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In this article, we examine competitive moves by which fi rms achieve superior performance. In contrast to prior work that has focused on moves and the related competitive advantages of large fi rms, we draw attention to entrepreneurial fi rms. Based on 32 runs of a multi-round experiential simulation and in-depth participant interviews, we fi nd that entrepreneurial fi rms require competitive strategies that are different from those of a control group of comparable large fi rms. Entrepreneurial fi rms that stay below the radar in established markets and are quick to explore in new markets perform better. They succeed in established markets with a strategy that works around large fi rm competition but ultimately surprises them, and in new markets with a strategy that sets the standards of competition swiftly by continuously creating and destroying new strongholds ahead of large fi rms. Overall, successful entrepreneurs use a combination of selective, invisible, and asynchronous strategies that vary depending on whether the market is established or new. Our fi ndings contribute to literatures on evolutionary learning, exploration and exploitation, and competitive dynamics.

When organizations crowdsource ideas, they select only a small share of the ideas that contributors submit for implementation. If a contributor submits an idea to an organization for the first time (i.e., newcomer), and the organization does not select the idea, this may negatively affect the newcomer's relationship with the organization and willingness to submit ideas to the organization in the future. We suggest that organizations can increase newcomers' willingness to submit further ideas by providing a thus far understudied form of feedback: rejections. Though counterintuitive, we suggest that rejections encourage newcomers to bond with an organization. Rejections signal contributors that an organization is interested in both receiving their ideas and developing relationships with them. To test our theory, we examine the crowdsourcing of 70,159 organizations that receive ideas from 1,336,154 contributors. Using text analysis, we examine differences in how rejections are written to disentangle the mechanisms through which rejections affect contributors' willingness to continue to interact with an organization. We find that receiving a rejection has a positive effect on newcomers' willingness to submit ideas in the future. This effect is stronger if the rejection includes an explanation and is particularly pronounced if the explanation accompanying the rejection matches the original idea in terms of linguistic style.Acknowledgments: Both authors contributed equally. We thank David Kelley, founder and former CEO of IDEO, who encouraged us to study rejections to understand how organizations handle ideas that they do not select for implementation. We appreciate constructive comments from

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Actors in a multiplex relationship—one crossing multiple domains—can struggle to transition into new roles in one domain without disrupting existing interactions and the role hierarchy in another. Via an inductive study of intergenerational leadership successions in seven Chinese family firms, we examine how actors can complete such a single-domain role transition. We find that a succession between the founder/father and the successor/son is successful when the mother (i.e., the founder’s wife) is active in the family but not the firm, acting as a trustworthy third party to the founder and successor in the family while staying nonpartisan to their business disagreements. Limiting her involvement to the family allows the mother to help the founder and successor maintain their existing family roles and interactions while transitioning into new roles in the firm. A mother involved in both firm and family could not stay nonpartisan between the founder and successor, which compromised their trust in her and prevented her from legislating over their multiplex relationship and facilitating the succession. We conceptualize the position of the uniplex third: the network position an actor occupies when she or he is connected in only one domain to two actors who have a multiplex dyadic relationship. Our cases reveal that the uniplex third position grants an actor authority via establishing trustworthiness and nonpartisanship relative to a multiplex dyadic relationship. The uniplex third party can thus facilitate change in one domain and maintain stability in another. We also observe how the mother is inhibited from occupying the uniplex third position when her kin are involved in the firm’s top management. If conflicts exist in the firm between the mother’s nuclear family and her kin, we find the mother disengages from succession-aiding activities in both family and firm domains.

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