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"Gambardella, Alfonso"
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A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Decision Making: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial
A classical approach to collecting and elaborating information to make entrepreneurial decisions combines search heuristics, such as trial and error, effectuation, and confirmatory search. This paper develops a framework for exploring the implications of a more scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision making. The panel sample of our randomized control trial includes 116 Italian startups and 16 data points over a period of about one year. Both the treatment and control groups receive 10 sessions of general training on how to obtain feedback from the market and gauge the feasibility of their idea. We teach the treated startups to develop frameworks for predicting the performance of their idea and conduct rigorous tests of their hypotheses, very much as scientists do in their research. We let the firms in the control group instead follow their intuitions about how to assess their idea, which has typically produced fairly standard search heuristics. We find that entrepreneurs who behave like scientists perform better, are more likely to pivot to a different idea, and are not more likely to drop out than the control group in the early stages of the startup. These results are consistent with the main prediction of our theory: a scientific approach improves precision—it reduces the odds of pursuing projects with false positive returns and increases the odds of pursuing projects with false negative returns.
This paper was accepted by Marie Thursby, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Journal Article
The User Innovation Paradigm: Impacts on Markets and Welfare
Innovation has traditionally been seen as the province of producers. However, theoretical and empirical research now shows that individual users—consumers—are also a major and increasingly important source of new product and service designs. In this paper, we build a microeconomic model of a market that incorporates demand-side innovation and competition. We explain the conditions under which firms find it beneficial to invest in supporting and harvesting users’ innovations, and we show that social welfare rises when firms utilize this source of innovation. Our modeling also indicates reasons for policy interventions with respect to a mixed user and producer innovation economy. From the social welfare perspective, as the share of innovating users in a market increases, profit-maximizing firms tend to switch “too late” from a focus on internal research and development to a strategy of also supporting and harvesting user innovations. Underlying this inefficiency are externalities that the producer cannot capture. Overall, our results explain when and how the proliferation of innovating users leads to a superior division of innovative labor involving complementary investments by users and producers, both benefitting producers and increasing social welfare.
This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation
.
Journal Article
The Economics and Management of Technological Diversification
Recently, attempts have been made to understand the patterns of corporate technological diversification and their implications in economic and managerial dimensions. This book consolidates these attempts and breaks new ground by examining the patterns of technological diversification, and their relationship with internationalisation, economic performance, and inter-company alliances. Following an introduction and a survey of product and technological diversification, the book begins with a statistical analysis of technological diversification, and its links with internationalisation and alliances. It continues with a range of industry and company case studies, and an assessment of historical evidence. The book provides a systematic analysis of data, case studies, and other relevant material to understand this phenomenon. Contributors bring to bear significant experience with large data sets at the firm level on technological divesification and other strategic dimensions on which it has an impact. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of economics, International Business, Business Strategy and Technology Management.
eBook
Strategic incentives to human capital
Motivating human capital in knowledge-intensive activities is a serious managerial challenge because it is difficult to link rewards to actions or performance. Firms instead might motivate knowledge workers by offering them opportunities to increase personal benefits (e.g., learning, satisfaction) through autonomy in the decision-making process. Our model shows that firms can offer less autonomy in projects closer to their core business: Because firm specialization raises the value of the project's outcomes, it also increases the benefits for knowledge workers, who derive motivation even though they make fewer decisions to support their realization of personal goals. Projects farther from the core offer weaker firm contributions, so firms can motivate knowledge workers by allowing them to benefit from greater autonomy. We discuss several implications of our analysis.
Journal Article
Organizational Attributes and the Distribution of Rewards in a Region: Managerial Firms vs. Knowledge Clusters
This paper expands the organization theory and evidence on regional industrial agglomerations. We define regional economic activities according to the attributes of the organizations that populate a region and investigate how organizational characteristics influence macro-outcomes at a regional economic level. We focus on two dimensions emerging from two widely known organizational forms: the managerial corporation and the knowledge cluster with a marked orientation toward interfirm knowledge spillovers. We use an original data set of 146 U.S. cities to obtain variations in the extent to which they are populated by managerial firms or knowledge clusters. By utilizing city-level measures of managerial salaries, we test how the intensity of managerial corporation versus knowledge cluster characteristics affects the mean and dispersion of the \"rewards\" of cities. Our evidence suggests that higher managerial corporate characteristics lower the variability of rewards, while they have no effect on the mean of rewards. Higher-knowledge cluster characteristics produce both higher dispersion and higher expected rewards. We explain these results by looking at the different learning mechanisms of the two organizational types. In so doing, we highlight the role of intra- and interfirm knowledge processes as important sources of differences in the rewards of the two models. From an empirical point of view, results are confirmed using both patent-based and skill mobility-based measures of knowledge spillovers.
Journal Article