R&D collaborations involving multiple types of partners have the potential to generate impactful innovations but also pose significant coordination challenges. Taking a coordination perspective, this study develops and tests a theoretical framework on the optimal temporal coordination of partner relationships in such collaborations. We argue that the effective coordination of multiple types of collaboration partners in R&D projects requires a balanced approach, combining episodes of simultaneous involvement of all partners with periods of sequential engagement with individual partners. Moreover, we propose that the relative emphasis on simultaneous versus sequential involvement depends on project-specific factors, including the complexity of technology development and the availability of managerial resources. Our analysis of 454 R&D projects undertaken by a major European electronics firm, in collaboration with diverse partner types (science-based partners such as universities and research institutions, versus market-based partners such as suppliers and customers), provides robust empirical support for these hypotheses.

Offshoring is a central strategy through which firms reorganize their global operations, yet little is known about its unintended consequences for mental distress among onshore employees. Integrating the Transactional Theory of Stress and Coping with the offshoring literature, we theorize that offshoring elevates mental distress, as the event is perceived as a threat that is difficult to cope with. We further argue that the effect is not uniform but depends on conditions that amplify the perceived risk of job loss or constrain re-employment opportunities. To test these arguments, we construct a comprehensive employer–employee dataset from the Netherlands, in which mental distress is measured using psychotropic medication prescriptions. Our analyses reveal that offshoring leads to a substantial increase in the likelihood of psychotropic medication use among onshore employees, lasting up to three years after the event. Furthermore, the effects become more pronounced when offshoring is accompanied by layoffs and among low-to-medium-skilled, migrant, and older workers. Taken together, our findings highlight that offshoring entails nontrivial and durable human costs, particularly for employees who are most vulnerable to its consequences. For managers and organizations, these results underscore that offshoring initiatives require sustained and targeted efforts to mitigate mental distress and safeguard effective implementation.

Appropriating returns to research and development is a crucial concern for firms conducting research and development under weak intellectual property rights regimes. To safeguard against such risks, firms can resort to an internal collaboration strategy in which technologies are developed in cross-border inventor teams. We argue that the adoption of such organizational strategies depends on the characteristics of the technology: its codifiability and complexity. We develop and test a framework in which the adoption of organizational strategies for appropriation is a function of excludability and imitability, with technology characteristics influencing imitability and misappropriation risks. Our patent-level study of cross-border internal collaboration strategies by 613 foreign research and development establishments of 101 leading multinational enterprises suggests strong technological boundary conditions to the use of organizational strategies to deal with intellectual property risks abroad.

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Pharmaceutical firms are extremely selective in deciding which patented drug candidates are taken up into clinical development, given the high costs and risks involved. We argue that the scientific base of drug candidates, and who was responsible for that scientific research, are key antecedents of take-up into clinical trials and whether the patent owner (‘internal take-up’) or another firm (‘external take-up’) leads the clinical development effort. We hypothesize that patented drug candidates that refer to scientific research are more likely to be taken up in development, and that in-house conducted scientific research is predominantly associated with internal take-up due to the ease of knowledge transfer within the firm. Examining 18,360 drug candidates patented by 136 pharmaceutical firms we find support for these hypotheses. In addition, drug candidates referring to in-house scientific research exhibit a higher probability of eventual drug development success. Our findings underline the importance of a ‘rational drug design’ approach that explicitly builds on scientific research. The benefits of internal scientific research in clinical development highlight the potential downside of pervasive organizational specialization in the life sciences in either scientific research or clinical development.

Since March outlined the importance of balancing exploration and exploitation in organizational learning, the exploration–exploitation paradigm has received substantial attention in the management literature. Recent studies have used computer-aided text analysis to construct measures of firms’ inclination towards exploration or exploitation, using the original set of keywords proposed by James G. March. We propose a structured series of tests to assess the validity of computer-aided text analysis-based measures and demonstrate that the approach used in prior studies is unlikely to deliver valid indicators. We demonstrate that an alternative approach, which relies on a larger library of keywords, including synonyms of the March keywords and selects only those keywords that are informative and that pass validity tests, delivers valid computer-aided text analysis indicators – both for unstructured (news articles) and structured text-bases (annual reports). Our study contributes to the literature on construct validity and has broader implications for the development of computer-aided text analysis-based indicators in strategy and organization research.

