Imitation—the process of reproducing other firms' products, processes, technologies, or strategic decisions in general—is a salient theoretical construct in the strategic management literature. Moving beyond the “one imitation strategy” assumption, some studies have focused on “how quickly” firms imitate, describing the speed of imitation (SoI) as a key source of “fast-mover advantages.” However, research on SoI has primarily developed in an isolated fashion across multiple subfields of strategic management, leading to a variety of theories, methodologies, and mixed findings that hinder the comprehensive understanding of SoI research. Against such a backdrop, this review leverages competitive dynamics research to (a) conceptualize SoI both as the velocity dimension of the imitation process and as a specific type of competitive response by identifying its necessary conditions, (b) integrate current knowledge on SoI by shedding light on its antecedents and outcomes, resulting in a process model that organizes these factors systematically, and (c) use this presented process model to identify research gaps and mixed findings in the existing literature, thus opening avenues for future research.

Firms seeking fast-mover advantages often confront a critical challenge: not only whether to imitate rivals' innovations but also how quickly to do so. Fast imitation, however, entails risks, particularly in highly uncertain environments. By bridging information-based and rivalry-based theories of imitation with the technological change literature, we investigate how firms adjust their speed of imitation of rivals' technological innovations during periods of technological transition and technological stability. Using a database of 9060 mobile phones and 156 mobile-phone-related technological innovations introduced from 1992 to 2019, we find that a firm's speed of imitation is lower during periods of technological transition following a technological discontinuity compared to periods of technological stability where a dominant design is established. Furthermore, we find that the relationship between technological transitions and a firm's speed of imitation is shaped by three moderating factors: the firm's pioneering orientation, the relative market share position of the technology pioneer, and the visibility of the technological innovation. Our study contributes to the imitation and technological change literature by providing a nuanced understanding of the trade-offs associated with speed of imitation in the context of industry-wide technological shifts.

Our study, grounded in the multimarket competition, knowledge management, and technological change literature, investigates how multimarket contacts among multinational enterprises—i.e., the extent to which rival multinational enterprises meet simultaneously in multiple countries—shape their innovation and patent litigation decisions in host countries. We propose that the degree of multimarket contacts a multinational enterprise has with its competitors in a host country may restrain it from aggressively launching product and technological innovations in that country due to a fear of cross-country retaliation. However, increased multimarket contacts also facilitate knowledge diffusion, heightening the risk of imitation, and consequently enhance the multinational enterprise’s patent litigation intensity—a means to protect knowledge-based resources—in that country. Moreover, we examine how two features of the host-country technological environment—technological ferment (an era of intense technical variation following a technological discontinuity until a dominant design emerges) and home–host country differences in intellectual property protection—moderate these relationships. We test our hypotheses using a dataset of 85 mobile phone vendors, which includes data on their products and technological innovations and litigation cases in 46 countries between 2003 and 2015. This study sheds light on the interplay among multinational enterprises’ multimarket contacts, innovation, and patent litigation.

Research Summary Drawing on signaling theory and the international business literature that addresses the role of institutions, we argue that multinational enterprises (MNEs) that use multimarket contact (MMC)-that is, meet the same competitors in multiple countries-to reduce rivalry in a given country, will have their actions and performance influenced by the institutional quality of that country. More specifically, we contend that action observability is the mechanism that explains why institutional quality facilitates an MNE's use of MMC with competitors in a host country. We also contend that an MNE's ability to successfully reduce rivalry with host country competitors via MMC is contingent on the institutional quality distance between the MNE's home and host country. We test our hypotheses with data from the mobile phone industry. Managerial Summary MNEs often meet the same rivals simultaneously in multiple countries, a phenomenon known as market overlap or MMC. Prior studies have found that MMC deters rivals from attacking each other in the countries they have in common. However, these studies have not taken into account the heterogeneity of the institutional environments of the countries in which multimarket rivals compete. We contend that the quality of countries' institutions and the institutional quality distance between home and host countries affect the extent to which MNEs can observe each other's actions, which in turn helps rival MNEs to avoid mutually damaging moves for their sales performance in the countries they have in common.

