Gary P. Pisano

Harvard University | Harvard

The head of the branded private investment company owner of the Virgin brand reflected on the group's new pillars of growth. Since the 1970s when Richard Branson created the Virgin record retailing company, Virgin had developed from scratch six companies worth more than $1 billion each and changed their focus from record retailing and music product...

In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven organisation had grown into one of Europe's largest biotech firms by revenues. Their...

This paper reports on a multimethod study of 16 hospitals implementing an innovative technology for cardiac surgery. This inductive study led to propositions about new technology adaptation and how group and organizational characteristics influence this process and its outcomes. The findings reveal substantial d ifferences in how an identical techn...

Fiat ended its 27-year absence in the North American automobile market when the first Cinquecento (500)-a very small, iconic Italian car that had strong sales in Europe-was delivered on March 10, 2011. The Italian automaker re-entered the market through an alliance with Chrysler, the American automaker Fiat acquired in April 2009. For Laura Soave,...

What causes so many companies that once dominated their industries to slide into decline? In this article, two Harvard Business School professors argue that such firms lose their touch because success breeds failure by impeding learning at both the individual and organizational levels. When we succeed, we assume that we know what we are doing, but...

In the biotech world, the 18-year-old Munich-based company MorphoSys was a rarity: it was profitable. The company achieved this profitability not by developing and selling its own drugs, but by licensing access to its proprietary library of human antibodies. Recently, the company decided to deviate from this model, and attempt to develop its own pr...

Science has long been connected to innovation and to business. As early as the late 19th century, chemical companies, realizing the commercial potential of science, created the first industrial research laboratories. During much of the 20th century, large-scale business enterprises like DuPont, GE, Westinghouse, IBM, Kodak, Xerox (PARC), and AT&T (...

In 2009, Amyris Biotechnologies was building a plant in Brazil that used synthetic biology to convert sugarcane into both renewable fuels and renewable chemicals. The Amyris' marketing team was investigating the commercial interest for both types of products, while the research and development team and the operations group were building processes t...

Prior work examining the relationship of varied experience (i.e., the concurrent completion of multiple tasks) and learning by groups finds inconsistent results. We hypothesize that team familiarity, i.e, individuals' prior shared work experience, may help explain this difference, as familiar teams may be more effective than unfamiliar teams at usi...

Human beings are critical to the functioning of the vast majority of operating systems, influencing both the way these systems work and how they perform. Yet most formal analytical models of operations assume that the people who participate in operating systems are fully rational or at least can be induced to behave rationally. Many other disciplin...

This paper uses data on 23 process development projects in pharmaceuticals to explore the broader issue of how organizations create, implement, and replicate new routines. A framework is presented which links approaches to experimentation and the structure of underlying knowledge. Although the concept of learning-by-doing is well accepted in the li...

In 1976, Genentech, the first biotechnology company, was founded by a young venture capitalist and a university professor to exploit recombinant DNA technology. Thirty years and more than 300 billion dollars in investments later, only a handful of biotech firms have matched Genentech's success or even shown a profit. No avalanche of new drugs has h...

This paper reviews the contribution of Teece's article [Teece, D., 1986. Profiting from technological innovation: implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy. Research Policy 15, 285–305.]. It then re-examines the core concept of appropriability in the light of recent developments in the business environment. Whereas tw...

In many settings, firms rely on independent contractors, or freelancers, for the provision of certain services. The benefits of such relationships for both firms and workers are often understood in terms of increased flexibility. Less understood is the impact of freelancing on individual performance. While it is often presumed that the performance...

Several observers have suggested that highly skilled workers convey little in the way of competitive advantage for firms due to their mobility. Implicit in this view is the belief that organizations are not important in determining the performance of such individuals. In this study, we address this issue by examining skilled individuals who work wi...

This paper examines effects of tacit and codified knowledge on performance improvement as organizations gain experience with a new technology. We draw from knowledge management and learning curve research to predict improvement rate heterogeneity across organizations. We first note that the same technology can present opportunities for improvement...