Multinational firms can access global talent in two ways: by employing migrants in their home country, or by employing foreign workers in their overseas affiliates. Taking a knowledge-based perspective, we conceptualize these employment decisions as simultaneous and subject to management coordination. Substitution effects are greater when there is a larger wage cost differential between home and host countries, leading to a cost-reduction motivation for foreign expansion and the offshoring of employment. Substitution also occurs when R&D intensive firms employ highly skilled and internationally mobile foreign workers and employ these where the worker’s knowledge and skills can be most productively put to use. In contrast, a complementary relationship occurs when the migrant country exhibits a high contextual distance with the home country of the firm, leading to knowledge (diversity) benefits of migrant employment at home when expanding abroad. Analyzing employee–employer and foreign affiliate data for multinational firms in the Netherlands (2008–2016) and estimating simultaneous equation models, we find support for these hypotheses. Our findings suggest that policies that restrict immigration may have a negative impact on the competitiveness of home-country multinational firms by limiting their ability to engage in value enhancing coordination of domestic and foreign employment growth.

We propose an integrated framework establishing the environmental and organizational contingencies under which the international dispersion of R&D activities benefits innovation performance in multinational firms. We suggest that R&D dispersion is more likely to enhance innovation performance – the smaller economies of scale and scope in R&D, the greater the technological strength of R&D locations and the stronger intra-firm knowledge integration. Employing a panel dataset of 175 R&D intensive US, EU, and Japanese firms, our findings provide support for this framework and suggest that these contingencies need to be taken into account simultaneously. Technology diversification strengthens rather than weakens the relationship between international R&D and performance, which we attribute to the positive influence of recombining knowledge sourced across diverse locations.

To fuel the innovation process with high‐quality ideas, firms are increasingly soliciting ideas from their employee workforce and involving them in idea contests. During an idea contest employees suggest ideas on a firm‐internal, digital idea platform. Once submitted, idea holders can receive constructive feedback from colleagues on their ideas – which has been advanced as positive instrument for stimulating idea improvement and idea quality. Examining three firm‐internal, multi‐staged idea contests that generated 395 ideas from a global management consulting firm, we examine under what conditions constructive feedback positively influences idea quality. We focus on the hierarchical roles of feedback providers and receivers and the role of feedback overlap (which indicates whether feedback focuses on similar issues). We find that the effect of constructive feedback on idea quality is larger when feedback providers have a higher hierarchical rank, but that this effect does not depend on the hierarchical rank of feedback recipients. Further, we show that (partial) feedback overlap strengthens idea quality. Our results generate new insights for both idea‐contributing employees and innovation managers about the important role of managing feedback during idea contests.

While Top Management Team (TMT) internationalization is an increasingly observed phenomenon, we know little about the mechanisms through which TMT internationalization fosters firm performance. In this paper we argue that an international TMT, as indicated by the international work experience (IWE) or the international origin of its members, can enhance innovation performance by steering the firm towards (successful) international R&D collaborations. Analyzing a unique employer-employee dataset of match with innovation surveys (2012-2018), we find that international TMTs show a higher propensity to engage in international R&D collaborations, which in turn positively contributes towards firm innovation performance. We do not find a direct effect of TMT internationalization on innovation performance. Our findings highlight the importance of examining the complex mechanisms through which TMT configurations and the hiring of foreign material talent can have firm performance consequences.