Competitive intensity refers to the extent to which firms exert pressure on one another within a given industry, by attacking each other’s competitive position to increase their own performance at the expense of others’ performance. The competitive intensity among existing firms in an industry may manifest in a variety of forms, like price discounting, new product introductions, aggressive advertising campaigns, the offering of an increasing number of complementary services, among others. The intensity of competition can have a positive effect on an economic system as a whole, since a higher intensity forces firms to do better than their rivals, for example by introducing better innovations, with the aim to maximize their performance within the competitive environment. As a result, such a phenomenon usually leads to better products and services for consumers. However, the intensity of competition among firms in an industry could undermine their ability to generate profits, and highly competitive industries might discourage new firms to enter. Understanding the intensity of competition within an industry is important for many stakeholders. For example, it is crucial for new firms that are considering entering the industry and need to assess its attractiveness in terms of profit potential. It is also important for industry incumbents who may have to decide whether to increase their resources to sustain their performance or divest and enter into new industries. Furthermore, it is essential for national authorities and regulators, who are responsible for avoiding collusive behaviors among dominant players that could undermine consumers’ purchasing power. The purpose of this article is to present key themes that aid in understanding competitive intensity and to summarize relevant research works published on this topic, primarily in the management literature. In this way, it aims to assist students and academics in navigating this subject more effectively while developing their research work. Specifically, this bibliography is organized as follows. First, it discusses how the concept of competitive intensity has been examined across various streams of literature. It is worth noting that the focus of this article is on the competitive intensity among firms within an industry, rather than among a firm’s organizational units, subsidiaries, or employees. Second, it discusses the main antecedents of competitive intensity (i.e., those factors affecting the extent to which firms compete aggressively) presented by studies in the extant literature. Third, it discusses the main outcomes of competitive intensity explored so far in the literature in terms of firms’ performance and strategic responses to competition. Finally, it presents the main measurements of competitive intensity used by scholars to examine this construct empirically.

Research summary Drawing on the information-based imitation and information-processing perspectives, we examine how experience interpretation and assessment-and in particular its board-level microfoundations-affects the relationship between a firm's international experience and its decision to imitate the market leader's location choices. Our results show that the negative relationship between international experience and imitation of location choices is positively moderated by board turnover, board age, and board equity ownership but not influenced by board gender diversity. These findings advance our understanding of the interplay between information-based motives for imitation and firms' information processing and organizational learning. Specifically, we contribute to research on the effect of international experience on firms' mimetic behavior by pointing out the relevance of experience interpretation and assessment from a microfoundations perspective. Managerial summary Our study provides indications for executives attempting to predict competitors' global strategy. When it comes to location choices, we find that companies with less international experience are more likely to follow the market leader, while those internationally experienced are more likely to follow their own path. Moreover, lower board turnover, relatively younger directors, and smaller equity ownership can favor the articulation and exploitation of the lessons offered by prior international experiences, thus further reducing the company's inclination to imitate the leader's location choices. Firms seeking an independent path toward internationalization can therefore use corporate governance-and in particular board-level factors-to enhance their ability to interpret and assess their international experience.

Instead of mutually forbearing, multimarket competition may exhibit different patterns in technology-intensive industries, where abnormal returns are often short-lived and firms need to constantly defend their knowledge resources from being imitated by rivals. Drawing on the multimarket competition and patent litigation literatures, we argue that the level of multimarket contact (MMC) a focal firm has in a given country is positively related to its intensity of patent litigation in that country, and this relationship is moderated by the extent of imitation threat, which can arise from technological, regulatory and competitive environments. We test our hypotheses in the global mobile phone industry with a comprehensive panel of 84 mobile phone vendors and their patent litigation battles in 45 countries from 2003 to 2015. The empirical evidence provides support to our theoretical predictions.

A spiral of patent infringement litigation among rival firms is a phenomenon often observed in complex product industries, where products comprise numerous separately patentable elements. Theoretically grounded in the awareness–motivation–capability framework of competitive dynamics, this article contributes to the literature on patent strategy and international market entry by looking at how, in a complex product industry, the intensity of patent litigation in a country affects a firm’s decision to enter that country. Our results show that the intensity of patent litigation in a country is a deterrent for potential entrants and has a negative effect on a firm’s likelihood of entering that country. We also show that a firm’s previous experience with patent litigation (awareness component), the share of a firm’s current patent applications in a target country (motivation component), and the size of a firm’s patent stock (capability component) moderate the relationship between a country’s patent litigation intensity and a firm’s likelihood of entering that country. We thus shed light on the joint effect of macro- and micro-level patent-related variables on a firm’s market entry decisions. We test our hypotheses with a comprehensive panel of patenting and entry strategies of 84 mobile phone vendors and their patent litigation battles in 45 countries, from 2003 to 2015.

