Academic background of senior executives and enterprise digital transformation

With the application of digital technology and its promotion of business model innovation, digital transformation has increasingly become an important strategic issue for enterprises. In this context, based on imprinting theory, we select all A-share listed enterprises in China from 2008 to 2022 as samples and study the relationship between the academic background of senior executives and the digital transformation of enterprises. The study results show that senior executives with academic backgrounds can significantly promote the digital transformation of enterprises. A test of the action mechanism shows that the academic background of senior executives plays a role in the promotion of the digital transformation of enterprises by improving enterprise innovation, and the degree of industry competition moderates the relationship between the academic background of senior executives and the digital transformation of enterprises. This paper applies imprint theory to explore the relationship between the academic background of executives and corporate digital transformation, expanding the research on how imprints affect corporate decision-making and the scope of imprint theory research, while also providing evidence to support government departments in formulating policies to encourage talented individuals with academic backgrounds to participate in corporate management.

A Window of Opportunity: Radical Versus Repurposing Innovation Under Conditions of Environmental Uncertainty and Crisis

In this article, we extend the innovation literature by examining how firms respond to crisis, specifically exogenous crises. At their early onset, crises may represent a window of opportunity for innovation, but it is not equally allocated across firms. We created a unique database of 636 biopharmaceutical firms, from 24 countries and territories, developing innovative treatments during the early outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis to study this phenomenon. We found that firms acted strategically to the shifting external environment and attempted to capitalize on the opportunity by pursuing different but complementary innovation strategies (i.e., radical versus repurposed). The successful outcome of a chosen strategy was highly dependent upon a firm's accumulated knowledge resources, which varied in degree of diversity (i.e., homogeneous versus heterogeneous). We found that firms with more focused R&D (i.e., homogeneous knowledge) developed more radical innovations, whereas firms with more diverse R&D (i.e., heterogeneous knowledge) repurposed innovations. We controlled for firm size (small versus large), firm age (startup versus mature), and country classification (developing versus emerging). We also controlled for a firm's prior knowledge and expertise in coronavirus research and found that it did not influence innovation. Our results suggest that this unique period of environmental uncertainty and crisis created a window of opportunity and a level playing field for innovation.

Coolly provocative: a microfoundational framework of interorganizational cultural distance and exploratory innovation

Purpose

Interorganizational collaboration has been a major source of exploratory innovation. Despite much research, the authors’ understanding about how partner cultural distance is harnessed for exploratory innovation is limited. The authors’ conceptual framework aims to address this gap by explaining the social-psychological processes between perceived partner cultural distance and exploratory innovation.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on research in organizational learning and culture mixing, the authors propose a multilevel model with two parallel processes – cultural brokering and cultural defense. If managers are engaged in the former and are protected from the latter, then the partnership will produce more exploratory innovation. Cultural brokering is encouraged by prompting a learning mindset, while cultural defense is preempted by dampening social categorization across organizational boundaries.

Findings

Cultural brokering can be encouraged by building operational-level managers' (OLMs') collaborative strength through developing a learning orientation, allowing them delivery for exploration, cultivating mutual trust with partners. Cultural defense can be preempted by protecting OLMs from intergroup anxieties through providing organizational support to the OLMs, bridging social categorization faultlines and setting shared collaborative goals. Whether an alliance can unleash its potential depends on not just how cultural brokering is enabled but also how cultural defense is curtailed.

Originality/value

This paper takes a microfoundational approach and considers micro-level processes in a partnership. Furthermore, the model takes the operational managers' perspective and defines culture at the organizational level. All these differences allow us to provide a nuanced picture of how diverse partnerships can be harnessed for exploratory innovation through a few easily-implementable measures.

Corporate Hierarchy and Organizational Learning: Member Turnover, Code Change, and Innovation in the Multiunit Firm

