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 problem of designing, coordinating, and managing complex systems has been central to the management and organizations 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...

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...

Economic analysis of rank-order tournaments has shown that intensified competition leads to declining performance. Empirical research demonstrates that individuals in tournament-type contests perform less well on average in the presence of larger number of competitors in total and superstars....

Tacit knowledge and cumulative learning underlie an evolutionary theory of business firm development and strategy. As one test case of the theory, this study examines firms' applied research and development activities. Evolutionary theory suggests that firms within an industry will tend both to...

We analyze the birth of capabilities and resources within organizations and within industries, and their historical antecedents, at the time of market entry. We find a consistent theme: the greater the similarity between pre-entry firm resources and the required resources in an industry, the...

Economic analysis of human capital leads to a somewhat different question than that addressed by other management research on external succession: do differences between external successors in the transferability of their human capital affect firm performance, and if so, how? By comparing...

Companies face an expanding set of choices about where to locate their innovation activity, both within their home countries and abroad. This location choice also requires firms to make a simultaneous choice about the organizational structure of innovation activity : almost by definition,...