IDENTITY AND STRATEGY AS A DUALITY: THE CASES OF IBM AND CORNING IN THE COMMERCIALISATION OF FIBER OPTIC TECHNOLOGY

There is a growing understanding of how incumbent firms successfully commercialise nascent technology. However, there is less understanding of why firms follow their disparate strategic trajectories. We draw upon insights in the organisational identity literature to investigate why IBM and Corning commercialised the fiber optic technology differently, given they were both technology-driven diversified corporations and initiated high investments in fiber optics when it was beginning to commercially emerge in communications. Our qualitative study investigates how and why that IBM’s customer-focused identity and Corning’s science-focused identity explain why they entered the fiber optic market along such distinct trajectories. We explore the relationship between identity and strategy as a duality, in that they cannot be understood as separate and distinct from each other but are as two sides of the same coin. We offer that understanding this relationship yields insights into why and how firms can follow different trajectories in the successful commercialising of nascent technology.

How Catastrophic Innovation Failure Affects Organizational and Industry Legitimacy: The 2014 Virgin Galactic Test Flight Crash

We examine how catastrophic innovation failure affects organizational and industry legitimacy in nascent sectors by analyzing the interactions between Virgin Galactic and stakeholders in the space community in the aftermath of the firm’s 2014 test flight crash. Following catastrophic innovation failure, we find that industry participants use their interpretations of the failure to either uphold or challenge the legitimacy of the firm while maintaining the legitimacy of the industry. These dynamics yield two interesting effects. First, we show that, in upholding the legitimacy of the industry, different industry participants rhetorically redraw the boundaries of the industry to selectively include players they consider legitimate and exclude those they view as illegitimate: detracting stakeholders constrain the boundaries of the industry by excluding the firm or excluding the firm and its segment, whereas the firm and supporting stakeholders amplify the boundaries of the industry by including firms in adjacent high-legitimacy sectors. Second, we show that, in assessing organizational legitimacy, the firm and its stakeholders differ in the way they approach distinctiveness between the identities of the industry and the firm. Detracting stakeholders differentiate the firm from the rest of the industry and isolate it, whereas the firm and supporting stakeholders reidentify the firm with the industry, embedding the firm within it. Overall, our findings illuminate the effects that catastrophic innovation failure has over high-order dynamics that affect the evolution of nascent industries.

When More Is Less: Explaining the Curse of Too Much Capital for Early-Stage Ventures

This study examines how the mechanisms that entrepreneurs use to successfully mobilize financial resources influence the long-term viability of their ventures. Through an inductive analysis of crowdfunded consumer drone ventures, we empirically illustrate and theoretically conceptualize the link between the claims entrepreneurs use to mobilize resources and the actions entrepreneurs must then take to develop successful ventures. We induct a theoretical framework to suggest that unbounded claims drive up the financial resources that ventures mobilize but reduce the likelihood of their long-term viability because of unmanageable technological complexity and uncontrolled organizational scaling, whereas bounded claims limit the financial resources that ventures mobilize but increase the likelihood of their long-term viability because of manageable technological complexity and controlled organizational scaling. We contribute to the resource mobilization literature by expounding on how the mechanisms that entrepreneurs use to mobilize financial resources are critical for ventures’ long-term viability over and above the amount of resources they mobilize. We contribute to the cultural entrepreneurship literature by linking research on claim making to the actions entrepreneurs must then take to deliver on their claims. Finally, we contribute to the literature on crowdfunding by connecting entrepreneurs’ campaign actions to the postcampaign outcome of on-time and on-scope product delivery.

Category change in cultural fields: Practice deviation and the discursive maintenance of category meanings in jazz music

Deviation from normative practices is common in established categories, stimulating category gatekeepers to reevaluate their approaches to defining and enforcing category boundaries and meanings. While scholars agree that categories are mutable and dynamic, we lack a theoretical framework explaining the mechanisms through which practice deviation stimulates category change. Using structural topic modeling and inductive hand-coding of a large text corpus, I analyze critical reviews of jazz records between 1968 and 1975 to show the discursive mechanisms through which gatekeepers codify change in cultural categories. As jazz musicians experimented with new practices associated with a style now known as jazz fusion, critics discursively reordered their criteria for assessing membership, quality, and value in jazz music, expanding the jazz category into new realms yet retaining its semantic coherence. This paper contributes to research on category dynamics including change and subcategorization, and extends knowledge of category maintenance and gatekeeping in cultural fields.

