No abstract

Research summary: Although prior research highlights the organizational and cognitive challenges associated with achieving organizational ambidexterity, there has been comparatively less empirical attention focused on the cognitive characteristics that may differentiate top managers of firms that achieve ambidexterity. We build on emerging research and identify cognitive flexibility as a cognitive characteristic with particular relevance to the challenges associated with ambidexterity and suggest that it works through chief executive officers (CEOs)' information search activities. We find that cognitively flexible CEOs are more likely to engage in effortful and persistent information search and rely to a greater extent on outside sources of information. In turn, effortful and persistent information search activities are associated with higher levels of organizational ambidexterity. Our study pushes forward the research agenda on cognitive micro-foundations of firm capabilities. Managerial summary: Ambidextrous organizations, or organizations that have the capability to pursue both incremental and discontinuous innovation, enjoy more sustainable competitive advantages. However, the achievement of organizational ambidexterity poses unique demands for top managers, including cognitive challenges. To help managers better understand these challenges, this study focuses attention on the role of the CEO in the achievement of organizational

This paper seeks to map out the emergence and evolution of entrepreneurship as an independent field in the social science literature from the early 1990's to 2009. Our analysis indicates that entrepreneurship has grown steadily during the 1990's but has truly emerged as a legitimate academic discipline in the latter part of the 00's. The field has been dominated by researchers from Anglo-Saxon countries over the past twenty years, with particularly strong representations from the US, UK, and Canada. The results from our structural analysis, which is based on a core document approach, point to five large knowledge clusters and further 16 sub-clusters. We characterize the clusters from their cognitive structure and assess the strength of the relationships between these clusters. In addition, a list of most cited articles is presented and discussed.

Product platforming-a specific approach to new product development utilizing common technology components or subsystems deployed across multiple products or product lines-has been argued to bring numerous valuable organizational outcomes (e.g., effectiveness of R&D process, superior postlaunch product commercial performance, and ultimately sustained competitive advantage). Yet, large-scale longitudinal empirical examinations of the mechanisms linking product platforming to firm performance are scarce. Drawing on the concepts of architectural leverage and product life cycle flexibility, the article presents the development and empirical test of a set of hypotheses regarding the commercial outcomes of platforming at the product level using a unique dataset comprising all products developed and sold by a large, global LED lighting manufacturer in 2010-2015. The results suggest that platformed products demonstrate significantly higher sales and gross profit margins aggregated over their product life cycle (PLC), vis-a-vis the comparable group of nonplatformed, individually developed products. In addition, the findings demonstrate that a product platforming development approach appears to extend the PLC relative to nonplatformed products based on an integral, nonmodular product architecture. Practitioner PointsA product platforming approach to R&D, implying the development and implementation of technology components or subsystems that are shared across multiple products or product lines, is an effective way to improve the commercial performance of new products.Platformed products achieve higher sales and gross margins over all stages of the product life cycle, compared to nonplatformed products based on an integral, nonmodular product architecture.Product platforming also prolongs the average product life cycle, because of the modular nature of product line architecture that supports platformed components and the flexibility of introducing newer components over time within that same architecture.Managers need to consider various trade-offs that can affect the adoption of a platforming strategy, which include the degree of heterogeneity of customer needs in the target market, as well as different internal organizational approaches to implementing the platforming strategy.