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Learning from Failure, Collective Efficacy and New Product Performance
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Author: Xiangming Tao, U. of Shanghai for Science and Technology
Author: Catherine L. Wang, Brunel U. London
Author: Paul John Alexander Robson, Royal Holloway, U. of London
Author: Mathew Hughes, Loughborough U.
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Although the virtues of the learning from failure in breeding innovation have been widely promoted, teams are still an under-researched objective when it comes to learning from failure. Moreover, much less is known about how team learning from failure affects innovation performance especially under the influence of collective cognition. Incorporating social learning theory and social cognitive theory, our study examines how experiential learning from failure (ELFF) and vicarious learning from failure (VLFF) affect new product performance (NPP) in new product development (NPD) teams. We further explore the moderating role of collective efficacy. Survey data from 152 paired NPD project teams in high-tech firms illustrates that both ELFF and VLFF facilitate NPP in terms of NPD speed to market and new product creativity. Further, a high level of collective efficacy intensifies the positive relationship between ELFF and NPD speed to market, but attenuates the positive relationship between VLFF and new product creativity. Our results illustrate that both ELFF and VLFF should be encouraged to promote innovation performance in the NPD team. However, the NPD team should hold a fine-grained view regarding the double-edged sword effect of collective efficacy on the relationship between learning from failure and NPP at the team level.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The antecedents of green technologies: ethnic inventors and recombinant capabilities
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Author: Alba Marino, U. of Messina
Author: Francesco Quatraro, U. of Turin
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We draw upon the micro-foundation of recombinant knowledge in GTs, the international business literature on the firms’ strategies for external knowledge sourcing and the most recent strain of migration studies in the innovation field to explore the role of ethnic migrants in leveraging recombinant creation dynamics and increasing the probability of successful green innovations. Our main argument is that the involvement of ethnic inventors increases the likelihood to successfully generate green inventions, due to their inherent experiences and distinct knowledge bases and experiences might enhance creativity (Parrotta et al., 2014) and complex problem solving (Cooke and Kemeny, 2017). We rely on data drawn from the ethnic patenting database, which covers harmonized USPTO patent records granted to US-based MNEs over the period 1975-2009 as designed by Kerr (2008), merged with information on the career of each inventor in the sample derived from the Harvard Patent Dataverse database (Lai et al., 2011). We find that teams composed of inventors with wider recombinant capabilities also tend to have a higher propensity of developing new green technologies. Also, a higher level of ethnic diversity among the US-based inventors correlates with a higher probability of patenting GTs, but the relationship follows a non-linear pattern along ethnic diversity. Finally, we ?nd that patents developed by R&D teams involving a higher degree of ethnic diversity among their domestic inventors are more likely to combine technological knowledge in a novel way to develop GTs. Our results bring implications for the strategic management of inventors’ teams by multinationals willing to run the green patent race and for policy-makers facing the climate change challenges.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The Role of Female versus Male Stars in Team Knowledge Recombination
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Author: Mona Reber, U. of Mannheim
Author: Leo Schmallenbach, U. of Mannheim
Author: Himani Singh, U. of Mannheim
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This paper focuses on female stars, an underrepresented and largely unexplored group of star knowledge workers, and their role in team knowledge recombination. We argue that gender differences between male and female stars can produce differential implications for the availability and integration of knowledge in teams and hypothesize that the presence of a female star fosters the breadth of knowledge recombination in teams. Empirically, we rely on a sample of star inventors, representing knowledge workers, and their patents filed at the US patent office in the period of 1990-2010. We match teams with a female star to similar teams with a male star and compare how broadly the teams recombine knowledge across technological boundaries in their patented inventions. We find that teams with a female star combine knowledge more broadly. Our findings emphasize the special role of female stars in teams and may thus help leverage the untapped potential of women in many knowledge-based and creative industries.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The Colour of Hierarchy: A field experiment on hierarchical endorsements and idea selection
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Author: Mathias J. M. Boënne, Erasmus U. Rotterdam
Author: Bart Leten, KU Leuven
Author: Ammon Salter, U. of Bath
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In the early stages of the idea creation process, individuals often turn to other members within the organization to help them select which ideas merit further development. Critical to this decision is receiving endorsement on the value of ideas from relevant others. We suggest the hierarchical position of these endorsements shapes idea selection, as these endorsements are interpreted by the idea creators as a signal of competence and of future support. We test this conjecture using a field experiment at a major European University organization, where information about the hierarchical endorsement on ideas is exposed and withheld to a randomly assigned treatment and control group involved in an ideation process. We find that hierarchical endorsement has a positive effect on idea selection for those high in the hierarchy of the organization, but little or no effect on those individuals in more low-level positions. Furthermore, we find that hierarchical endorsements mainly reinforce initial quality perceptions of idea creators, rather than that they shift selection towards other ideas. We explore these findings for our understanding of the role of hierarchy in the idea creation processes.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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