
Will MitchellUniversity of Toronto | U of T
Will Mitchell
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Publications (178)
Diversification involves ongoing decisions about firm boundaries and relatedness. We develop a theoretical model that uses a real-option framework combined with optimal mechanism design to analyze how choices of boundaries and relatedness affect firm performance in the face of tradeoffs between governance and flexibility. We find that: (1) optimal...
We investigate the idea that firms’ choices of M&A evaluation methods are influenced by two socio-political factors that arise in the behavioral theory of the firm—uncertainty and controversy. In doing so, we investigate boundary conditions between arguments that expect firms to use financial analysis such as net present value as the primary tool a...
Research Summary: Research exploring investor reactions to sustainability has substantial empirical limitations, which we address with a large‐scale longitudinal financial event study of the first global sustainability index, DJSI World. We examine investor reactions to firms from 27 countries over 17 years that are added, deleted, or continue on t...
Research summary
This article studies how the strategic benefits of political ties change as a closed political‐economic system opens, focusing on types and destinations of connections between business leaders and political actors. We examine how formal and informal ties (types) to party leaders, government officials, and elected legislators (desti...
This special issue is devoted to exploring new methods for addressing questions in strategic management. This introduction synthesizes the collective contribution of the articles for strategy research. The articles draw on methods from other fields, extending and adapting them to address strategy questions. The innovations provide new, different, o...
This paper draws from performance feedback theory and the resource-based view of the firm to study divestiture activity. We argue that the extent and nature of resource reconfiguration through divestiture may be affected by both high and low extremes of performance relative to a firm's historical aspirations. Based on analysis of divestiture counts...
The dynamic capabilities literature suggests that firms need to use both internal development and external sourcing in order to thrive over time, but we have a limited understanding of the conditions that best suit different sourcing choices. This study examines how constraints that arise from firms' existing stocks of capabilities and from their i...
Acquisitions often do not reach completion when buyers’ initial evaluations change during post-announcement due diligence investigations, but research offers only limited explanations for when such deal-cancelling new information will be most common. Drawing from the spatial geography and acquisition strategy literatures, we argue that successful c...
In emerging-market countries, commercial institutions do not always develop sufficiently quickly or effectively to support ambitious entrepreneurs. How might intermediaries remedy these problems? We address this question by drawing on institutional literatures to develop the concept of "open system intermediaries." Our research design involves exam...
The Strategic Management Journal encourages studies using qualitative empirical methods that investigate important research questions and phenomena in order to generate new insights. Researchers believe that qualitative research often provides a means of identifying generalizable patterns concerning important questions in the field of strategic man...
Several studies suggest that political ties help firms survive or perform but do not examine the boundary conditions concerning which types of firms and which type of ties help firms. We draw from resource dependence and resource-based theories to argue that political ties can improve both firm survival (labeled “buffering”) and performance (labele...
Strategic Management Journal 2014 discusses quantitative empirical analysis in strategic management. One of the trademark of strategic management research is the use of unique data; attention paid during data collection to potential pitfalls in empirical estimation can pay off later by enabling simpler or more robust analyses. Decisions regarding w...
Organizational studies are only beginning to assess how firm value is affected when organizations gain or lose status. Drawing from the social evaluation literature, we suggest that the benefits and penalties that investors impose following changes in status will be moderated by firm performance. Using a large-scale financial event study of additio...
Valuable resources often exist at distant points from a firm’s current locations, with the result that strategic decisions such as growth have a spatial dimension in which firms seek information and choose between geographically distributed alternatives. Studies show that geographic proximity facilitates the flow of resources, but there is limited...
Research on strategic momentum considers how experience with innovation affects firms’ subsequent innovativeness. Traditionally the momentum literature has emphasized arguments for an accelerating effect of innovation experience, but recent critiques and contrasting empirical results suggest ambiguity regarding how experience with innovation affect...
Despite extensive research concerning the challenges that early entrants face when they enter new markets, the term “first mover advantage” has taken hold in many business classrooms and executive offices. However, the belief in a wide-spread “first mover advantage” largely rests on a severe survival bias. Indeed, the perceived “first mover advanta...
