Tom Mom

Investigating Managers' Exploration and Exploitation Activities: The Influence of Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Horizontal Knowledge Inflows

This paper develops and tests hypotheses on the influence of a manager’s knowledge inflows on this manager’s exploration and exploitation activities. Based on a survey among managers of a leading electronics firm, the findings indicate, as expected, that top-down knowledge inflows of a manager positively relate to the extent to which this manager conducts exploitation activities, while they do not relate to a manager’s exploration activities. Furthermore, as expected, bottom-up and horizontal knowledge inflows of a manager positively relate to this manager’s exploration activities, while they do not relate to a manager’s exploitation activities. We contribute to current literature on exploration and exploitation by focusing on the manager level of analysis, and by adding the importance of knowledge flow configurations to the literature on the impact of organizational factors upon exploration and exploitation.

Strategic agility in MNEs: : Managing tensions to capture opportunities across emerging and established markets

Traditional sources of sustainable competitive advantages are very rare in todays heterogeneous and hyper-competitive global business environment. This article identifies and illustrates three dynamic capabilities—sensing local opportunities, enacting global complementarities, and appropriating local value—by which MNEs are able to operate successfully across emerging and established markets. For MNEs in these markets, strategic agility is a meta-capability that enables them to create and deploy these three capabilities in a dynamic balance over time. Doing so demands embracing the tensions between these capabilities effectively.

Relational Capital and Individual Exploration: Unravelling the Influence of Goal Alignment and Knowledge Acquisition:

We investigate how the relational capital of a person within an organization affects the extent to which she or he conducts exploration activities. Our theory separates out a negative effect that comes from aligning goals with other organizational members from a positive effect that stems from acquiring knowledge from them. Our data from 150 members of the R&D teams of three leading R&D-intensive firms support the theoretical model. By developing and testing this theory, we contribute to the literature on exploration, which lacks understanding of the antecedents of individual exploration in organizations. We also contribute to relational capital literature, which has focused on organizational and group-level exploration, but which has shown inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between relational capital and exploration. A reason for this may be that this body of research has emphasized positive effects of relational capital for exploration only, and has not accounted for the different mechanisms that mediate the effects of relational capital on individual exploration activities. Our theory offers a more comprehensive view by explaining how relational capital may provide both benefits and liabilities to individual exploration activities.

The skills base of technology transfer professionals

As the importance of technology transfer activities to the growth and survival of public and private organisations has become evident in recent years, researchers have been paying closer attention to the resources and capabilities such organisations will need in order to compete in markets. Yet it is still unclear what skills that individuals who are considering the various activities and contexts they are part of need. This paper investigates the skills that individual technology transfer professionals generally need and how the importance of each of these skills varies by context. It is based on a multiple-phase qualitative and quantitative study of technology transfer skills at the individual level. Results indicate the importance for technology transfer professionals to possess a range of five particular soft and business skills besides having two hard skills such as those related to intellectual property rights and domain-specific knowledge. Our results also highlight the heterogeneity in skills that technology transfer professional mainly draw on depending on the contexts of which they are part.

Technology transfer: the practice and the profession

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new profession often referred to as the technology transfer (TT) manager. TT managers apply various skills to accomplish transfer activities such as legal competencies; marketing and negotiation competencies; team work competencies; innovation competencies; and knowledge management competencies. Furthermore, the transfer of technology takes place in various contexts such as universities, business entities and governmental institutions. This special issue focuses on the profession of technology transfer. In particular, it examines the emergence of the technology transfer profession and the impact on the practice of technology transfer at the individual, unit, project and organizational level.

A Multilevel Integrated Framework of Firm HR Practices, Individual Ambidexterity, and Organizational Ambidexterity

Research on strategic human resource (HR) management and organizational ambidexterity has assumed that organizational ambidexterity originates from operational managers that pursue both exploratory and exploitative activities. Yet, multilevel insights are absent about how and through which mechanisms HR practices may actually facilitate operational manager ambidexterity and how their ambidexterity may result into organizational ambidexterity. Our multisource and multilevel data from 467 operational managers and 104 senior managers within 52 firms reveals that the top-down effects of ability- and motivation-enhancing HR practices on operational manager ambidexterity are partially mediated by their role breadth self-efficacy and intrinsic motivational orientation. Furthermore, we find that the bottom-up relationship between operational manager and organizational ambidexterity is contingent on firm opportunity-enhancing HR practices. With that, our study provides important new multilevel insights into the effectiveness of strategic HR systems in supporting individual and organizational ambidexterity.