Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

From Primordial Soup To Platform-Based Competition: Exploring The Emergence Of Products, Systems, And Platforms, C. Jason Woodard, Eric K. Clemons

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We use an agent-based NK model to explore the conditions under which standard platforms emerge among competing products. Our findings were inconclusive. We find that the usual Darwinian conditions needed for the emergence of complexity are sufficient to yield a limited reliance upon platforms with a core of common components, simply because evolution causes the population to converge on a set of products that contain combinations that "work well," yielding what we call "coincidental platform emergence." Economies of scale yield more use of common components, or "production platform emergence." Positive participation externalities initially induce the highest degree of platform emergence …

Value Relevance Of Blog Visibility, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Arindam Tripathy, Lee J. Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study empirically examines the effect of a non-traditional information source, namely a firm's blog visibility on the capital market valuation of firms. After controlling for earnings, book value of equity and other value relevant variables, such as traditional media exposure, R&D spending, and advertising expense, we find a positive association between a firm's blog visibility and its capital market valuation. In addition, we find blog visibility Grange causes trading, not vice versa. Our findings indicate that non-traditional information sources such as blogs help disseminate information and influence consumers' investment decisions by capturing their attention.

Four Perspectives On Architectural Strategy, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A recurring theme in the literature on technology and organizations is the concept of mirroring, which posits a duality between technological and organizational design decisions. In this paper we highlight a second, orthogonal duality between components and interfaces: designers of both products and organizations must decide what information to hide within component boundaries and what to expose to other designers. Although the component-interface duality appears in many settings, it presents especially vexing strategic challenges in the design and production of complex digital artifacts. We present a typology of four interlinked perspectives on these kinds of strategic design problems, and discuss …

Agile Innovation Management, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The volume and velocity of innovations are on the increase resulting in increased pressures on every company for attaining, retaining and increasing its market leadership. Many companies need to retool their innovation management processes to address two agility related objectives in order to survive and grow in such a rapidly changing innovation environment. The first objective would be the ability to assemble an innovation team within the shortest possible time. This can only be satisfied by companies that are capable of forming innovation teams rather quickly. The related second objective would be to reduce the I2M (Idea to Market) cycle …

Strategic Responses To Standardization: Embrace, Extend Or Extinguish?, C. Jason Woodard, Joel West

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft's responses to 12 software technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005. Despite the company's reputed tendency to pursue a strategy dubbed “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” a content analysis of news articles from the same period reveals surprising diversity in Microsoft's responses at the product level.

We classify these responses using a typology that treats “embrace” and “extend” …

A Quality Metric For Sustainable Innovations, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sustainability has become a major concern for nations and firms especially since the Kyoto Protocol was defined in 1997. While there have been several studies on benchmarks for national innovation systems and effectiveness of innovation management within firms there is as yet no reasonable metric for determining the quality of an innovation much less its quality relating to sustainability? Similarly, there have been several studies on sustainability but that such research groups have also not focused on developing a metric for denoting the quality of sustainable innovations. This paper offers a metric that defines the quality of an innovation, especially …

Innovation And Price Competition In A Two-Sided Market, Mei Lin, Shaojin Li, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine a platform's optimal two-sided pricing strategy while considering seller-side innovation decisions and price competition. We model the innovation race among sellers in both finite and infinite horizons. In the finite case, we analytically show that the platform's optimal seller-side access fee fully extracts the sellers' surplus, and that the optimal buyer-side access fee mitigates price competition among sellers. The platform's optimal strategy may be to charge or subsidize buyers depending on the degree of variation in the buyers' willingness to pay for quality; this optimal strategy induces full participation on both sides. Furthermore, a wider quality gap among …