influence information search and subsequent decisions? Moreover, does information overload influence information processing with larger choice sets? We investigated these questions by letting people freely explore sets of gambles before choosing one of them, with the choice sets either increasing or decreasing in number for each participant (from two to 32 gambles). Set size influenced information search, with participants taking more samples overall, but sampling a smaller proportion of gambles and taking fewer samples per gamble, when set sizes were larger. The order of choice sets also influenced search, with participants sampling from more gambles and taking more samples overall if they started with smaller as opposed to larger choice sets. Inconsistent with information overload, information processing appeared consistent across set sizes and choice order conditions, reliably favoring gambles with higher sample means. Despite the lack of evidence for information overload, changes in information search did lead to systematic changes in choice: People who started with smaller choice sets were more likely to choose gambles with the highest expected values, but only for small set sizes. For large set sizes, the increase in total samples increased the likelihood of encountering rare events at the same time that the reduction in samples per gamble amplified the effect of these rare events when they occurred—what we call search-amplified risk. This led to riskier choices for individuals whose choices most closely followed the sample mean.

Munchausen, Black Swans, and the RBV Response to Levitas and Ndofor

The critique by Levitas and Ndofor (this issue) challenges the author’s earlier argument (Gibbert, this issue) on three grounds. It starts off by denying the existence of any paradox. Second, they argue that even if there were a paradox, attempts to ensure generalizability would actually hamper, rather than foster the development of the RBV. Finally, they observe that the problems of the RBV extend beyond generalizability and discuss a number of additional problems, in particular—construct validity. It was not within the scope of the author’s original essay to assess the importance of other criteria that can be used to assess the quality of a theory. This response provides an opportunity to address this importance. The author first attempts to clarify the distinction between the logic of a situation and its implied methodology. Confusion of the two motivated, the author believes, Levitas and Ndofor’s critique. The author then uses this distinction to address each of the three criticisms in turn.

What makes a `good' title and (how) does it matter for citations? A review and general model of article title attributes in management science

What makes a “good” title for an article, i.e. one which might attract citations in the academic community? Answers to this question are manifold, though inconclusive across disciplines. In an attempt to provide cohesion, we integrate significant title characteristics from previous studies across disciplines into a comprehensive model and link it with citation count. Keeping the application context constant, we focus on management science and find that only non-alpha numeric characters and a balanced title structure have small, but significant effects on citation count. Surprisingly, attributes which tended to show significant effects in other disciplines (though often in opposite directions), such as length, context, and linguistic attributes exhibited no relationship with citation count.

The Influence of Material Resources on Innovation Projects: The Role of Resource Elasticity

More (rather than fewer) material resources are thought to be the key driver in innovation project performance. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests that the influence of material resource availability on innovation projects is not as simple and straightforwardly positive as it may seem. We build on the concept of an innovation project teams resource elasticity to disentangle the material resource–innovation output conundrum. This concept is analogous to the marketing concept of price elasticity and points to four types of innovation project teams based on their resource elasticity: In resource‐elastic teams, the relationship between material resources and innovation outcomes is positive (hence, they are ‘resource driven’ when able to dispose of adequate material resources or ‘resource victims’ when lacking these material resources). In contrast, and as a significant departure from previous work, resource‐inelastic teams show no or even a negative relationship between material resource adequacy and team performance (thus, the teams are ‘resourceful’ if they can perform with limited material resources or ‘resource burners’ if they show low success with adequate material resources). Because neither adequate nor inadequate material resources seem to be a reliable predictor of success, we synthesize empirical research efforts that point to each team types key characteristics to derive novel implications for managing innovation projects.

Customer value: theory, research, and practice

This first paper examines total benefits and total costs of product–service designs as antecedents to customer value assessment. It introduces the reader to all the papers in this volume. The first half of the paper offers a model of customer value assessment. This section describes research studies in industrial marketing contexts that illustrate the core propositions in the model. The second half of the paper provides brief introductions to the papers in this volume; these papers offer further evidence supporting the view that discontinuous innovations offer superior customer value but customers tend to eventually become increasingly comfortable with the status quo and move away from adopting superior proven technologies. This paper advocates being mindful of the marketplace dynamics affecting value. The volume serves to increase knowledge and understanding of the dynamic forces affecting changes in customer value.

The curious case of the refrigerator-TV: similarity and hybridization.

This article examines the role of similarity in the hybridization of concepts, focusing on hybrid products as an applied test case. Hybrid concepts found in natural language, such as singer songwriter, typically combine similar concepts, whereas dissimilar concepts rarely form hybrids. The hybridization of dissimilar concepts in products such as jogging shoe mp3 player and refrigerator TV thus poses a challenge for understanding the process of conceptual combination. It is proposed that models of conceptual combination can throw light on the judged future success and desirability of hybrid products in general. The composite prototype model proposes two stages of conceptual combination. In the first stage, the concepts are aggregated into an additive hybrid, simply by forming the union of the two sets of attributes. In the second stage, any conflicting attributes are identified and resolved, often with the introduction of emergent attributes, resulting in an integrative hybrid. Across four studies that varied the similarity and type of hybrid products, similar and integrative hybrids were valued more than dissimilar and additive hybrids. Critically, though, dissimilar hybrids were also highly valued if they were integrative. Results supported the two stages proposed by the composite prototype model, and implications for other models of hybrid formation are discussed.