Gianmario Verona

We developed a decision tree that integrates relevant organizational adaptation theories to respond to radical changes. The understanding of organizational adaptation often requires a combination of multiple theoretical lenses, especially considering today’s radical changes in technologies, markets, and regulations. However, the research streams on adaptation and change are often disconnected and we lack a unifying adaptation framework that might reveal the synergistic contribution of each theoretical perspective to the problem. To fill this important lacuna, we integrate four relevant scholarly perspectives on the topic: dynamic capabilities, ambidexterity, vertical alliances, and horizontal strategic alliances. Our main contribution is an integrative decision tree that unveils when and why each perspective is most appropriate to respond to radical changes. Our research also unpacks dynamic capabilities theory by suggesting when ambidexterity, vertical, and horizontal alliances are appropriate to integrate the upper-level theory of dynamic capabilities, and how they can overcome some of its limitations. The paper also clarifies that, in order to adapt ambidextrously after radical changes destroying core and/or complementary assets, companies need specific alliance strategies.

Building on the vast literature on technological innovation and new product development, we propose a “strategic organization” framework to inform future research. The framework focuses on two core constructs: “agents” (external stakeholders and internal members of the firm involved in innovation activities) and “capabilities” (activities, systems, and values that retain and unfold organizational knowledge). It also distinguishes between two levels: the “new product development” process (the strategic and organizational sequences of tasks and decisions that compose product development activities); and the “firm” (the strategic and higher-order activities that shape corporate governance, corporate strategy, competitive strategy, and the organizational configuration of the firm). We draw on the framework to highlight how the strategic and organizational management of innovation has moved from a specialized organizational unit, the Research and Development function, to the C-suite. We discuss the implications of this framework for future research and highlight emerging challenges related to short-term financial pressures, sustainability, and digital transformation.

We examine how incumbent organizations respond to complementary-asset discontinuities — technological changes that introduce new manufacturing, distribution, and sales assets but leave the incumbents’ core knowledge preserved. To examine this increasingly common but relatively overlooked phenomenon, we conducted an inductive study of how six newspapers adapted to Internet distribution from 1995 to 2019. Our contribution is a framework that highlights three levels of adaptation (resources, demand, and ecosystem) with related mechanisms and necessary outcomes. At the resource level, incumbents adopt the new complementary assets according to the perception of synergies with their existing core knowledge. At the demand level, the extent to which incumbents update their beliefs about value creation depends on how much they experiment with customers. At the ecosystem level, higher experimentation in the ecosystem helps incumbents to update their beliefs about value capture. The research offers important implications for the technological change, strategic management, and business model innovation literature.

Existing literature has investigated how to approach post-merger and acquisition (M&A) integration right after the deal, but has been relatively silent on how to recover from a failed post-M&A seve...

Transferring individuals who possess relevant knowledge from one organizational unit to another—a form of resource redeployment—may help to overcome impediments to knowledge transfer. Despite the promise of this mechanism, which often occurs through intrafirm geographic mobility, relatively little research has examined how the knowledge and expertise of individuals interacts with the organizational resources of the units to which individuals move. This study examines whether intrafirm geographic mobility improves organizational performance by providing a conduit for the transfer of knowledge while accounting for the interaction between individual knowledge and factors at the organization-unit level of analysis. We analyze the performance effects of the transfer of engineers who have expertise in innovative process technologies. The results from a large multinational company show that the innovative process technology-related expertise of an individual engineer who moves to a new organizational unit is positively associated with the performance of that unit, suggesting that intrafirm geographic mobility improves organizational performance by providing a conduit for the transfer of knowledge. The results also show that the technology-related knowledge of engineers is a substitute for organization-level factors when a unit uses only technologies with which it is already familiar, whereas the technology-related knowledge of engineers is a complement to organization-level factors when units introduce new technologies. Thus, individuals who bring novel expertise to their organizational units through intrafirm mobility may be important vehicles for organizational learning and building new competences, helping to diffuse best practices.

Research Summary: How do incumbents respond to a market information regime change? We employ literatures on product portfolio strategies and capability adaptation to analyze the information regime change induced by the advent of streaming in the U.S. music industry. Our findings highlight that an information change impacts the strategy of organizations. We observe that the inclusion of streaming reveals increasing demand for novelty and variety. Finally, we identify breadth of experience as a driver of the type of innovation adopted. Incumbents with broader experience proliferate across‐niches. Incumbents with focused experience increase the novelty of their offerings. Overall, incumbents with higher breadth of experience perform better. We discuss the implications of these results in literatures of environmental changes, capability adaptation, product proliferation, and democratization induced by new technologies. Managerial Summary: In several industries, rankings influence firms' decisions. Recently, many of these rankings have experienced changes to account for new demand behavior induced by digitization. We study the introduction of streaming into the Hot 100 Billboard music chart in the U.S. We find that the inclusion of streaming reveals more demand for novelty and variety. Also, we show that firms respond differently to this information change and their response depends on their experience breadth, that is the capability to address different market segments at the same time. Music labels with broader experience are capable of addressing the new demand, while those with limited experience bet on novelty as a way to defend their niche. Overall, the music labels with higher breadth of experience are the ones that perform better.