Gautam Ahuja’s research while affiliated with Cornell University and other places

Research Summary We examine how and when integration of process and product components within a firm's innovation portfolio increases firm returns. Strategy literature argues that integration enhances the firm's appropriation of returns from innovations. We evaluate this argument recognizing that integration is but one of multiple appropriation tools; firms can also use other (e.g. scale-based) mechanisms to enhance appropriation. Using new measures of integration based on textual coding of patent claims, we demonstrate that while higher process-product integration improves firm performance, this effect diminishes when the firm has greater production capacity or access to markets. Further, high integration lowers innovative productivity. Together, these demonstrations explain why firms, even with awareness of the benefits of integration between components, may not all choose high-integration strategies. Managerial Summary How should a manager design, structure and organize the firm's innovation portfolio – as a collection of separate standalone process and product innovations, or a set of innovations each containing both new process and product attributes? Using data from the global chemicals industry and new textual-coding-based measures, we demonstrate that the latter helps the firm appropriate returns to its innovations by making it harder for others to understand and replicate its innovations, but that it comes with a tradeoff of lower innovative productivity. We stress that that latter approach is less useful when the firm has other scale-based tools in place, that enhance appropriation as well, such as large production capacity or reach to markets. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Abstract At the 2016 SMS Foundations Session interview with Professor Gautam Ahuja, we explored the key insights of his research trajectory, with a special focus on how organizations successfully innovate. We discussed the major ideas, theories, and results that he and his co-authors generated throughout his successful career. The interview was conducted on September 18, 2016 at the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference in Berlin, Germany. This article discusses Gautam’s role in the organizations’ literature, reports excerpts of the interview, and concludes with a postscript from Gautam Ahuja written for the community of organization design scholars.

A firm’s 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_391 strategy can be described as a vector of firm choices spanning the domains of technology development and commercialization. Within this area, we review the main research contributions concerning key choices such as the decision to conduct research, research intensity, the allocation of research dollars between 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_332, applied 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_245, the organizational locus of research activities, the geographical locus of research activities, the nature of technologies targeted, the breadth of technologies worked on, the knowledge management strategy employed, the value appropriation strategy pursued by the firm and the mode of technology commercialization.

It is frequently observed that many firms, especially those that are successful in the current environment, fail to change quickly enough when the environment changes significantly. One potent explanation for these observations is a phenomenon of learning called a ‘competency trap’. In this article we briefly describe what competency traps are, the factors that lead to them, the consequences for the firm, including reduced adaptability and missed opportunities, and, finally, the various means through which a firm can avoid falling into the competency traps.

The literature on corporate diversification has argued for and established the case that companies overdiversify in a product market sense (i.e., enter into unrelated product markets where they may not fully cover their cost of capital). Yet even without engaging in unrelated diversification, managers need to make resource allocation decisions in a variety of activities that a company conducts to consummate its business. In this article, we focus on R&D activity, and we discuss the effects that the uncertainty, boundary ambiguity, feedback latency, R&D lumpiness, and legitimacy that characterize technological contexts can have in making overinvestment in R&D likely. Specifically, in this article we (a) draw attention to the construct of activity overinvestment, and specifically R&D overinvestment; (b) use the received literature to argue that there exists a prima facie case for examining this construct and its antecedents in order to evaluate the extent and implications of R&D overinvestment; and (c) make the more general case that the resource allocation literature needs to study the issue of activity overinvestment systematically.

We review the literature on the diversification–performance (D–P) relationship to (a) propose that the time is ripe for a renewed attack on understanding the relationship between diversification and firm performance, and (b) outline a new approach to attacking the question. Our article makes four main contributions. First, through a review of the literature, we establish the inherent complexities in the D–P relationship and the methodological challenges confronted by the literature in reaching its current conclusion of a nonlinear relationship between diversification and performance. Second, we argue that to better guide managers the literature needs to develop along a complementary path—although past research has often focused on answering the big question of does diversification affect firm performance, this second path would focus more on identifying the precise micromechanisms through which diversification adds or subtracts value. Third, we outline a new approach to the investigation of this topic, based on identifying (a) the precise underlying mechanisms through which diversification affects performance, (b) the performance outcomes that are “proximate” to the mechanism that the researcher is studying, and (c) an appropriate research design that can enable a causal claim. Finally, we outline a set of directions for future research.

It is frequently observed that many firms, especially those that are successful in the current environment, fail to change quickly enough when the environment changes significantly. One potent explanation for these observations is a phenomenon of learning called a ‘competency trap’. In this article we briefly describe what competency traps are, the factors that lead to them, the consequences for the firm, including reduced adaptability and missed opportunities, and, finally, the various means through which a firm can avoid falling into the competency traps.

A firm’s innovation strategy can be described as a vector of firm choices spanning the domains of technology development and commercialization. Within this area, we review the main research contributions concerning key choices such as the decision to conduct research, research intensity, the allocation of research dollars between basic research, applied research and development, the organizational locus of research activities, the geographical locus of research activities, the nature of technologies targeted, the breadth of technologies worked on, the knowledge management strategy employed, the value appropriation strategy pursued by the firm and the mode of technology commercialization.