Chicken, or the egg, or both? The interrelationship between a firm's inventor specialization and scope of technologies

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Toh, Puay Khoon
• 署名单位: University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities
• 刊物名称: STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0143-2095
• DOI: 10.1002/smj.2128
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 723-738
• 关键词: resource; technological scope; ORGANIZATION; inventor; specialization

摘要

Firms with different scope of technologies experience different firm growth. Understanding such heterogeneity requires knowing not only what drives technologies' scope but also why these drivers remain different across firms. I propose inventor specialization as a driver of technologies' scope: firms with more specialized inventors create narrower scope technologies. I also propose that these narrower scope technologies themselves in turn induce these firms' inventors to remain more specialized. I empirically demonstrate this two-way interrelationship in the U.S. communication equipment industry using policy shocks as natural experiments and a new measure of scope. This interrelationship has important implications for why resources and organization appear isomorphic within a firm but heterogeneous across firms. t (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.