In this paper, we examine how the competitive industry environment shapes the way that digital strategic posture (defined as a focal firm's degree of engagement in a particular class of digital business practices relative to the industry norm) influences firms' realized digital business strategy. We focus on two forms of digital strategy: general I...
Business groups are key sources of innovation in emerging market economies, but we understand little about why innovativeness differs across groups and over time. Variation in the density of intragroup buyer–supplier ties, which are common structural linkages among group affiliates, can help explain both cross-sectional and temporal heterogeneity o...
We study how firms' use of in-licensing for their initial entry to a business domain can detract from the performance of their subsequent autonomous endeavors in the domain. We argue that in-licensing produces high levels of causal ambiguity about factors that drive the performance achieved with the licensed product. In turn, the experience that fi...
Acknowledgement: We appreciate comments and suggestions from the reviewers.
Evolutionary theory of business activity studies how firms are selected out of environments in which they do not fit, but most existing work underemphasizes the distinction between acquisition and dissolution as selection processes. We address this gap with a multilevel analysis that investigates how managerial and functional organizational capabil...
We study how relational rents and social rigidities create barriers to exploiting network resources in horizontal alliances.While the alliance literature has focused on challenges to combining partners' internal resources, we examine alliances in which firms attempt to pool network resources that arise from the partners' relationships with third pa...
Research Prospective (RP) has been included as a new feature in the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ). The term has been used as a noun to demonstrate the journal's goal of promoting in an impactful way, along with the future direction of the strategic management field. SMJ will publish the new feature in the form of short articles that can genera...
COMPUTER SOFTWARE This study examines time-based pacing of generational product innovation in the applications software industry. We argue that firms tend to develop temporal routines for introducing generational product innovations due to customer demands and internal operating procedures that value temporal consistency. The argument further sugge...
A key question for organizational learning research is to identify opportunities and constraints for firms to gain useful information from the activities and performance of other firms. We argue that vicarious information contained in outlet-level ownership transfers of other firms presents an important opportunity for small multi-unit organization...
Research concerning diversification and specialization of venture capital funds typically does not consider how a VC's effort might influence performance of different portfolios. We develop a model that analyzes VC effort when there is the potential for cross-sectional and/or serial knowledge spillover among projects. The model generates two implic...
This paper builds on the concept of "intent to learn" as an explanation for why some firms are better than others at appropriating knowledge in their alliances. We re-conceptualize the idea of learning intent to include both top management-level decisions and firm-wide processes, while also recognizing that knowledge appropriation includes learning...
Asset reconfiguration by both growth and divestiture underlies business transformation, but reconfiguration remains poorly understood in countries with limited market infrastructure. We argue that more developed infrastructure facilitates resource reconfiguration, assisting weak firms' attempts to retrench and strong firms' attempts to grow; in tur...
This study examines how competitive market conditions shape the responsiveness with which businesses release generational product innovations (GPIs) following the introduction of GPIs by either competitors or complementary firms.GPIs are substantial technical advances in the performance of products within technology regimes. Prior studies of innova...
Executing a new strategy nearly always requires new resources and capabilities and most firms seek them out the wrong way. In a 10-year study of 162 telecom companies, the authors found that organizations deploying all the methods available to them outperform those that stick with a narrow approach. Yet most firms doggedly pursue one chief method,...
This article considers how a firm's system of exchange skills including internal technical expertise and supplier governance mechanisms influence supplier performance, both independently and jointly. The core question is whether inter-firm governance mechanisms, including both relational and contractual mechanisms, can substitute for a firm's inter...
Acknowledgements: We have benefited from comments by Vish Viswanathan, Nils Stieglitz, Nicolai Foss, John Daniels, seminar participants at EIASM workshop on information and organization design, the Management Innovation conference at Copenhagen Business School, and students at Ewha Womans University who attended classes about multinational business...
Theories of the firm raise conflicting arguments about how complementarities between two or more components affect firms' knowledge and production boundaries. Traditional arguments in the boundaries of the firm literature suggest that firms will tend to produce sets of complementary components internally, while more recent modularity studies argue...
