Imitation is thought to lead to a decrease in inter-firm heterogeneity. This outcome rests on the assumption that imitation engenders only one type of implication for the imitating firm: an endowment of knowledge (technologies, product designs, strategies, etc.) about successful practices that...

An important strategic challenge facing entrepreneurs and managers is the need to make choices across a set of policy alternatives (e.g., strategies, technologies, product designs), the merits of which are not initially well known. The efficacy of these choices is an increasing function of...

Learning from experience is a central theme in the management literature. While in general experiential learning is viewed as efficacious, the literature increasingly points to the difficulties inherent in the learning process — many of which stem from a deficit of information about the merits...

Replicating a successful template or best practice across time (temporal replication) or across a number of different economic settings (spatial replication) is an important strategy for organizational growth and performance improvement. In this paper, we use an NK landscape model to examine how...

It is a central tenet in the literature on organizational change that firms need to explore novel courses of action in order to adapt and survive. Should firms thus exhibit a “pro-innovation bias” when evaluating novel decision alternatives? Or should firms rather assess new opportunities as...

It is a central tenet in the literature on organizational change that firms need to explore novel courses of action in order to adapt and survive. Should firms thus exhibit a “pro-innovation bias” when evaluating novel decision alternatives? Or should firms rather assess new opportunities as...

Imitation is ubiquitous, yet the comparative efficacy of imitation strategies is poorly understood. A popular imitation strategy, sometimes called benchmarking, “mixes-and-matches” the practices common to leading firms. Using computational models, we compare benchmarking to the...