Riitta Katila

New Product Search Over Time: Past Ideas in Their Prime?

This paper investigates how the age of the knowledge that firms search affects how innovative they are. Two seemingly contradictory propositions are examined: (1) old knowledge hurts by making innovation activities obsolete, and, (2) old knowledge helps because it is more reliable and legitimate, thereby promoting innovation. Results based on longitudinal data on 131 robotics firms reconcile the contradictory propositions: while old intra-industry knowledge hurts, old extra-industry knowledge promotes innovation.

Swimming with Sharks: Technology Ventures, Defense Mechanisms and Corporate Relationships

This paper focuses on the tension that firms face between the need for resources from partners and the potentially damaging misappropriation of their own resources by corporate “sharks.” Taking an entrepreneurial lens, we study this tension at tie formation in corporate investment relationships in five U.S. technology-based industries over a 25-year period. Central to our study is the “sharks” dilemma: when do entrepreneurs choose partners with high potential for misappropriation over less risky partners? Our findings show that entrepreneurs take the risk when they need resources that established firms uniquely provide (i.e., financial and manufacturing) and when they have effective defense mechanisms to protect their own resources (i.e., secrecy and timing). Overall, the findings show that tie formation is a negotiation that depends on resource needs, defense mechanisms, and alternative partners. These findings contribute to the recent renaissance of resource dependence theory and to the discussion on the surprising power of entrepreneurial firms in resource mobilization.

Exploiting technological opportunities: the timing of collaborations

High-technology companies that discover new technological opportunities face two critical decisions: whether and when to collaborate in exploiting these opportunities. Prior research has examined factors such as transaction costs that determine whether firms decide to collaborate. In this study, we aim to understand when firms collaborate in exploiting opportunities. To this end we study the history of 86 biopharmaceutical product-development projects. We find that factors that reduce articulation and appropriation uncertainties in these projects—patent protection, high R&D intensity of the discoverer, partners’ prior collaboration experience, and support infrastructures in the industry—can speed up collaboration. Interestingly, project-specific factors do not seem to affect timing.

Who Takes You to the Dance? How Partners’ Institutional Logics Influence Innovation in Young Firms

Drawing on institutional theory, we examine how the institutional logics—taken-for granted norms, structures, and practices—of different types of funding partners influence young firms and their search for innovations. We test our hypotheses in a longitudinal study of a complete population of ventures in the minimally invasive surgical device industry in the U.S., supplemented by interviews with industry informants. We find that types of funding partners vary significantly from one another: they all provide resources, but their institutional logics differ. Venture capitalists (VCs) pick young firms with significant patented technologies and help firms launch products, and high-status VCs strengthen both the patenting and product innovations of young firms. Corporate venture capitalists and government agencies also select patent-intensive firms but are less effective than VCs in helping ventures during the relationship because, though these partners often have impressive technical and commercial resources for innovation, their institutional logics constrain how effectively young firms can access their resources. Relative to other types of funding partners, VCs have a closer advisor relationship with the venture; greater power, influence, and access to resources; better-paced and more-motivating milestones; and better understanding of the commercialization process. Our results extend the institutional logics literature to interorganizational relationships and suggest that the choice among types of funding partners may have unanticipated effects on firms’ innovation beyond the financial resources gained through the relationship.

Building Blocks of the Maker Movement: Modularity Enhances Creative Confidence During Prototyping

Can we enable anyone to create anything? The prototyping tools of a rising Maker Movement are enabling the next generation of artists, designers, educators, and engineers to bootstrap from napkin sketch to functional prototype. However for technical novices, the process of including electronic components in prototypes can hamper the creative process with technical details. Software and electronic modules can reduce the amount of work a designer must perform in order to express an idea, by condensing the number of choices into a physical and cognitive “chunk.” What are the core building blocks that might make up electronics toolkits of the future, and what are the key affordances? We present the idea that modularity, the ability to freely recombine elements, is a key affordance for novice prototyping with electronics. We present the results of a creative prototyping experiment (N = 86) that explores how tool modularity influences the creative design process. Using a browser-based crowd platform (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), participants created electric “creature circuits” with LEDs in a virtual prototyping environment. We found that increasing the modularity of LED components (i) increased the quantity of prototypes created by study participants; and (ii) increased participants’ degree of perceived self-efficacy, self-reported creative feeling, and cognitive flow. The results highlight the importance of tool modularity in creative prototyping.

User-Centered Innovation for the Design and Development of Complex Products and Systems

In this chapter, we examine user interaction for the design and development of complex products and systems. Through a two-phase research effort, we explore and test the influence of user involvement (i.e. novice/average and expert/lead users) in early stage design and new product development.

Stay the Course or Pivot? Antecedents of Cognitive Refinements of Business Models in Young Firms (WITHDRAWN)

This paper studies the hypothesis-based probing of business opportunities known as the Lean Startup Method. It shines the spotlight on how early-stage venture teams engage with the method, and specifically how this process differs as a function of team composition. We use detailed longitudinal data on 152 NSF-supported founding teams that use the lean startup method over an entrepreneurial intervention period of eight weeks. Findings show that the execution of the method is positively related with objectivizing the perceived opportunity, as well as coming up with new hypotheses about portions of the perceived opportunity landscape not originally considered. The evidence also suggests that teams predominated with management experts are less likely to engage with the lean startup method, especially when many of their assumptions about the business opportunity remain untested. Paradoxically, it is these same teams that would be able to extract the most learning from use of the method if they engaged with it in the first place. This paper provides nuanced understanding of how the different steps of the lean startup method work, and how teams potentially differ in the use of this method.

Evolving Strategies for Social Innovation Games

While evolutionary computation is well suited for automatic discovery in engineering, it can also be used to gain insight into how humans and organizations could perform more effectively in competitive problem-solving domains. This paper formalizes human creative problem solving as competitive multi-agent search, and advances the hypothesis that evolutionary computation can be used to discover effective strategies for it. In experiments in a social innovation game (similar to a fantasy sports league), neural networks were first trained to model individual human players. These networks were then used as opponents to evolve better game-play strategies with the NEAT neuroevolution method. Evolved strategies scored significantly higher than the human models by innovating, retaining, and retrieving less and by imitating more, thus providing insight into how performance could be improved in such domains. Evolutionary computation in competitive multi-agent search thus provides a possible framework for understanding and supporting various human creative activities in the future.

Outcomes from Institutional Interactions: Does Government Funding Help Firm Innovation?

Scholarship studying the effect of public funding on private innovation is split. Research either argues for a complementary effect, in which firms benefit from non-dilutive capital and unique tech...