ABSTRACT Evolutionary theory discusses the exits of organizations from environments,that they do not fit, but most work underemphasizes the distinction between business acquisition and dissolution as selection processes. We address this gap by investigatinghow,the presence of
The dynamic capabilities literature suggests that firms need to use both internal development and external sourcing in order to thrive over time, but we have a limited understanding of the conditions that best suit different sourcing choices. This study examines how constraints that arise from firms' existing stocks of capabilities and from their i...
The organizational memory literature has compared social sources to documentary archives as potential sources of knowledge that decision makers can use when they seek information needed to carry out business activities, but has not considered how an individual's personal stock of relevant knowledge will shape the benefits of such organizational sou...
This paper studies how different types and destinations of connections between business leaders and political actors create strategic benefits in closed and open political economic systems. The analysis examines how political ties facilitate diversification by business groups in Taiwan between 1986 and 1998, before and after the country underwent e...
The organizational memory literature has compared social sources and documentary archives as potential sources of knowledge that decision makers can use when they seek information needed to carry out business activities. However, this research under-emphasizes how an individual's personal stock of relevant knowledge will shape the benefits of both...
This paper explores whether firms make better governance choices as they gain experience in different modes of governing external resource sourcing, modes that include acquisitions, alliances, and purchase contracts. We refer to the ability to choose appropriate governance modes as a firm's mode selection capability. Using a sample of 162 firms in...
Information technology enabled exchanges in electronic markets have significant implications for buyer-supplier relationships. Building on studies that emphasize the role of intangible assets in interorganizational relationships, this study argues that buyers are less likely to use reverse auctions for supplier relationships involving a high degree...
Anecdotal evidence suggests that innovative medical devices often arise from physicians' inventive activity, but no studies have documented the extent of such physician-engaged innovation. This paper uses patent data and the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile to provide evidence that physicians contribute to medical device innovation...
Recent discussions in health reform circles have pinned great hopes on the prospect of innovation as the solution to the high-cost, inadequate-quality U.S. health system. But U.S. health care institutions-insurers, providers, and specialists-have ceded leadership in innovation to Indian hospitals such as Care Hospital in Hyderabad and the Fortis Ho...
Business groups are a network form of multi-business firm that play central economic and technological roles in many emerging economies. We draw from the technology studies literature, complemented by concepts from studies of organizational networks, to investigate how equity, director, and operating ties between firms within groups shape their inn...
Businesses often benefit by forming alliances with other firms but risk becoming dependent on their partners. We discuss two situations in which dependence may create serious problems: first, if a partner shuts down and. second, if a partner forms a relationship with a new partner. We examine collaborative relationships formed by businesses operati...
Chain-owned nursing homes have become the predominant type of provider in the United States, but little is known about their management structures. Prior research has found that chain ownership has significant effects on health outcomes, but why that is the case is not well understood.
This study examines the effects of corporate-mandated standardi...
Modularity in product design and flexible supply chains is increasingly common in buyer-supplier relationships. Although the benefits of supply chain flexibility and component modularity for end-product manufacturers are accepted, little is known about their impact on suppliers. We advance the literature on modularity by exploring how three aspects...
ABSTRACT Max Weber (1922/1946) championed,bureaucratic practices as a rationalizing force that increases
Multiunit chains proliferated rapidly during the twentieth century and now dominate much of the service sector landscape, often growing by acquiring components from other owners. Transfer learning plays a central but only partially understood role in chain strategy, in both ongoing and newly acquired components. Multiunit chains gain potential bene...
A key question for organizational learning research is to identify opportunities and constraints for firms to gain useful information from the activities and performance of other firms. We argue that market-level turnover events generate and release vicarious information that small multiunit organizations can use to enhance their likelihood of surv...
We appreciate financial support from the Institute for Supply Management, the American Production and Inventory Control Society, and the University of Michigan Business School. Thanks to reviewers for their comments and suggestions. All errors remain our own.
