Samuel S. Holloway

Creative Industries: Aligning Entrepreneurial Orientation and Innovation Capacity

The creative industries consist of profit-oriented enterprises involved in the creation, production, and distribution of arts, cultural, and creative goods and services. Scholars examining the creative industries have largely focused on the characteristics of individual art-entrepreneurs or the macroeconomic benefits of creative clusters, but have not explored potential antecedents to firm-level performance. Employing data from architectural design organizations, we examine entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and innovation capacity (IC) as potential antecedents of two measures of firm performance; individual project success (PS) and overall firm competitive advantage (CA). In the context of the creative industries, EO takes the form of entrepreneurial approaches, strategies, and actions taken by firm managers, while IC represents the organizational environment that supports the development and maintenance of the firm’s innovative capabilities. Our results suggest that IC mediates the EO – performance relationship for both individual projects and in terms of achieving competitive advantage. This implies that to be successful, creative industry firms must be able to both recognize opportunities and develop and manage the right mix of creative capabilities to exploit those opportunities.

From evangelical roots to capitalist returns: Market formation from community beginnings

This research tests a theory of consumption-driven market emergence (CDME): a process wherein embedded entrepreneurs, multiple and dispersed actors from a particular habitus, innovate products outside of mainstream market logics leading to the distributed development of communities of practice around the innovations. A key feature of CDME is the introduction of a market catalyst, an actor that provides critical elements of infrastructure that, in turn, allows the emergence of a fully functioning, efficient and legitimized market. In this article we examine how the organic foods market emerged from a widespread collection of ideologically driven farmers and consumers into a high-growth and profitable commercial market. We test a model of CDME with secondary data reflecting the dynamics of the organic farming industry. Results from the fixed effects panel data estimation show strong support for the model.

Partly True and Partly Rhetorical: Conceptualizing Firm Images of Authenticity

Most research on authenticity has focused on consumer perceptions of the consequences of authenticity (e.g., prestige, production methods, or provenance), leaving the within-firm factors that contribute to an organization’s image of authenticity poorly understood. Drawing on Beverland’s (2005) proposal that authenticity is based on projecting an image that is “partly true and partly rhetorical” (p. 1008), our paper proposes a conceptualization of authenticity based the competitive advantage (CA) that results from alignment between firms’ innovation capacity (IC) and corporate identity management (CIM). Our results show that differences between high- and low-levels of IC interact with CIM (i.e., mission and values, corporate communications and visual identity) to explain differences in CA across firms. Employing data from the architecture context, our findings suggest that when high-IC firms are able to combine their superior creative capabilities with strong CIM processes (i.e., employing ‘partly true and partly rhetorical’ capabilities to convey authenticity) they are able create a powerful competitive advantage, thereby differentiating themselves from inauthentic competitors, even those who have made investments in similarly high levels of CIM.

Navigating the ‘Valley of Death’: an Investigation of Which Marketing Competencies Lead Toward Successful Technology Commercialization

Government sponsored programs organized to support science research have placed very little focus on supporting the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of developed technologies from the lab to the market. The Small Business Innovation Research program is one such initiative with the historic mindset that if a technology is good enough, the market opportunity will organize around it. As a result, government departments have not used the market viability of a technology as selection criteria. This has led to uneven success for the commercialization of technologies supported by SBIR grants. We present the initial findings of a longitudinal empirical study that examines which components of marketing competence may allow SBIR grant recipients to negotiate the transition from the lab to successful commercialization of their technologies

WHEN COLLABORATION TRUMPS RIVALRY: EXAMINING ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Vertical groups are inter-firm structures that populate industries such as film production, architecture, and construction. Vertical groups consist of stable sets of suppliers and buyers that interact regularly in a persistent pattern of exchange relations. Such collaborations shift boundary decisions from a rivalrous choice by a single firm acting alone to a collaborative decision by the entire group. This raises the level of analysis to the group level, and questions the validity of prior, rivalrous theories of the firm. To examine this, we applied traditional theories of the firm to a collaborative setting. Using archival data on bridge construction project networks, we examine how project characteristics affect vertical group structure. Specifically, we predict and find that more diverse projects led to less embedded vertical groups, with a greater number of partners and few prior relationships, whereas more uncertain projects led to highly embedded vertical groups with fewer, better known partners.