Life and Business Improvement

Consistent with a Red Queen effect, firms whose patents cited competitors' older ones have slower rates of new product introduction. Thus, the speed of learning matters: organizations that learn slowly from competitors may find their innovation performance rapidly deteriorating. Firms citing older extra-industry patents introduce new products at a higher rate, however. Intra-firm knowledge has a nonlinear effect, first promoting, then hampering innovation as age increases. Temporal diversity in intra-firm and extra-industry knowledge reduces the number of new product introductions but may still positively impact their innovativeness. By considering the location of knowledge in both time and space (that is, its relatedness to a firm's existing knowledge base), newer knowledge is always better for innovation an issue that is made all the more relevant as digitization hastens technology and industry dynamics. Different organizational processes require different paces, and the ...

Problems faced by Managers Today The coming of the 21 st century held meaning for most Western societies, serving as an opportunity for broader speculation about what ought to be done to improve the performance of businesses. In the field of management, cycles of boom and bust in Asia had called into question new ways of organizing hailed in the 1980s, and questions and concerns mounted about inadequacies of 20th century views of business firms. The 21 st century comes with dramatic changes and the idea that, to cope with it, managers ought to strategize anew and shape and reshape their firms. To understand what vital developments are actually taking place in the 21st century, managers need to ask the questions; which current conceptions successfully capture these opportunities and threats, and the vital trends in strategizing, organizing, and managing? Or can current conceptions be extended to serve this purpose? Over the past two decades, the world has moved from the Cold War...