This paper demonstrates the existence of bidirectional relationships between interfirm collaboration and business sales. Controlling for factors that influence whether firms form collaborative relationships, the analysis shows that entry and post-entry collaboration often contribute to superior performance, which in turn attracts more partners. How...
Prior research provides ambiguous results regarding the performance of international acquisitions. Drawing on a survey of 248 acquisitions, we find that acquirers enhance their capabilities when they buy a target with a multinational geographic scope. A financial event study uses a subsample of the acquisitions to show that the financial markets al...
Acquisition of capabilities is both imperative and difficult in emerging economies. This study adopts a duel network perspective to examine how the source networks and recipient networks in which international joint venture (IJV) partners operate influence inter-organizational transfer and diffusion of capabilities. We study multiple cases in the C...
Business groups are multi-business firms in which network ties between affiliates shape the innovative incentives and abilities of the group's businesses. We consider three types of intra-firm linkages within business groups: operating, director, and investment ties. Such ties create both opportunities and constraints for innovation by units of a b...
In this paper, we propose that a firm's capacity to control the transfer of resources in alliances is driven by two essential abilities: a learning ability and a protection ability. To explain learning in alliances, previous research has focused on a wide range of rather diverse factors, such as the firm's alliance experience, its knowledge base, i...
Abstract This paper studies firms' choices of internal vs external sources of new capabilities. We first compare transaction cost, knowledge-based, and institutional arguments, which all emphasize the attributes of capabilities, including contractual hazards, capability gaps, and legitimacy. We next contrast these arguments with propositions that e...
This article discusses how firms innovate within and across firm boundaries by reconfiguring their resources and business units over time. Focusing on acquisitions and internal development as key aspects of business dynamics, the authors track the evolution of 87 product lines and 88 business units in Johnson & Johnson's medical sector from 1975 to...
Organization structure acts as a lens on the environment, gathering information and shaping its flow through a firm to inform managers' choices. This shaping of information flow happens through an organization's operating units, which selectively process information from the environment, and through the links between them, which pass information be...
This paper shows that business groups in emerging economies exert dual effects on innovation. While groups facilitate innovation by providing institutional infrastructure, groups also discourage innovation by creating entry barriers for nongroup firms and thereby inhibit the proliferation of new ideas. This pattern reflects an evolutionary process...
Most research of post-acquisition integration examines integration of individual business units. The research pays less attention to corporate level integration processes, by which we mean the standardization of integration routines and synchronization of integration activities across a firm's business units. We argue that corporate level acquisiti...
This study investigates how participating in strategic alliances with rivals affects the relative competitive positions of the partner firms. The paper builds on studies that show significant differences in the outcomes of scale and link alliances. The study argues that the more asymmetric outcomes of link alliances translate into greater changes i...
This paper studies organizational change following a shift in an industry environment, in the context of how a focused factory adapts to a change in its manufacturing objectives. We use the organizational nature of production operations to suggest that the effectiveness of adaptation will depend on how well the manufacturing requirements of the new...
Although several studies have shown that inward foreign direct investment (FDI) often leads to greater host country productivity, researchers have yet to determine the relative importance of direct technology transfer and competitive pressure. To assess the relative importance of the two channels, we examine the US auto-component industry between 1...
Our study addresses two main questions: First, what types of alliances do firms tend to create when combining different kinds of resources? Second, what governance mechanisms do firms set up to coordinate and protect resources when they use them for different alliances? We examine 227 alliances between competitors in Asia, North America, and Europe...
Firms differ in their integration capability, which is the ability to absorb and manage businesses on a continuing basis. We expect integration capability heterogeneity to influence acquisition strategy by profit-seeking firms, affecting both their propensity to acquire and the types of businesses that they target. We argue that a firm's integratio...
as well as the editorial assistance of Nancy Kotzian. We are responsible for all errors.
This paper studies acquisitions of nursing home facilities by chains. We first test alternative 'cream-skimming' and 'turn-around' arguments concerning nursing home acquisitions. We then consider post-acquisition changes in nursing home health performance, differentiating effects of the acquisition process from those of prior strategy and performan...
