While much is understood about the general pattern of industry dynamics, a critical element underlying these dynamics, the rate of the expansion of individual firms, has been largely overlooked. We argue that the rate at which firms can reliably increase their scale of operations is a critical factor in understanding the structure of industries. Further, success at scaling-up the firm's operati…
The issue of the failure of incumbent firms in the face of radical technical change has been a central question in the technology strategy domain for some time. We add to prior contributions by highlighting the role a firm's existing set of complementary assets have in influencing its investment in alternative technological trajectories. We develop an analytical model that considers firm hetero…
The strategy field has generally been viewed as somewhat fragmented with the primary 'fault line' stemming from the divide between economic and behavioral approaches. It is argued here that this is a false divide as any but the most trivial problems require a behavioral act of representation prior to invoking a deductive, 'rational' approach. In this sense, all approaches are behavioral. Once w…
In his thoughtful commentary on our 2005 paper (Gavetti, Levinthal, and Rivkin, 2005), Farjoun offers three critiques and extensions. First, he suggests our approach should have explicitly considered a constructionist logic. Second, Farjoun argues that we have neglected the full array of modes of cognition between rational choice and feedback-based adaptive learning and have therefore overstate…
How firms discover effective competitive positions in worlds that are both novel and complex are examined. In such settings, neither rational deduction nor local search is likely to lead a firm to a successful array of choices. Analogical reasoning, however, may be helpful, allowing managers to transfer useful wisdom from similar settings they have experienced in the past. From a long list of o…