Arun Kumaraswamy

Florida International University | FIU · Department of International Business

We explore how organizations may be designed to transform themselves even as they continue to perform seamlessly on a day-to-day basis. Our inquiry frame recognizes that organizational designs comprise several elements - people, technologies, processes, and governance. Our study of an exemplary organization, Infosys Technologies, yields two insight...

We report on a longitudinal study of the emergence of the ATLAS detector, a complex technological system developed at CERN, Geneva. Our data show that the coordination of initial architectural choices was driven by cycles of contestation and justification that resulted in the creation of what we term interlaced knowledge – pockets of shared knowled...

Firms introducing disruptive innovations into multisided ecosystems may confront the disruptor’s dilemma – they must gain the support of the very incumbents they disrupt. We examine how these firms may address this dilemma through a longitudinal study of TiVo, a company that pioneered the Digital Video Recorder. Our analysis reveals how TiVo naviga...

A recent and promising trend in international business and international management research has been to consider institutions not only as taken-for-granted constraints that need to be accommodated, but also the outcomes of agency; purposive action by individuals, firms, coalitions and other actors. We elaborate the development of research in this...

Applications of blockchain technology (BCT) are scaling globally, especially in developing countries, where the opportunities that they exploit are often most prevalent. Achieving scale is vital for BCT ventures, which rely on network effects. BCT ventures seeking to scale employ innovative methods for scaling and also provide interesting insights...

An inversion is a strategy used by multinational enterprises (MNEs) to avoid high corporate taxes in their home countries, by changing their domicile to foreign countries with lower taxes. While prior studies have focused primarily on firm-level and country-level determinants of inversions, we explore how an industry-level factor – foreign competit...

How can an emerging economy, beset by political, economic and resource challenges, jump-start the technology catch-up process in the agricultural sector and then forge an ecosystem to facilitate the continual generation and dissemination of innovations? Equally important, how can it maintain the viability and salience of its catch-up initiatives su...

Research Summary We explore the challenges that digital platform‐based sharing economy ventures confront in establishing legitimacy for their business models by examining the dynamics that ensued when Uber Technologies deployed its ridesharing business model in four U.S. cities. Uber entered each city to jumpstart network effects by establishing co...

This a fully collaborative effort, with authors listed in reverse alphabetical order. We, the guest editors and contributors to this special issue, are indebted to Dries Faems, the Journal of Management Studies handling editor, and the many anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback.

We begin this paper by examining the process of innovation using Usher’s model of cumulative synthesis which comprises four steps: perception of an incomplete pattern, setting of the stage, the act of insight, and critical revision and full mastery. Going beyond a synoptic view on the process of innovation implied by this sequence, Usher’s model al...

Market liberalization in emerging-market economies and the entry of multinational firms spur significant changes to the industry/institutional environment faced by domestic firms. Prior studies have described how such changes tend to be disruptive to the relatively backward domestic firms, and negatively affect their performance and survival prospe...

Market liberalization in emerging-market economies and the entry of multinational firms spur significant changes to the industry/institutional environment faced by domestic firms. Prior studies have described how such changes tend to be disruptive to the relatively backward domestic firms, and negatively affect their performance and survival prospe...

We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the research site for our exploration. Our probe of the emergence of Wikipedia articles highlights a distinctive property of such digital technologies: in their very use, they ge...

Innovation processes are complex. It is through local interactions among people and technologies that diverse and novel outcomes emerge. Even when governed by simple rules, such interactions can generate nonlinear temporal dynamics. Given such complexities, how might an organization sustain innovation for continued growth and vitality? Drawing on a...

We discuss the assumptions that underlie path dependence, as defined by Vergne and Durand, and then provide the outlines of an alternative perspective which we label as path creation. Path creation entertains a notion of agency that is distributed and emergent through relational processes that constitute phenomena. Viewed from this perspective, 'in...

In this paper, we highlight the pervasive influence of information technologies on multinational enterprise (MNE) operations, strategies and structures. The democratization of information technologies has diminished geographic distance and compressed response times for MNEs. In turn, this has led to an increased and simultaneous emphasis on both gl...

We adopt a systems perspective to explore the challenges that organizations face in harnessing knowledge. Such a perspective draws attention to mutually causal processes that have the potential to generate both vicious and virtuous circles. Based on a longitudinal study at Infosys Technologies, we conclude that knowledge management involves more th...

Running headline: Harnessing knowledge for increasing returns Keywords: knowledge-based view, growth, scalability, increasing returns, structuration * Pre-print of chapter in E. Hess and R. Kazanjian (eds.) 2006. The Search for Organic Growth Cambridge University Press, 211-243. ** We thank Nandan Nilekani for encouraging us to write about Infosys....

Analysis of 45 rapidly growing, profitable firms reveals five strategies: (1) product proliferation, (2) mass market development, (3) increasing value to select customers, (4) distribution innovation, and (5) acquisition and consolidation. These five strategies are not restricted to high-growth industries and arise when firms exploit market disequi...

Institutional entrepreneurship implicit in a firm's sponsorship of its technology as a common standard is beset by several challenges. These challenges arise from a standard's property to enable and constrain even as potential competitors agree to cooperate on its creation. Our exploration of Sun Microsystems's sponsorship of its Java technology su...

Firms interact in a “lattice-like” structure within an overall regulatory environment to develop emerging technologies in many high-technology industries. The authors propose that organizational issues at various levels of such a network organization need to be addressed for successful technology development to occur. These levels include the intra...

At one time, firms designed technological systems for obsolescence. Increasingly, however, firms are designing technological systems to facilitate the retention and reuse of components. This paper offers guidelines for how technological systems can be designed for retention and reuse, and explains why retention and reuse of components have become i...

Several key technologies are converging to create the emerging cyberspace. We characterize this convergence process as one of cumulative synthesis and suggest that the network mode of organization is the most appropriate for facilitating convergence

Today's industrial landscape is characterized by rapid change and systemic technologies. Rapid change results in ever shorter product life cycles that demand continual innovation from firms. The systemic nature of technologies makes it difficult, if not impossible, for any one firm to manufacture all components of a technological system. We propose...

An integral part of competition is to deny rivals access to proprietary technical knowledge. Yet, Sun Microsystems provides rivals easy access to its technical knowledge and encourages them to enter its workstation market. This paper employs theoretical insights on technological systems and network externalities to understand Sun's open systems str...

Competition in telecommunications increasingly fuses firms into a network of interdependent industries. We propose the concept of the corporate community as a unit of analysis for investigating technological convergences. Corporate communities augment our understanding of interfirm competition by pointing to the strategic constellations within whic...

Base rate and conjunction fallacies are consistent biases that influence decision making involving probability judgments. The authors develop simple graphical techniques and test their efficacy in correcting for these biases. Preliminary results suggest that graphical techniques help to overcome these biases and improve decision making. The authors...

This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal study of the cognitive processes of an entrepreneur creating a new business. The study covered the opportunity identification phase of the new business creation upto the product launch phase. The authors argue that entrepreneurs adopt an "inside view" mode of forecasting the future histories of th...