Realizing the vision of the IOM's landmark report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, will require new knowledge to support new policy and management. This paper lays out a research agenda that must be pursued if the health care system is to bridge the quality chasm. Based on a consensus process involving leading health care researchers and authorities, t...

This paper reports on a qualitative field study of 16 hospitals implementing an innovative technology for cardiac surgery. We examine how new routines are developed in organizations in which existing routines are reinforced by the technological and organizational context All hospitals studied had top-tier cardiac surgery departments with excellent...

Sumario: The challenge of team management these days is not simply to execute existing processes efficiently. It's to implement new processes as quickly as possible. But adopting new technologies or new business processes is highly disruptive, regardless of the industry. The authors studied how surgical teams at 16 major medical centers implemented...

This paper examines learning curves in the health care setting to determine whether organizations achieve performance improvements from cumulative experience at different rates. Although extensive research has shown that cumulative experience leads to performance improvement across numerous contexts, the question of how much of this improvement is...

This study investigated operating room teams confronted with learning a radically new technology for performing cardiac surgery. Implementing new technology in hospitals is challenging because of the perceived risk to human life of trying something new when current approaches meet widely accepted standards of care. Understanding the learning and ad...

Strategic management has been increasingly characterized by an emphasis on core competences. Firms are advised to divest unrelated businesses and return to core business. Moreover, competitive advantage is now increasingly seen as a matter of efficiently deploying scarce knowledge resources to product markets. Much of this change in emphasis has oc...

The dynamic capabilities framework analyzes the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by private enterprise firms operating in environments of rapid technological change. The competitive advantage of firms is seen as resting on distinctive processes (ways of coordinating and combining), shaped by the firm's (specific) asset positions (...

This paper examines the relative performance of vertically integrated projects versus collaborative projects in the bio-pharmaceuticals industry. Using Akerlof's (1970) model of the impact of asymetric information on quality, this paper suggests that a potential "lemons" problem exists in the market for know-how. It hypothesizes that projects with...

The concept of learning-by-doing has featured prominently in the literature on manufacturing improvement and technological innovation. Much of the focus of this literature is on the ‘doing’ or ‘using’ that takes place in an actual commercial production or usage environment. But problem-solving can also occur long before a new product or process des...

The concept of “manufacturing strategy” is still, in human terms, barely past adolescence. In years, it is younger than most of the MBAs who study it today. So it is not surprising that–like them–it has been undergoing almost continual growth and elaboration throughout its short life, as it tested itself against the real world and as that world evo...

An expanded paradigm is needed to explain how competitive advantage is gained and held. Firms resorting to 'resource-based strategy' attempt to accumulate valuable technology assets and employ an aggressive intellectual property stance. However, winners in the global marketplace have been firms demonstrating timely responsiveness and rapid and flex...

This paper analyzes and compares the various governance structures through which new biotechnologies have been developed and commercialized over the past decade and a half. These governance structures include (1) forward vertical integration by new biotechnology firms (NBFs) from R&D into manufacturing and marketing; (2) backward integration by est...

Investigates the decisions of large, established pharmaceutical companies to develop new biotechnology-based pharmaceutical products with in-house research and development (R&D) rather than by outsourcing. The following five hypotheses are presented: pharmaceutical companies (1) are more likely to internalize R&D in those biotechnology product area...

This paper contributes with empirical findings to European co-inventorship location and geographical coincidence of co-patenting networks. Based on EPO co-patenting information for the reference period 2000-2004, we analyze the spatial con figuration of 44 technology-specific co-inventorship networks. European co-inventorship (co-patenting) activit...

This paper explores the underlying causes of volatility in R&D performance over time at the firm level. R&D performance volatility has not been deeply examined in the innovation literature despite the fact that it plays a critical role in industries such as pharmaceuticals or the movie industry, where firms often undergo "hot" and "cold" streaks in...

Los orígenes de la estrategia -- Trazado del panorama de los negocios -- Crear una ventaja competitiva -- Anticipar las dinámicas competitivas y cooperativas -- Crear y sostener el éxito -- Casos