We discuss how firms can replicate practices and knowledge embedded in practices by following principles, with no direct reference to an extant working example (template). Definitions are provided for the key concepts of templates, principles, and background knowledge. We address the challenges...

This paper shows how idiosyncratic resources can be the basis of sustained profitability and persistent heterogeneity under competitive conditions: Generic inputs purchased in the market become idiosyncratic resources by investments in customization. Analytically, we show how heterogeneous firms...

As emphasized by Barney (1986), any explanation of superior profitability must account for why the resources supporting such profitability could have been acquired for a price below their rent generating capacity. Building upon the literature in economics on coordination failures and incomplete...

This study presents a new model of search on a rugged landscape, which employs modeling techniques from fractal geometry rather than the now-familiar NK modeling technique. In our simulations, firms search locally in a two-dimensional fitness landscape, choosing moves in a way that responds both...

The paper analyses the properties and outcomes of competitive dynamics in industries characterized by heterogeneous firms and continuing stochastic entry. A formal analytical apparatus is developed, able to derive some generic properties of the underlying competition process combining persistent...

Production theory in the neoclassical tradition is strong on Abstract generality. Its high level of Abstraction tends to impede understanding of technological change, partly because its perspective on production differs so much from those of engineers, managers and technologists. A more grounded...

This note expounds the abstract fundamentals of the appropriability problem, re-assessing insights from three classic contributions those of Schumpeter, Arrow and Teece. Whereas the first two contributions were explicitly concerned with the implications of appropriability for society at large,...