Andrew A King

Questrom School of Business

This article examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success of and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability...

A long tradition in social science research emphasizes the potential for knowledge to flow among firms colocated in dense areas. Scholars have suggested numerous modes for these flows, including the voluntary transfer of private knowledge from one firm to another. Why would the holder of valuable private knowledge willingly transfer it to a potenti...

Research summary : This article uses distributional matching and posterior predictive checks to estimate the extent of false and inflated findings in empirical research on strategic management. Based on a sample of 300 papers in top outlets for research on strategic management, we estimate that if each study were repeated, 24–40 percent of signific...

Few academic management theories have had as much influence in the business world as Clayton M. Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. But how well does the theory describe what actually happens in business?

Why do we sanction norm violations? Despite near universal agreement on the role of sanctions for maintaining norms of cooperation, scholars hotly dispute whether individuals sanction based on a rational calculus or because of strong retributive instincts. In this paper we report on a mixed-method field study examining sanctioning behavior. Our goa...

When will knowledge holders share their knowledge with peers? Several studies suggest that norms of knowledge disclosure encourage knowledge transfer. More recently, scholars have hypothesized that norms of knowledge use may indirectly promote it. In this article, we synthesize a theoretical framework of the effect of norms of knowledge use and tes...

Theory suggests that social exchange is facilitated when actors are more likely to sanction violations of social norms. Most previous research on exchange behavior has examined the effect of sanctions on norm violators. We instead consider the effect of anticipated sanctions on the behavior of a potential norm enforcer. We combine qualitative evide...

Scholars have conjectured that managers fail to appreciate the potential for waste reduction and thereby miss valuable opportunities for win-win improvements. Previous studies have explored the existence of these proposed unrealized improvements, but no study has systematically explored how expectations of waste reduction are set. In this article,...

In this panel symposium, we aim to stimulate a rich discussion on theories of technological discontinuities, in particular disruption of established firms by entrants. Building on the seminal work of scholars such as Christensen, Henderson, and Tushman, researchers have made great progress explaining under what conditions disruptions occur in a ran...

Many scholars have argued that systems for treating waste impede organizations from preventing waste in the first place. They theorize that end-of-pipe (EOP) treatment diminishes the incentive to avoid creating waste in the production process and obscures the information necessary to devise prevention techniques. This prediction has been widely acc...

Francis Bacon, pioneer of the scientific method, noted in one of his aphorisms that “human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.” In this paper, we evaluate whether this tendency encourages scholars to find and publish erroneous results in top, peer-reviewed, outle...

This article explores some of the ways that corporations coordinate to set the rules of business competition. Such coordination is often called "industry self-regulation" (ISR). ISR is sometimes created by actors that are not "industrial". Its enforcement may not be "self" regulated, but rely instead on the sanctions of outsiders. It first describe...

In this article, we investigate whether environmental capabilities influence firms’ corporate strategies, a topic that has received little attention to date. We hypothesize that firms are more likely to acquire facilities when ownership facilitates the transfer of capabilities either to or from the facility. Using a panel from the US government’s T...

Previous studies suggest that spin-outs will locate in close proximity to the firm from which they spawn. As a result of this process, clusters of entrepreneurial activity tend to develop around a few strong parent firms. But do all spin-outs really stay close to home? We demonstrate that spin-out firms choose heterogeneous technological and market...

In this paper, we explore the conditions for knowhow transfer in gourmet cuisine, an industry characterized by rapid innovation and weak protection of intellectual property (IP). We investigate whether bilateral exchanges are facilitated either by the existence of norms that reduce the risk of misappropriation or by IP strategies that decrease the...

Technological advancement and innovation requires the integration of both external knowledge and internal inventiveness. In this paper, we unpack the concept of absorptive capacity and separately explore the effect of different types of prior experience on the capacity to adopt external knowledge and make internal inventions. We also measure how ab...

Voluntary industry management standards are emerging as an important new form of industrial coordination. They now regulate management practices in industries as diverse as electronics and entertainment. One goal of these standards is the differentiation of well-management firms. Unfortunately, theories of diffusion suggest that such differentiatio...

Tokyo Electron Ltd. operates in a constrained innovation environment, defined by modular boundaries that are long standing in the industry that it serves, the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. While the original motivation for these boundaries was division of labor and partitioning of a complex problem into manageable pieces, the company...