Shared Fate and Entrepreneurial Collective Action in the U.S. Wood Pellet Market

Although studies underscore the importance of creating a coherent collective identity in order to legitimate a new market category, strategy and entrepreneurship research is divided on whether and to what degree an entrepreneur will engage in collective action to promote the identity. To reconcile the inconsistency, we introduce the concept of entrepreneurial shared fate—the belief of a focal venture that it and its competitors are bound together by a sense of belongingness and equally experience similar consequences—and explore how external threats can influence the degree of shared fate. We conceptually distinguish between communal and individual threats and propose that communal threats will increase, whereas individual threats will decrease, shared fate. We also explore boundary conditions that strengthen and weaken the main effects of perceived communal and individual threats on collective identity promotion. Empirically, we examine venture identity framing in response to forest-conservation activism in the U.S. wood pellet market. Implications for research on new market categories, collective identity, optimal distinctiveness, and forest management are discussed.

Organizing Form, Experimentation, and Performance: Innovation in the Nascent Civilian Drone Industry

Our aim is to explore whether the benefits to firms of using community-based innovation extend to nascent markets: uncertain, high-velocity settings with novel, often complex products. Grounded in a rare empirical comparison, we closely track the two ventures (one using community-based innovation and the other firm-based) that pioneered the nascent civilian drone market. We unpack how each addressed the three major innovations that shaped this setting. Our primary insight is that the firm organizing form for innovation performs best relative to communities in nascent markets. Firms have a coordination advantage that enables quickly and accurately targeting experimentation and problem-solving processes to reduce the many specific uncertainties that characterize these markets. Although communities can help, their task self-selection advantage works best in stable settings such as established markets with simple products (e.g., modular software) and in ambiguous settings in which low-cost randomness pays off. Broadly, we contribute a theoretical framework that identifies how organizing form and problem type jointly shape innovation performance. Most important, uncertainty forms a boundary condition for when firms should rely on firm-based (versus community-based) organizing for innovation.

Anchored Differentiation: The Role of Temporal Distance in the Comparison and Evaluation of New Product Designs

A new design can be compared with its contemporaries or older designs. In this study, we argue that the temporal distance between the new design and its comparison play an important role in understanding how a new design’s similarity with other designs contributes to its valuation. Construing the value of designs as a combination of their informational value and their expressive value, we propose the “anchored differentiation” hypothesis. Specifically, we argue that expressive value (which is enhanced by how much the new design appears different from others) is emphasized more than informational value (which is enhanced by how much the new design appears similar to others) compared with contemporary designs. Informational value, however, is emphasized more than expressive value when compared against designs from the past. Therefore, both difference from other contemporary designs (contemporary differentiation) and similarity to other past designs (past anchoring) help increase the value of a new design. We find consistent evidence for our theory across both a field study and an experimental study. Furthermore, we show that this is because temporal distance changes the relative emphasis on expressive and informational values. We discuss our contribution to the growing literature on optimal distinctiveness and design innovation by offering a dynamic perspective that helps resolve the tension between similarities and differences in evaluating new designs.

Raising the Bar: Values-Driven Niche Creation in U.S. Bean-to-Bar Chocolate

We examine how entrepreneurs might build a viable, values-driven niche. Extant templates for niche creation typically employed in moral markets depend on instrumentally rational logics that privilege economic ends such as profitability and efficiency. Entrepreneurs seeking to construct a nascent niche whose purpose and objectives include the amelioration of social ills, however, may find such templates inadequate. Using the emergence of the U.S. bean-to-bar chocolate niche, through which entrepreneurs attempt to address the social and environmental shortcomings of conventional chocolate production, we demonstrate that constructing an alternative model for niche creation is feasible. Most bean-to-bar entrepreneurs deliberately opted out of extant private regulation initiatives, developing instead alternative encompassing, values-driven sourcing and cooperative relationships, which we term collaborative governance. This is enacted throughout the niche by promoting shared values, best practices, and transparency and is supported by strategic meaning-making work to cultivate customers. Together, these three values-driven strategies form a novel template of niche creation based not on cognitive repositioning or exploiting exogenous change within existing structures and institutions, but on a reconceptualization of how markets might work to support the implementation of nonmarket goals. Based on our mixed-methods analysis, we find that, instead of hoping to accomplish nonmarket goals through established market structures, entrepreneurs built a niche centered on the achievement of specific social goals. Our findings suggest that to understand the strategies supporting emergent socially oriented markets, researchers must explore the intersections of values, entrepreneurial motivations, and operational complexities.

Managing the Value Appropriation Dilemma in Business Model Innovation

Managers and designers of innovative business models that are enabled by emerging technologies need to build legitimacy with ecosystem participants. Yet increasing legitimacy within the ecosystem raises competitors’ incentives to imitate the business model innovators, thereby adversely affecting the innovators’ ability to appropriate value. We refer to this trade-off as the appropriation dilemma. We draw on institutional and resource-based perspectives to develop propositions about mitigating the appropriation dilemma and provide illustrations with a range of cases. Our theory development contributes to the technology management and business model innovation literatures by delineating how business model innovators can create value for all stakeholders and at the same time appropriate value through strategic business model design, a task that is particularly salient in the context of emerging technologies. We also strengthen the theoretical foundations of business model innovation research by grounding propositions about the strategic design of business models in resource-based theory and institutional theory.

