Given the inherent risk of innovative activity, firms can improve the odds of success by pursuing multiple parallel objectives. Because innovation draws on many sources of ideas, firms also may improve their odds of successful innovation by accessing a large number of knowledge sources. In this study, we conduct one of the first firm-level statistical analyses of the impact on innovation of breadth in both innovation objectives and knowledge sources. The empirical results suggest that broader horizons with respect to innovation objectives and knowledge sources are associated with successful innovation. We do not find diminishing returns to breadth in innovation objectives, which suggests that firms may tend to search too narrowly. We interpret these results in light ofwell-known cognitive biases toward searching in relatively familiar domains.

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This study examines cooperative standard setting in wireless telecommunications. Focusing on the competition among firms to influence formal standardization, the roles of standard-setting committees, private alliances, and industry consortia are highlighted. The empirical context is Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an international standards-development organization in the wireless telecommunication industry. Panel data analyses exploiting natural experiments caused by a consortium merger and entry of Asian firms suggest that participation in industry consortia increases firms' contributions to the development of new technical specifications in 3GPP committees. Moreover, connections to standard-setting peers formed in consortia facilitate change requests to ongoing specifications. These results suggest that if firms in network technology industries want to influence the evolution of their industry, they should identify both formal standard-setting committees and industry consortia in which they can discuss, negotiate, and align positions on technical features with their peers. For policymakers, these results suggest that it is important to ensure that technical consortia remain open for all industry actors and that membership fees do not become prohibitive to small and resource-constrained players.standards, research and development, strategy, wireless telecommunications