Lahiri & Narayanan (2013) "Vertical intergration, innovation, and alliance portfolio size: Implications for firm performance

22 important questions on Lahiri & Narayanan (2013) "Vertical intergration, innovation, and alliance portfolio size: Implications for firm performance

What do the authors examine?

The consequences of alliance portfolio configuration by focusing on contingencies that affect the impact of alliance portfolio size on innovation and financial performance

Where do alliances enable firms access to?

To complementary assets and/or capabilities that are required to create, store, and commercialize knowledge to generate new products

In which ways can alliance portfolio resources be exploited?

  1. Increasing portfolio size increases the number of alliances from which firms draw resources. External knowledge gained from alliances can, in turn, be applied to improve innovation performance
  2. With a portfolio of alliances, firms learn to attribute outcomes to changes in inputs and processes, allowing better identification of cause and effect
  3. Engaging in a larger portfolio of alliances enables firms to learn and utilize diverse knowledge from partners better over time
  4. Firms with larger alliance portfolios are likely to see greater survival rates of their alliances
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In which three categories can prior research on exploiting alliance portfolio resources be divided?

  1. Alliance portfolio size
  2. Alliance portfolio characteristics such as breadth, density, level of redundancy, and strength of individual alliances in a portfolio
  3. Characteristics of partners in the alliance portfolio

Which two contingencies to improve the understanding of how APS impacts the focal firm's performance are identified?

  1. The focal firm's choice to vertically integrate or not
  2. The choice to invest resources in innovation that manifest in high levels of innovation performance

Why are vertically integrated firms more likely to have internal access to a broader knowledge base of firm-specific knowledge than vertically specialized firms?

Due to technical dialog between upstream and downstream units

What about innovation and financial performance?

Fast-paced industries are characterized by rapid changes in product and process technologies, i.e., high “clock speed”. In such industries, the ability to innovate is an important source of competitive advantage for firms. Despite a broad consensus that greater innovation leads to higher financial performance, empirical evidence of this linkage is minimal and is relatively recent.

Why is increasing APS likley to enhance innovation performance on the firm?

  1. Firms with larger APS will have access to a wider variety of knowledge resources from different partners
  2. Increased diversity of knowledge elements from external sources increases the opportunities for novel combinations
  3. A larger number of ongoing alliances indicates higher centrality of the focal firm in the network of industry peers, wich allows the focal firm access to greater variety in types of information

Why is it good to have access to a wider variety of knowledge resources?

Access to a more idverse external resources from alliance partners increases the likelihood of being able to locate knowledge elements, previously unknown to the firm, which can be used in novel ways to aid problem solution. The likelihood of such instances increases with an increase in size of the focal firm's alliance portfolio

What are the challenges of utilizing external knowledge that increases with greater diversity of knowledge?

  1. The challenges of search, identification, and transfer of knowledge resources across portfolio of partners increases significantly as the APS increases
  2. The importance of firms' internal routines that are required to develop products and processes.

Why are firms with larger APS likely to experience increased financial performance?

  1. Firms in fast-paced industries face increased uncertainty arising out of technology volatility (vluchtigheid) and demand uncertainty
  2. Larger APS enables the focal firm to lower costs through several cost-effective technologies of partners and the potential for increased economies of scale from multiple alliance partners

What are the reasons why an increase in APS can have diminishing or even negative impact on firm performance?

  1. Firms pursue the most promising alliance options and pursue those opportunities early on. This leaves less productive alliance options as firms engage in an increasing number of alliances
  2. As APS increases, the effectiveness of a manager's ability to exploit the alliances for their benefit will decrease given the increased demands on managerial attention and bounded rationality
  3. With an increasing APS, bureaucracy and transaction costs of coordinating simultaneously across multiple parties increases
  4. Past research suggests that alliance experience has a curvilinear impact on alliance success

Creation of knowledge involves repeated use of

The firms existing knowledge elements and increasing the scope of search for new knowledge elements

What do the authors propose drawing on the resource dependence theory (RDT)?

That firms have higher levels of innovation gain less by increasing APS in comparison to firms that have lower levels of innovation

Why may innovation-oriented firms rely more on their own knowledge?

The use of it may be less costly than expending effort on search and transfer of external knowledge, the costs of which increase with portfolio size.

Why is the choice of vertical scope critical to firm profitability?

Due to high asset specificity and the need for extenscie coordination across activities

Where does the choice to vertically integrate allows firm to?

To engage in activities that are often also conducted in-house

What are the decisions that VI/VS firms can make?

  • Make
  • Buy
  • Make and buy 

What do the authors argue about the benefit from increasing APS for VI firms?

That it is less than that for VS firms

Whereby may alliance portfolios impact innovation performance? Building on the idea that innovation results from search, transfer, combination, and recombination of knowledge elements

  1. By contributing novel knowledge elements to the focal firm for conceptualizing unique solutions to problems
  2. By increasing diversity of knowledge elements from external sources to increase the combinatorial possibilities of potentially novel solutions

In which ways will a fim's choice of vertical integration influence the impact of APS on innovation performance?

  1. For external knowledge sourced from the alliance portfolio to be useful in problem solving it must be novel to the focal firm
  2. Larger alliance portfolios allow increased combinatorial possibilities to enhance the likelihood of novel problem solutions
  3. Prior research has established the importance of resource slack to a firm's success in pursuing innovation

Larger alliance portfolios allow increased combinatorial possibilities to enhance the likelihood of novel problem solutions.

In utilizing external knowledge from a wider variety of alliance partners, the focal firm must be able to relate the external knowledge to its own resources. An important driver of heterogeneity in firms’ utilization of external knowledge, to improve innovation performance, is the ability to combine and recombine external knowledge with the existing knowledge elements. Given the need to bring internal and external knowledge together at the same location, firms must conduct an internal search to identify the appropriate internal knowledge that can be combined with particular external knowledge elements to gain the most benefits.

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