Research Summary: Scholars have noted that pronounced changes in consumer demand and technology often offer firms temporary opportunities to strengthen their performance vis-a-vis rivals. This article contributes to the literature on windows of opportunity from an organizational learning perspective. It investigates whether the depth and breadth of a firm's international experience with pronounced changes in demand conditions (demand windows) and technologies (technological windows) affect its ability to take advantage of such changes within a country to increase its market share. The results, based on a sample of 615 telecommunication companies competing in 124 countries, suggest that mainly two out of four dimensions of international experience help firms to exploit windows of opportunity in a country.Managerial Summary: What can help multinational companies (MNCs) to navigate periods of marked changes in demand and technology? When an MNC encounters a marked change in demand or technology in a country, it may have already experienced in the past many or just a few of these events, depending on its international footprint, and this serves to assess the MNC's international experience with such changes. Using data on telecommunication companies, we show that both (a) an MNC's repeated exposure to a certain type of change over time (depth of international experience) and (b) the variety of changes an MNC has been exposed to (breadth of international experience) in international markets may help the MNC to obtain market share advantages when such changes occur in a country.

There is empirical evidence of how challengers in an industry can take advantage of technological discontinuities that open "technological windows" of opportunity, which allow them to reduce their market share gap with market leaders, a phenomenon known as "catching-up." However, this literature has examined leader–challenger catching-up processes within a particular industry as a whole, without considering the different product categories that can usually be identified within that industry. In fact, firms may have different market shares depending on the category under consideration, and technological discontinuities can be product category related. We extend the literature on windows of opportunity and changes in market leadership by showing that the chance a challenger has to reduce the market share gap with the market leader in a product category during a technological window depends on (a) whether the market leader in the focal product category is also the market leader in other product categories, (b) the share of a challenger's business in the focal product category relative to its overall business in the industry, and (c) the relative size of the product category with respect to the other product categories in the industry. We contend that such across-category factors influence the leaders and challengers' propensity to exploit opportunities resulting from technological discontinuities in a product category. We test a set of hypotheses using data on 31 mobile phone makers competing in India from 2003 to 2020 in the feature phone and smartphone product categories.

In this study we attempt to shed more light on the relationship between speed of new technology imitation and the sales performance of the imitator compared to the innovator, with a particular focus on the performance out-comes resulting from the rapid imitation of technologies introduced by the market leader. Using data on handset technologies mounted on more than 600 devices introduced to the UK market by 14 mobile phone vendors operating from 1997 to 2008, we study hundreds of imitative actions to test hypotheses on the extent to which an imitator can catch up (i.e., reduce the market share gap) with the market leader by rapidly imitating its in-novations. First, we show that gaining advantage by rapidly imitating a technology pioneer is contingent on whether the pioneer is the market leader or a non-leader rival. Second, we find that the risks of rapid imitation of the market leader's technologies are mitigated when industry clockspeed is high, i.e., during a period of fast innovation and imitation cycles in an industry, resulting in rapid variations in product design. Third, we observe that the degree of competitive responsiveness of the technology pioneer when its innovations are imitated represents an important mechanism that can explain why speed of imitation may affect how an imitator can improve its market share gains relative to the pioneer. This paper advances competitive dynamics and imitation as predictive theories of how rapid imitators might catch up with market leaders in technology-intensive industries.

Research shows that the higher a firm’s level of multimarket contact (MMC) with its rivals in a country, the lower the likelihood the firm will exit that country, because MMC leads to mutual forbearance, which deters rivalry and protects a firm’s survival. Yet, recent studies suggest that in technology-intensive industries MMC may increase rivalry, since MMC increases familiarity of a focal firm’s technological resources, leading to a greater threat of knowledge spillovers and imitation from multimarket rivals, which increases a focal firm’s incentives to protect its technological resources by attacking multimarket rivals. Grounded in the research on MMC in international markets and the resource-based view of the firm, we propose and test hypotheses suggesting that a firm’s MMC with its rivals in a country increases the likelihood the firm will leave that country if competition over technological resources among country rivals escalates, unless the firm has strong capabilities to protect its technological resources. We found robust support for our hypotheses by testing them with a sample of 84 mobile phone vendors operating in 45 countries from 2003 to 2015.