While their expertise and scientific excellence make academic star scientists attractive collaboration partners for firms, this study indicates that firms face difficulties in capturing value from collaborations with academic stars. Stars are time constrained, may be less committed to commercialization, and can be a source of undesired knowledge spillovers to other firms. The purpose of this study is to recognize the contingencies under which collaboration with star scientists is positively associated with a firm's ability to produce valuable patents (invention performance). We analyze a panel data set on the collaborations in basic research (publication data) and invention performance (patent output) of 60 prominent pharmaceutical firms. We find that basic research collaboration with academic stars is on average not associated with a performance premium above the overall positive influence of collaborating with academia. We only observe this premium if the star scientist abstains from simultaneous collaboration with other firms ('dedication') and extend her collaboration with the firm to involve not only basic but also applied research ('translation'). Extending prior work that has focused on corporate star scientists, we find that if the collaboration involves an internal firm star scientist, a translational contribution of the academic star is no longer a prerequisite, and may even be detrimental to inventive performance. Our findings inform the literatures on industry-science links and firms' (scientific) absorptive capacity by revealing the crucial contingencies for firms to benefit from partnering with the best and brightest among academic scientists.

This study focuses on the informational dynamics governing relationship formation among entrepreneurial ventures backed by venture capital. Of particular interest is the role which intermediary VC firms play by channeling information among their portfolio companies, decreasing thus information asymmetries and increasing the likelihood of relationships as a result. This study investigates this effect in context of acquisitions using a matched sample of acquirer and target VC-backed entrepreneurial ventures in the years between 1995 and 2015. We first establish a baseline hypothesis regarding the likelihood of acquisitions between ventures that share a common VC investor, which we expect is greater than in those that do not share a common VC investor. The study then proceeds to scrutinize the intermediary VCs in arguing that their idiosyncratic profiles control the efficacy and willingness to act as intermediation, focusing specifically on acquisitions as outcomes. We investigate three attributes of intermediary VC firms in particular: The first is their expressed commitment towards investees, which we argue and find will lead to a greater likelihood of acquisitions among the intermediaries’ portfolio companies. Then we investigate their diversification of investments across industries, which we find decreases this likelihood. Third, we find that acquisitions are similarly less likely when the intermediary VC firms are more reputable.

This paper starts by observing that many licensing contracts contain explicit organizational arrangements for transferring the licensed technology, involving repeated and close interaction between the licensing partners. We argue that these interactions provide opportunities for the licensor to learn from the licensee. Using data on 1861 licensing deals of 254 pharmaceutical and biotech firms between 1995 and 2015, we show that licensors are more likely to cite the inventions from their licensing partner after an out-licensing deal than matched control firm-pairs that do not engage in licensing. The paper makes the following contributions: first, it demonstrates that not only licensees but also licensors can learn from licensing and that this reverse learning stems from the licensor-licensee relation. Second, it shows that firms can learn from directed outward knowledge transfers rather than non-deliberate knowledge spill-outs. Third, we show that the licensor's post-licensing behavior vis-à-vis the licensee reflects targeted learning by tapping into the most valuable components of the licensee's technology portfolio and those new to the licensor. Finally, the paper extends the theoretical framework behind strategic out-licensing decisions. We show that learning from out-licensing is an additional (positive) element in the trade-off faced by licensors in addition to short-term revenue generation and the risk of long-term rent dissipation.

In the early stages of the idea creation process, individuals often turn to other members within the organization to help them select which ideas merit further development. Critical to this decision is receiving endorsement on the value of ideas from relevant others. We suggest the hierarchical position of these endorsements shapes idea selection, as these endorsements are interpreted by the idea creators as a signal of competence and of future support. We test this conjecture using a field experiment at a major European University organization, where information about the hierarchical endorsement on ideas is exposed and withheld to a randomly assigned treatment and control group involved in an ideation process. We find that hierarchical endorsement has a positive effect on idea selection for those high in the hierarchy of the organization, but little or no effect on those individuals in more low-level positions. Furthermore, we find that hierarchical endorsements mainly reinforce initial quality perceptions of idea creators, rather than that they shift selection towards other ideas. We explore these findings for our understanding of the role of hierarchy in the idea creation processes.