Parshotam Dass

Toward a smarter enterprise: Disaggregation and dispersion for innovation and excellence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to trace the emergence of knowledge-centric innovative enterprises that function in a disaggregated and dispersed form and further contemplate the economic and managerial rationale behind this strategy. A constant challenge to large organizations as well as those pursuing the intent to grow bigger is how to sustain the innovative dynamism. Design/methodology/approach – The authors review the evolution of disaggregated and dispersed enterprises and discuss the changing cost structures for transactions, integration and coordination in the global knowledge economy. They elaborate the benefits of scale reduction and dispersed operations with examples. Findings – Their review of the extant practices suggests that managers are finding value in disaggregating the firm operations. Disaggregation enhances the firm agility and responsiveness and helps the firm exploit the fleeting opportunities without incurring the opportunity cost or risking high investment. Practical implic...

Non-competes and Spinout Creation: A Cross-country Test of the Relationship with Individual Income

The prevailing wisdom in the organizational literature is that spinouts by higher earning employees are more damaging to parent firms than spinouts by lower earning employees. Unfortunately, covenants not to compete (hereafter: non-competes) do not always discriminate between spinouts that could harm the parent firm and those that could help it. The greater human and financial capital of higher-earning employees permits them to overcome barriers created by non-competes. By contrast, lower earning employees may be effectively prevented from creating spinouts in the face of non- competes. In short, our study suggests that non-competes are not serving parent firms’ intended purpose of discouraging the spinouts by higher earning employees. Instead, they have an untended consequence of mainly blocking the wrong types of spawn–that is, spinouts by lower earning employees, which may not harm the parent firms. In fact, these spinouts may actually help the parent firm, and could have a net positive economic and so...