Evaluating Ambiguous Offerings

This paper studies how audience members categorize and evaluate ambiguous offerings. Depending on whether audience members categorize ambiguous offerings based on prototypes or goals, they activate two distinct cognitive mechanisms and evaluate differently ambiguous offerings. We expect that when audiences engage in goal- versus prototype-based categorization, their evaluation of ambiguous products increases. We theorize that, under goal-based categorization, the perceived utility of unclear attributes increases for audiences, which leads them to evaluate more positively ambiguous product offerings. We test and find support for these direct and mediated relationships through a series of laboratory, online, and field experiments. Overall, this study offers important implications for research on product and market categories, optimal distinctiveness, and market agents’ cognitive ascription of value.

Shaping Markets Through Temporal, Constructive, and Interactive Agency

In this introductory essay, we develop a theoretical framework of agency as a basis for strategic shaping and market transformation. We conceive of agency as both constrained and enabled by structure, and we build on sociological views that treat market structures as pairings of cultural schemas and material resources that are mutually sustaining. Structures contain the seeds for change because contradictions and conflicts that are inherent to structure inspire agents to imagine a new order and provide pathways to enact them. We theorize three connected forms of agency. Constructive agency captures agents’ ability to differently apply schemas to mobilize resources and improve their strategic positions. Temporal agency underlies agents’ autonomy and individuation, and enables agents to envision new possibilities. Interactive agency captures the collective nature of agency, where interactions among heterogeneous actors provide opportunities for agents to persuade others of their changing conceptions and learn new schemas, expanding agents’ repertoires for shaping opportunities.

Building Industries by Building Knowledge: Uncertainty Reduction over Industry Milestones

Scholars have long been interested in new industry emergence, highlighting that it could often be impeded by uncertainty across four dimensions: technology, demand, ecosystem, and institutions. Building on the insight that uncertainty stems from partial knowledge, we develop a conceptual framework that utilizes a temporal and a process perspective for knowledge generation and aggregation. Industry emergence through key milestones—commercialization, firm takeoff, and sales takeoff—is made possible by knowledge-generation processes by diverse actors within and across uncertainty dimensions, and knowledge-aggregation processes with appending, selecting, and collective mechanisms at play. Our conceptual framework integrates across disciplinary perspectives to shed light on both the development of an industry poised for future growth, and the bottlenecks that may delay or even impede industries from emergence.

Forced Ecosystems and Digital Stepchildren: Reconfiguring Advertising Suppliers to Realize Disruptive Social Media Technology

Research often examines disruption in the context of head-to-head competition between firms and technologies. In contrast, we examine the unique dynamics of disruptive technologies within supplier ecosystems. We do so through an inductive multiple case study set in the global advertising industry from 2008–2013, as the industry grappled with the emergence of social media. Using rich archival and field data, we closely track five global consumer goods manufacturers and their associated advertising suppliers as they attempted to integrate social media into their advertising activities. Our primary contribution is to unpack the process by which firms reconfigure their supplier ecosystems to address disruptive new technologies. Our framework reveals that integrating new technologies may require firms to reconfigure the distributions of both activity and power, and that fundamental trade-offs may leave the value of new technologies unrealized. Broadly, we contribute to research and theory on buyer-supplier relationships, alliances, and technology disruption by bringing a more realistic perspective that considers firms’ network of suppliers and interfirm turf wars in technology adoption.

Community-Based Resource Mobilization: How Entrepreneurs Acquire Resources from Distributed Non-Professionals via Crowdfunding

We examine how entrepreneurs acquire financial resources for their early-stage ventures from distributed non-professionals via crowdfunding. Through an inductive analysis of entrepreneurs’ successful and unsuccessful non-equity crowdfunding campaigns, we derive a holistic framework of community-based resource mobilization. Our framework consists of three distinct processes entrepreneurs use to attain financial capital from non-professional resource providers over time: community building to establish psychological bonds with individuals possessing domain-relevant knowledge, community engaging to foster social identification with existing resource providers, and community spanning to leverage proofpoints with intermediaries who can help orchestrate resource mobilization with broader audiences. Entrepreneurs’ enactment and temporal sequencing of these three processes distinguish successful versus unsuccessful resource mobilization efforts in a crowdfunding setting. Community building is used by successful entrepreneurs primarily prior to a campaign’s launch, community engaging is used throughout a campaign, and community spanning is most effectively used after achieving a campaign’s initially-stated funding goal. This study empirically illustrates and theoretically conceptualizes the dynamics of resource mobilization in a crowdfunding setting.