Previous studies suggest that spin-offs will locate in close proximity to the firm from which they spawned. As a result of this process, clusters of entrepreneurial activity tend to develop around a few strong parent firms. But do all spin-offs really stay close to home? In this article, we investigate which firms choose to stay nearby and which te...

Some geographical locations have characteristics that create opportunities for de novo enterprises, but not all new firms can access the benefits presented by a potential location. The ability of new firms to appropriate benefit and avoid risk depends on the resources that entrepreneurs can marshal for their enterprise. This article develops a mode...

We extend theories of self-regulation of physical commons to analyze self-regulation of intangible commons in modern industry. We posit that when the action of one firm can cause spillover harm to others, firms share a type of commons. We theorize that the need to protect this commons can motivate the formation of a self-regulatory institution. Usi...

Previous research has considered extensively the causes and effects of market entry order and timing. It has neglected, however, the timeliness of such entry — the degree to which a firm delivered a new product on the date it had set for its release. In this article, we begin to fill the need for such research by evaluating some strategic explana...

We extend understanding of information-revealing bandwagons by considering a common condition under which adoption of a practice by small organizations, rather than large ones, has a disproportionate influence on future adoption propensities. We hypothesize that when the value of adoption increases with organizational size, smaller adopters have su...

Environmental issues, while of growing interest, have been outside the main focus of business scholarship. This position on the periphery may have been a good thing. It allowed scholars of business and the environment to consider unusual theories and evaluate overlooked phenomenon. In doing so, they have created a body of research providing new ins...

Environmental issues, while of growing interest, have been outside the main focus of business scholarship. This position on the periphery may have been a good thing. It allowed scholars of business and the environment to consider unusual theories and evaluate overlooked phenomenon. In doing so, they created a body of research that provides new insi...

Scholars of management have long considered how institutions can help resolve market imperfections and thereby improve human welfare. Most previous research has emphasized the use of for-profit firms. Such institutions cannot effectively address many environmental problems, however, because environmental problems often transcend firm boundaries. As...

Theory suggests that when transaction costs are low, corporations and stakeholders can minimize social costs by transacting to their mutual advantage, but when trans- action costs are high, reducing social costs requires the intervention of a centralized institution. In surprisingly little work have scholars considered what happens in between—when...

Theory suggests that certification with a management standard may reduce information asymmetries in supply chains and thereby generate a competitive advantage for certified firms. This article uses an 11-year panel of U.S. manufacturing facilities to test whether certification with the ISO 9000 Quality Management Standard generates a competitive ad...

We study conditions surrounding the emergence of a private decentralized institution. We find that a critical event created an industry commons, and a self-regulatory institution reduced the risks associated with this commons. Surprisingly, the institution did so by protecting the entire industry from the errors of member firms.

In this article, we respond to calls by previous researchers to clarify the function of decentralized institutions by analyzing the strategic motives of individual actors. We investigated an important type of decentralized institution, certified management standards, and theorized that firms use these institutions to reduce problems that might aris...

Delivery of antigens by injection of the encoding DNA allows access to multiple antigen-presenting pathways. Knowledge of immunological processes can therefore be used to modify construct design to induce selected effector functions. Expression can be directed to specific intracellular sites, and additional genes can be fused or codelivered to ampl...

Theories of absorptive capacity propose that knowledge gained from prior experience facilitates the identification, selection, and implementation of related profitable practices. Researchers have investigated how managers may develop absorptive capacity by building internal knowledge stocks, but few have focused on the distribution of this knowledg...

Increasingly, technological innovation creates markets for new products and services. To survive, firms must respond to these new markets. How do firms develop the capabilities necessary to succeed in such changing conditions? Some suggest that experience with previous entry builds such capabilities. Others suggest that capabilities arise from expe...

In this paper, we explore the locus of profitable pollution reduction. We propose that managers underestimate the full value of some means of pollution reduction and so under exploit these means. Based on evidence from previous studies, we argue that waste prevention often provides unexpected innovation offsets, and that onsite waste treatment ofte...

Previous empirical work suggests that firms with high environmental performance tend to be profitable, but questions persist about the nature of the relationship. Does stronger environmental performance really lead to better financial performance, or is the observed relationship the outcome of some other underlying firm attribute? Does it pay to ha...

