Ambition Is Nothing Without Focus: Compensating for Negative Transfer of Experience in R&D

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ghosh, Anindya; Martin, Xavier; Pennings, Johannes M.; Wezel, Filippo Carlo
• 署名单位: University of Navarra; IESE Business School; Tilburg University; University of Pennsylvania; Universita della Svizzera Italiana; emlyon business school
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2013.0845
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 572-590
• 关键词: technology recombination; Organizational learning; organizational inventive focus; patent citations; photographic imaging industry

摘要

Organizations create high-impact inventions when they combine disparate strands of technology in their corporate research and development. We theorize that when undertaking complex inventive search characterized by high breadth, i.e., drawing on multiple diverse technology components, an organization's propensity toward high-impact inventions depends on its stock of experience with recombining such components and on the focus of its inventive search. Building on learning transfer theory, we argue that the complexity and causal ambiguity of higher-breadth projects is such that experience with similar inventive search will be a poorer guide, comparatively reducing their inventive impact; however, this negative effect can be attenuated by the degree of focus of an organization's contemporaneous inventive search. Using a longitudinal data set of patents from the photographic imaging industry, we find support for our predictions.