A common justification for organizational change is that the circumstances in which the organization finds itself have changed, thereby eroding the value of utilizing existing knowledge. On the surface, the claim that organizations should adapt by generating new knowledge seems obvious and...

Many organizational actions need not have any immediate or direct payoff consequence but set the stage for subsequent actions that bring the organization toward some actual payoff. Learning in such settings poses the challenge of credit assignment (Minsky 1961), that is, how to assign credit for...

A simple model is developed to explore the interrelationship between processes of organizational level change and population selection forces. A critical property of the model is that the effect on organizational fitness of the various attributes that constitute an organization's form is...

We reflect on the evolution of the strategy field as seen through the window of Management Science. Reflecting the diverse disciplinary roots of strategy research, we identify a broad-ranging body of work that varies with respect to the assumptions made regarding individual rationality and the...

Joglekar, Bohl, and Hamburg (JBH) make two basic sets of criticisms of our paper (Cohen and Levinthal [Cohen, W. M., D. A. Levinthal. 1994. Fortune favors the prepared firm. Management Sci. 40 227--251.]) in their comment. First, they object to two key elements of the model structure: the...

A critical factor in industrial competitiveness is the ability of firms to exploit new technological developments. We term this ability a firm's absorptive capacity and argue that such a capability not only enables a firm to exploit new extramural knowledge, but to predict more accurately the...

Choice settings are strategic to the extent that they entail cross-sectional or intertemporal linkages. These same factors may impose daunting demands on decision makers. We develop a graph-theoretic generalization of the NK model of fitness landscapes to model the way in which policy choices...

Modularity has been heralded as an organizational and technical architecture that enhances incremental and modular innovation. Less attention has been paid to the possible implications of modular architectures for imitation. To understand the implications of modular designs for competitive...

The evolution of technology has been a central issue in the strategy and organizations literature. However, the focus of much of this work has been on what is essentially the "supply side" of technical change---the evolution of firm capabilities. We present a demand-based view of technology...

The problem of designing, coordinating, and managing complex systems has been central to the management and organization literature. Recent writings have tended to offer modularity as at least a partial solution to this design problem. However, little attention has been paid to the problem of...