This study examines how recombinant innovation is affected by member turnover and organizational learning within a corporate hierarchy. Prior work has overlooked the role of organizational structure in organizational learning, focusing instead on the knowledge provided by individual new hires or on the disruption caused by individual departures. We address this gap by applying March’s [March JG (1991) Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organ. Sci. 2(1):71–87.] mutual learning model to a corporate hierarchy. In doing so, we theorize how the contributions of corporate staff to socializing new employees and to learning from the organizational code may differ from those of the organization’s subunit members. Empirically, we examine the learning effects of aggregate corporate and subunit arrivals and departures on novel recombinant innovation by subunits. Using 24 years of Motorola company directories, we construct membership turnover measures for corporate and subunit employees and exploit patent data to capture recombinant innovation. Our results suggest that, whereas the influx of new ideas through arrivals may be critical, breaking the pattern of inertial behavior through departures is more important for recombinant innovation. Corporate departures matter most for recombinant innovation, a result that reflects not only corporate staff’s slower individual learning from the organizational code but also its ability to update that code more quickly. In supplementary analyses, we find different effects for technical and nontechnical staff and internal and external arrivals, as well as demonstrate the mutual learning mechanism using internal corporate documents to capture code change. Our study has strong implications for theories of organizational learning, strategic human capital, organization design, and innovation.

Entrepreneurship Through a Unified Sociological Neoinstitutional Lens

The institutional context, which includes the normative, regulative, and cognitive dimensions of social life within the various constitutive spheres of society, has a strong influence on entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. Institutions shape who becomes an entrepreneur, opportunity creation, identification, and evaluation, as well as how entrepreneurs attempt to start new firms. We introduce a novel framework that unifies the two dominant perspectives in sociological neoinstitutionalism, the institutional logics and the institutional pillars typologies, and apply this unified framework to examine the existing research at the nexus of entrepreneurship and institutional theory while outlining a set of entrepreneurial phenomena to which the framework can be applied. We analyzed the citation pattern of all 77 articles published since 1999 in top management journals (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal) that used institutional theory to examine entrepreneurial phenomena, and we demonstrate how the unified framework effectively organizes past research while also pointing to new and important areas for development.

Market Competition and the Effectiveness of Performance Pay

It is well established that the effectiveness of pay-for-performance (PfP) schemes depends on employee- and organization-specific factors. However, less is known about the moderating role of external forces such as market competition. Our theory posits that competition generates two counteracting effects—the residual market and competitor response effects—that vary with competition and jointly generate a curvilinear relationship between PfP effectiveness and competition. Weak competition discourages effort response to PfP because there is little residual market to gain from rivals, whereas strong competition weakens incentives because an offsetting response from competitors becomes more likely. PfP hence has the strongest effect under moderate competition. Field data from a bakery chain and its competitive environment confirm our theory and let us refute several alternative interpretations.

What Does Political Context Tell Us? Understanding the Persistence of Ideological Imprints in the Case of Turkish Humor Magazines

This study aims to develop a contextualized perspective for understanding the variation in the persistence of founders’ ideological imprints across different periods. We argue for the time-varying influence of political circumstances on ideological imprinting to grasp the consequences of multiple different imprints. Employing a multiple-case study research design that relies heavily on archival data, we explored the political contextual sources of variation in political cartoons of Turkish humor magazines from 1972 to 2015. Our findings show that the variation in the persistence of ideological imprints is related to political changes that result in (in)congruence between the founder’s political ideology and the ideology of the governing party, the type of political ideology that the founder represents, and change within the party ideology over time. By revealing how political contexts surrounding imprints lead to persistence, we contribute to imprinting theory and the organizational implications of political ideologies in non-Western contexts.

The Best of Both Worlds: The Benefits of Open-specialized and Closed-diverse Syndication Networks for New Ventures' Success

Open networks give actors non-redundant information that is diverse, while closed networks offer redundant information that is easier to interpret. Integrating arguments about network structure and the similarity of actors' knowledge, we propose two types of network configurations that combine diversity and ease of interpretation. Closed-diverse networks offer diversity in actors' knowledge domains and shared third-party ties to help in interpreting that knowledge. In open-specialized networks, structural holes offer diversity, while shared interpretive schema and overlap between received information and actors' prior knowledge help in interpreting new information without the help of third parties. In contrast, actors in open-diverse networks suffer from information overload due to the lack of shared schema or overlapping prior knowledge for the interpretation of diverse information, and actors in closed-specialized networks suffer from overembeddedness because they cannot access diverse information. Using CrunchBase data on early-stage venture capital investments in the U.S. information technology sector, we test the effect of investors' social capital on the success of their portfolio ventures. We find that ventures have the highest chances of success if their syndicating investors have either open-specialized or closed-diverse networks. These effects are manifested beyond the direct effects of ventures' or investors' quality and are robust to controlling for the possibility that certain investors could have chosen more promising ventures at the time of first funding.