Previous research has found that foreign-owned establishments often lack specific capabilities needed to respond to local business conditions and are held to a higher standard by local stakeholders. These establishments compensate, however, by possessing offsetting capabilities such as technological excellence. In this article, we investigate how t...

Lean production may have a significant public good spillover—improved environmental performance. However, empirical evidence of the link between lean production practices and environmental performance has not resolved the nature of the relationship. To explore this issue, we conduct an empirical analysis of the environmental performance of 17,499 U...

Standardization processes are of strategic importance to firms. Often firms incur significant switching costs when they fail to adopt practices or technologies that become industry requirements. Unfortunately, choosing the correct standard is difficult. Early adopters risk choosing standards that fail. Insufficient attention has been paid to the fa...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35789/2/b2014300.0001.001.pdf http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35789/1/b2014300.0001.001.txt

this paper, we adopt the term "industry self-regulation" because this most clearly suggests the form of institution that we are interested in -- trade association sponsored industry standards. Such standards have proliferated in recent years and consequently have attracted attention from business, government, and environmental activists (Rees, 1997...

A growing number of managers believe that addressing environmental impacts in product-design decisions has tangible advantages to firms. Yet many firms struggle to diffuse design-for-environment (DfE) practices across their product-development teams. Four leading electronics firms' attempts to adopt DfE suggest that the establishment of highly inte...

This research helps to link theories of sticky information with organizational design and governance. It suggests that information embodied in process material can allow downstream tasks to uncover information about upstream tasks. It shows that downstream operators can use this information to negotiate interdependence problems with upstream operat...

Radical innovations are thought to hamper the survival of incumbent firms by destroying their capabilities and paralyzing their management. In response, incumbents are thought to act ineffectually and enter late into new markets, and thus are washed away in waves of creative destruction. In this study, we find that incumbents in the disk drive indu...

Increasingly ecologists have recognized the importance of sudden and unexpected changes in the natural environment-often called ''surprises.'' Organizational scholars have not developed a theory of how to avoid ecological surprise. This article suggests one way to develop such a theory. Using ecology, systems analysis. and a historical comparison o...

Theory predicts that managers will create specialized boundary-spanning departments to insulate a firm from changing surrounding conditions. Theory also predicts such insulating structures will inhibit adaptation. The author has found that in response to changing water-pollution regulation, top managers indeed created specialized pollution-control...

The spatial distributions of normal and transverse forces applied at the surface of a deformable sheet can be made visible by supporting the sheet on an illuminated, transparent light-conducting plate. At points of contact between the sheet and the plate, the total internal reflection of light is spoiled, and a high-constrast image of the contact a...

Lean production may have a significant public good spillover – improved environmental performance (Florida, 1996; Hart, 1997). However, empirical evidence of the link between lean production practices and environmental performance has not resolved the nature of the relationship. To explore this issue, we conduct an empirical analysis of the environ...

There is a great deal of interest in the process and outcomes of corporate acquisitions, and in recent years, much of the work has focused on how knowledge is transferred between the acquirer and its new target to accrue efficiency and effectiveness of business activities. Current research assumes that the transfer occurs from units with stronger k...

Previous studies suggest that spin-offs will locate in close proximity to the firm from which they spawned. As a result of this process, clusters of entrepreneurial activity tend to develop around a few strong parent firms. But do all spin-offs really stay close to home? In this article, we investigate which firms choose to stay nearby and which te...

Firms within an industry often find themselves tarred by the same brush. When accidents occur, stakeholders often punish both the offending firm and the entire industry. In this way, a firm's reputation may be tied to other firms, and so reputation may be a common resource shared by all members of an industry - what we term a reputation commons. As...

Scholars have long inferred the managers make systematically biased assessments of the potential for waste reduction, and these biases partially explain reported examples of x-inefficiency in waste reduction. Previous studies have neither developed the underlying logic of this conjecture nor tested it empirically. In this article we do both. We als...

Spinouts and innovation in the disk drive industry: Do founders take static or dynamic capabilities with them?

The authors explored certification with the ISO 14001 environmental management standard. Sponsored by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the ISO 14001 standard specifies a set of environmental management systems and practices, including the development of environmental objectives and policies, the provision of training and do...