Learning from rivals: the memory-inconsistent strategy

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the role of competitive memory that assists the new ventures to overcome challenges due to the liability of newness in the strategic adaptation stage.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper. Through a critical literature review on new venture survival and organizational memory, the authors identified the possibility for new ventures to learn from other firms from organizational learning and resource-based perspectives.FindingsThe authors found that new ventures can acquire and analyze the existing rivals' strategic moves documented in multiple sources, such as published yearbook, financial report, media, etc., and develop their own strategies. New ventures can also benefit from the relatively high degree of organizational inertia of existing rivals.Practical implicationsNew venture survival and performance are substantially affected by the initial organizational learning and strategic decision-making. Applying the memory-inconsistent strategy (MIS), new ventures that lack competitive experiences can learn from their rivals by internalizing the rivals' competitive memory as strategic resources and utilizing such resources to develop a competitive strategy.Originality/valueNew venture research in competitive markets focuses on the challenges and difficulties due to the lack of experiences, neglecting the fact that new ventures can learn from competitive memories of existing rivals. However, the lack of competitive experiences also means a lower degree of organizational inertia and other strategic commitments. The authors introduce the MIS and suggest that new ventures can benefit from strategic flexibility and create a temporary competitive advantage by surprising existing firms.

Gatekeeper Networks, Knowledge Inertia, and Knowledge Performance in Business Incubators

“…Additionally, knowledge inertia is influenced by the rate of mutual learning between incutabees. In the existing research, the role of knowledge inertia on innovation is both negative (Jiang et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2023) and positive (Yu et al, 2020;Zan et al, 2022). In this paper, the authors use a simulation method to compare the difference in gatekeeper intervention results when considering knowledge inertia.…”

“…Zhou et al (2022) showed that knowledge inertia was negatively correlated with the creativity of R&D teams. Jiang et al (2021) discovered that for new businesses, lower knowledge inertia made their decision-making more flexible and unpredictable, thus creating a temporary competitive advantage. There are also some articles that directly consider knowledge inertia as a negative behavior and analyze its causes (Vafeas & Hughes, 2021) and effects (Fu et al, 2021).…”

Decision-maker's overconfidence and international performance: the role of the adoption of intuitive practices

“…Although from the literature, conflicting results related to the impact of intuitive or rational styles on performance outcomes emerged (Zacca et al. , 2017), different studies (Goll and Rasheed, 2005; Miller and Cardinal, 1994; Schwenk and Shrader, 1993) identified a positive and significant relationship between formal and systematic analyses and planning, which are indicative of rationality in decision-making (Jiang et al. , 2021) and firm performance.…”

“…Indeed, while rationality is conceptualized as "objective, sequential, convergent, logical and detailed", intuition is represented by the following adjectives: "divergent, simultaneous, feeling and holistic" (Sadler-Smith, 2004, p. 161). Although from the literature, conflicting results related to the impact of intuitive or rational styles on performance outcomes emerged (Zacca et al, 2017), different studies (Goll and Rasheed, 2005;Miller and Cardinal, 1994;Schwenk and Shrader, 1993) identified a positive and significant relationship between formal and systematic analyses and planning, which are indicative of rationality in decision-making (Jiang et al, 2021) and firm performance. In addition, further studies suggested that the adoption of intuitive practices may favor idiosyncrasies in decision-making, thus leading to a decrease in performance (Phillips et al, 2016;Liberman-Yaconi et al, 2010).…”