This book adopts a knowledge-based perspective that sees the firm as a store of knowledge resources and capabilities. The firm’s knowledge base includes the expertise and experience of individuals, the routine and processes that define the distinctive way of doing things inside the organization, as well as the knowledge of customer needs and suppli...
We examine how three aspects of network structure affect supplier performance, focusing on relationship duration, supplier autonomy, and customer status. We examine their impact in different competitive contexts by considering differences in the modular and architectural technological characteristics of the components. Using data on all U.S. automo...
This study compares the use of acquisitions by Asian, European, and North American firms operating in the U.S. medical sector between 1978 and 1995. We examine the incidence of acquisitions, the relative emphasis that acquirers place on resource deepening and resource extension, and the post-acquisition retention of acquired resources. We find subs...
We appreciate helpful comments from Gary Dushnitsky, Mike Lenox, Harbir Singh, and seminar participants at the Wharton School, the University of Minnesota, and the Academy of Management Annual Meetings in Toronto.
Business acquisition, resource redeployment, and asset divestiture are elements of a dynamic process in which firms change their businesses by recombining internal and external resources. Analyzing 253 horizontal acquisitions, we show that post-acquisition resource redeployment leads to asset divestiture from the business that receives the redeploy...
two anonymous reviewers have also provided valuable comments.
La finalité de notre article est de comprendre la nature et la diversité des relations intervenant dans le processus de diffusion interorganisationnelle des connaissances. Notre questionnement porte dans un premier temps sur la nature des dimensions de ces relations et dans un second temps sur leur diversité. L’intérêt est double : préciser et comp...
La finalité de notre article est de comprendre la nature et la diversité des relations intervenant dans le processus de diffusion interorganisationnelle des connaissances. Notre questionnement porte dans un premier temps sur la nature des dimensions de ces relations et dans un second temps sur leur diversité. L’intérêt est double : préciser et comp...
This paper studies how firms use acquisitions to achieve long-term business reconfiguration. We base the study in a routine-based perspective on business dynamics. We develop and test hypotheses concerning the relative extent of change by acquiring and non-acquiring businesses, focusing on product line addition, retention, and deletion as forms of...
This study examines the causes of acquisitions of nursing homes by corporate chains and the consequences for the operating strategies of the acquired facilities and the health outcomes of their residents. Our data include all reports of inspections of Medicare/Medicaid certified U.S. nursing homes from January 1991 through September 1997. During th...
This paper investigates the outcomes and durations of strategic alliances among competing firms, using alliance outcomes as indicators of learning by partner firms. We show that alliance outcomes vary systematically across link and scale alliances. Link alliances are interfirm partnerships to which partners contribute different capabilities, while...
This paper investigates the outcomes and durations of strategic alliances among competing firms, using alliance outcomes as indicators of learning by partner firms. We show that alliance outcomes vary sistematically accross link and scale alliances. Link alliances are interfirm partnerships to which partners contribute different capabilities, while...
The secret to good alliances is simplicity both in terms of collaboration and strategic autonomy. This article proposes a simple matrix. How to get the best results from alliances Alliances with other companies are an integral part of corporate life. No matter what industry or country, alliances are essential tools by which companies reduce costs a...
Business acquisition, resource redeployment, and asset divestiture are elements of a dynamic process in which firms change their businesses by recombining internal and external resources. Analyzing 253 horizontal acquisitions, we show that post-acquisition resource redeployment leads to asset divestiture from the business that receives the redeploy...
This study links theories concerning methods that firms use to acquire technology with theories concerning types of technological change. We place particular emphasis on interorganizational relationships. We predict that firms will often acquire know-how needed for encompassing technological change through equity-based arrangements with other organ...
This study links theories concerning methods that firms use to acquire technology with theories concerning types of technological change. We place particular emphasis on interorganizational relationships. We predict that firms will often acquire know‐how needed for encompassing technological change through equity‐based arrangements with other organ...
This research examines how a supplier's relationships with other organizations in its environment influence the occurrence and timing of its international expansion. The paper describes how constraints on information and market attractiveness influence the establishment by a supplier of a first plant in a foreign location. We develop a model that c...