The international management literature has presented inconclusive results about the effect of institutional voids in a host country on entrant firms’ resource commitment. With the lens of institutional theory and transaction cost theory, this article examines how institutional voids in an emerging market influence a firm’s decision to move resources in that market. Resource commitment in an emerging market is examined in terms of the degree of control of the entry strategy employed. The theory presented argues that as institutional voids in a firm’s host country escalate, the firm sets out different priority actions to mitigate behavioral and environmental uncertainties in the host country, that in turn affect the degree of control of its entry modes. By relying on a sample of 90 Italian firms operating in China between 2001 and 2010, the results support the hypothesis that the institutional voids–entry mode degree of control relationship displays an inverted U-shape. JEL CLASSIFICATION F23; L1

We advance research on the antecedents of business model design by integrating institutional and imitation theories to explore how the business model of new ventures evolves in a weak institutional environment. Based on a case study of Jumia—an online retailing company in Africa established with the aim to emulate the success of Amazon.com—we propose a process model entitled “imitate-but-modify” that explains how business models evolve through four distinct phases (i.e., clarification, legitimacy, localization, and consolidation). In essence, this model explains how new ventures surrounded by considerable uncertainty deliberately seek to learn vicariously by imitating the business model template of successful firms. However, because of significant institutional voids, the ventures’ intentional imitation is progressively replaced by experiential learning that blends business model imitation with innovation.

Competitive dynamics inquiry originates from a sequence of attacks and counterattacks among firms in an industry. Firms attack and respond to attacks of rivals in order to strengthen or defend their competitive position within their competitive space. Competitive dynamics research is thus centered on the analysis of how the firm’s actions affect rivals’ reactions and performance. Actually, the nature of competitive dynamics research is the open recognition that firm strategies are “dynamic”: Strategic actions initiated by one firm may trigger a series of actions among rival firms. The new competitive environment in many industries has generated the inception of furious competition, emphasizing flexibility, speed, and innovation in response to fast-changing technological and institutional conditions and temporary competitive advantages. The key constructs and the intellectual roots of competitive dynamics (i.e., Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction and industrial organization economics and related oligopoly theories) offer some practical examples of industry and firm cases where competitive dynamics have found their main applications. The relevant underpinnings of the awareness–motivation–capability (AMC) framework provide an integrative model of the key behavioral drivers that shape a competitive actions and responses framework (i.e., the factors influencing the firm’s awareness of the context; the factors inducing or impeding the motivation of firms to respond to competitors’ action; and the capability-based factors affecting the firm’s ability to undertake actions), the three key attributes (i.e., the specific actions of firms in the industry, the firm’s competitive interdependence, and the antecedents and performance implications of firms’ competitive actions and reactions), and the three main levels of analysis used in competitive dynamics literature (i.e., action-level studies, business-level studies, and corporate-level studies). Some insights regarding the relationship between dynamic competition and the sources of temporary competitive advantage, coopetition dynamics, as well as the kind of accelerated competition epitomizing early 21st-century digital dynamics settings update the traditional competitive dynamics flavor, as they are connected with firms’ strategic interaction and the pursuit of temporary advantages.

The question of how a firm’s business model evolves in an institutionally voided environment still deserves research attention in the business model literature. Bridging the institutional-based view of strategy and interorganizational imitation literature, this study examines how a firm’s business model evolves in an institutionally voided environment in a developing economy. Using a qualitative data on Jumia—an e-commerce giant in Africa, our results suggest that the business model of a firm enfolded by significant institutional voids evolves through the following: first, the firm intentionally seeks to learn vicariously by imitating a successful firm’s business model template. Second, because of the substantial impact of the institutional voids, the intentional pure imitation of the business model template of the successful firm becomes impossible and therefore, the firm begins to modify various components of the imitated business model template through experiential learning that blends the business model imitation process with innovation. Based on our finding, we propose a business model evolution process-model we called “imitate-but-modify”, that explains how a firm’s business model evolves in four unique stages in institutionally voided environments in developing economies. Implication on theory and practice of this finding are discussed.

We argue that multinational enterprises (MNEs) that use multimarket contact (MMC) to coordinate strategy with rivals in host countries must contend with the institutional quality of host countries. Drawing on signaling theory and institution-based view, we propose that institutional quality can influence the observability of actions by an MNE’s rivals in a host country, thereby affecting the MNE’s ability to use MMC to establish mutual forbearance with host country rivals. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 85 mobile phone vendors in 46 countries.