Samina Karim

Business Unit Reorganization and Innovation in New Product Markets

This paper empirically examines how business unit reorganization affects innovation, and explores how the learning process may mediate this relationship. Unit reorganization is the creation, deletion, or recombination of business units within a firm. Innovation is radical and involves product market entry by a firm into markets in which it was not previously active. I test competing hypotheses that predict either a U-shape or inverted U-shape relationship between reorganization and innovation to determine whether and how learning occurs in the presence of unit-level structural change. Theoretical support is drawn from literature on dynamic capabilities and organizational learning. The sample studied is 250 medical firms belonging to the pharmaceutical, healthcare-service, and medical-device industries, studied over a 20-year period. The findings are twofold. First, reorganization is found to exhibit a U-shape relationship with innovation, supporting learning arguments that stress the importance of experiencing a cohort of multiple events. Second, only reorganization experiences within a current period affect future innovation; past experiences do not impact future innovation, implying that firms may face constraints in organizational memory. The study concludes by exploring the structural origin (i.e., from internal, acquired, or recombined units) of innovative activity within firms.

Structural Recombination and Innovation: Unlocking Intraorganizational Knowledge Synergy Through Structural Change

This paper examines how structural recombination of business units within a firm impacts subsequent firm innovation. We argue that structural recombination is both a means for firms to unlock the potential for intraorganizational knowledge recombination and a source of disruption to the firms existing knowledge resources, so that the overall effect of structural recombination on innovation will depend on the balance between these two effects. Structural recombination will have a positive effect on innovation where there are substantial intraorganizational knowledge synergies, where path dependence is low, and where knowledge resources are of high quality, limiting disruption. Results from a 20-year panel of 71 firms operating in the U.S. medical sector confirm these arguments. The study thus provides a contingent view of the effects of structural recombination on firm innovation while highlighting the role of structural recombination in realizing untapped knowledge synergies within the firm.

Predicting Organizational Reconfiguration

This chapter addresses the issue of structural change within for-profit organizations, both as adaptation to changing markets and as purposeful experimentation to search for new opportunities, and builds upon the “reconfiguration” construct. In the areas of strategy, evolutionary economics, and organization theory, there are conflicting theories that either predict structural change or discuss obstacles to change. Our aim is to highlight relevant theoretical rationales for why and when organizations would, or would not, be expected to undertake structural reconfiguration. We conclude with remarks on how these literatures, together, inform our understanding of reconfiguration and organization design and provide insights for practitioners.

Examining Alliance Portfolios Beyond the Dyads: The Relevance of Redundancy and Nonuniformity Across and Between Partners

In this research, we unpack how interdependencies affect not just individual dyads but also value creation across an alliance portfolio and ultimately a focal firm’s performance. Moving beyond the collection of dyadic relationships of individual alliances, we examine more holistically the distribution of power imbalances and mutual dependences within alliance portfolios, as well as the impact of redundancies in portfolio partners’ resources. Building on resource dependence theory, we develop and test arguments on a sample of 59 firms in the U.S. passenger airline industry during 1998–2011. We find that nonuniform distributions of power imbalances and mutual dependences within the alliance portfolio as well as redundancy affect firm performance in different ways, which has implications for the management of alliance portfolios.

A Framework of Organisations as Dynamic Structures

This paper integrates advances in organisational structure research into a broader framework of ‘structural action’ that depicts organisations as dynamic structures. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the main contributions from various theories and perspectives that have all informed our understanding of the impact of organisational structure on strategic change. We propose that organisational structures, as one mechanism by which strategy is enacted, are moulded purposefully and in different ways. To better understand how organisations are re-designed, the framework recommends particular structural actions depending on the turbulence (both internal and external) and performance (both actual and aspired) aspects of the organisation.

Examining Resource Redeployment in Multi-Business Firms

Abstract This paper introduces the volume on Resource Redeployment and Corporate Strategy, which is devoted to exploring a relatively new justification for how multi-business firms create value – having flexibility to internally redistribute non-financial resources across their businesses. We clarify how a theory around resource flexibility differs from other theories of how multi-business firms create value. We then synthesize the collection of papers in this volume and describe how they contribute to this line of inquiry. Finally, we offer our own views on opportunities for elaboration of this theory.

Is Unit Spanning by Executives Associated with Strategic Change

Firms frequently create executive links between units by transferring or sharing people. Organization theory has emphasized that “boundary-spanning” by people can be a source of innovation and change as these executives combine knowledge from different domains. Within the organization, however, spanning connections also strengthen social ties and cognitive filters that may reduce the possibility of strategic change. Our analysis of executive links in medical firms finds that these links, especially when they occur between the corporate unit and business units, are mostly associated with reduced strategic change through market entry and exit. This finding suggests that the cognitive and social commitments from executive links may undermine the knowledge diffusion expected to arise from connecting separate units of the firm.

Acquiring Managers’ Intent and Actions in Acquisition Implementation

Based on researchers’ observations of the degree of relatedness or interdependence in a business combination, most past corporate strategy literature has assumed that managers try to achieve certain goals, i.e. the pursuit of economic synergies. Based on that assumption, theory predicts that certain designs and implementation actions should ensue. In this paper, we directly address and measure managers’ goals in the context of acquisitions. We theorize and empirically test the effect of different acquisition goals (efficiency and knowledge) on two distinct dimensions of acquisition implementation, namely, the acquirer’s effort at involving target employees and at cross-fertilization. We offer alternative hypotheses about the impact of efficiency intent on acquisition implementation: whereas past literature argues that the pursuit of efficiency should lead acquiring managers to consolidate operations while not involving target employees, we claim instead that efficiency may require certain effort at involving target employees and might benefit from cross-fertilization. Further, we claim that knowledge intent requires substantial and even greater effort at target involvement and cross-fertilization than the pursuit of efficiency. We test our model in a sample of 85 U.S. Midwest acquisitions. We find mixed support for our hypotheses. Counter to existing acquisition research, we find that efficiency pursuit prompts acquiring managers to exert substantial effort to involve target personnel and to cross-fertilize. However, we do not find support that knowledge intent has a significant impact on implementation actions. Our paper contributes to the acquisition, implementation and knowledge literatures, as well as to corporate strategy and design research broadly.