Research summary
Research on entrepreneurship has focused primarily on the individual characteristics of founders in driving the success of new ventures offering stand‐alone products and/or services. ...In recent years, we have seen an increase in entrepreneurship in digital platforms—where success requires positioning products and services within dynamic digital networks that depict complex connections among platforms, complementary modules, and consumers. This article introduces key elements of a theory for settings where entrepreneurship success is intricately connected to the moves of other entrepreneurs and coordinated within and across platforms. We introduce a network‐centric view to understand how entrepreneurs occupying the role of third‐party developers support digital platforms by their choices to link to them. Furthermore, we develop propositions reflecting a dynamic perspective representing two key stages of competition in digital platforms, initial launch, and scale‐up. We hope this work guides further theorizing and empirical research in digital platforms and entrepreneurship in general.
Managerial summary
Over the last decade, we have seen a rise in digital entrepreneurs who support platforms such as Apple iOS, Google's Android, Facebook, Twitter, and others. The success of platforms requires support from applications, and entrepreneurs in such settings play a critical role in making some platforms succeed relative to others. Our study provides insight into how digital entrepreneurs can orchestrate strategic moves that allow them to navigate the complex landscape of linking and adapting to different platforms and how these linkage choices can lead to entrepreneurial success.
Over the last three decades, the prevailing view of information technology strategy has been that it is a functional-level strategy that must be aligned with the firm's chosen business strategy. Even ...within this socalled alignment view, business strategy directed IT strategy. During the last decade, the business infrastructure has become digital with increased interconnections among products, processes, and services. Across many firms spanning different industries and sectors, digital technologies (viewed as combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies) are fundamentally transforming business strategies, business processes, firm capabilities, products and services, and key interfirm relationships in extended business networks. Accordingly, we argue that the time is right to rethink the role of IT strategy, from that of a functional-level strategy—aligned but essentially always subordinate to business strategy—to one that reflects a fusion between IT strategy and business strategy. This fusion is herein termed digital business strategy. We identify four key themes to guide our thinking on digital business strategy and help provide a framework to define the next generation of insights. The four themes are (1) the scope of digital business strategy, (2) the scale of digital business strategy, (3) the speed of digital business strategy, and (4) the sources of business value creation and capture in digital business strategy. After elaborating on each of these four themes, we discuss the success metrics and potential performance implications from pursuing a digital business strategy. We also show how the papers in the special issue shed light on digital strategies and offer directions to advance insights and shape future research.
This study examines corporate performance effects of cross-business knowledge synergies in multibusiness firms. It synthesizes the resource-based view of diversification and the economic theory of ...complementarities to conceptualize cross-business knowledge synergies in terms of the relatedness and the complementarity of knowledge resources across business units of the multibusiness firm. The study hypothesizes that corporate performance is improved when the firm simultaneously exploits a complementary set of related knowledge resources across its business units. In a sample of 303 multibusiness firms, the study finds that synergies arising from product knowledge relatedness, customer knowledge relatedness, or managerial knowledge relatedness do not improve corporate performance on their own. Synergies arising from the complementarity of the three types of knowledge relatedness significantly improve both market-based and accounting-based performance of the multibusiness corporation.
We review and reframe three main quests of research on information systems (IS) strategy: (1) the strategic alignment quest, (2) the integration quest, and (3) the sustained competitive advantage ...quest. The assumptions and logic of these quests have become less relevant in increasingly complex adaptive business systems (CABS), where the competitive performance landscapes of products and services are highly dynamic and co-evolve. We revise the strategic alignment quest to propose a co-evolution quest that addresses not only competitive strategy questions of a firm but also corporate strategy questions. The co-evolution quest seeks to increase a firm's agility and dynamism in repositioning itself, identifying profitable product-market positions as the evolving competitive landscape erodes the profitability of the firm's existing positions. To support the co-evolution quest, we revise the integration quest and propose a reconfiguration quest that encompasses not only business processes but also products and services, as well as the contracts, resources, and transactions associated with them. As the firm makes repositioning moves to co-evolve with the competitive landscape, the reconfiguration quest seeks to increase the firm's agility in disintegrating its existing nexus of contracts, resources, and transactions that support the old positions and in reconfiguring new ones that support the new positions. Finally, we revise the sustained competitive advantage quest to propose a renewal quest that recognizes the temporary nature of competitive advantage in CABS. The renewal quest seeks to destabilize the firm's old sources of competitive advantage when competitive dynamics erode their utility, rapidly create new sources of competitive advantage, and concatenate a series of temporary advantages over time. The three reframed quests provide the foundation for a research agenda on IS strategy in CABS. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Based on a survey of 90 transnational product introductions, we find that the transnational product development capabilities of organizations significantly depend upon their ability to transfer and ...deploy tacit knowledge concerning overseas markets. Specifically, we find that organizations which use cross-national teams, teams with members who have prior overseas experience, or teams whose members communicate frequently with overseas managers in order to acquire information about tacit differences among countries have greater transnational product development capabilities. This study contributes to our understanding of how organizations transfer and deploy knowledge across borders for competitive advantage and makes an important contribution to the literature on global strategy.
This study examines the hypercompetition phenomenon within the prepackaged software industry. It theoretically develops and empirically validates the idea that dynamically changing complementarity ...relationships among software product markets increase industry hypercompetition. The study also explains how dynamic capabilities for the management of complementary product markets can enable an independent software vendor (ISV) to create and renew temporary advantages. Specifically, an ISV can maintain or increase its performance rank in its product markets in three ways: (1) by competing with a portfolio of strongly complementary products; (2) by forming a product market portfolio that has strong complementarity relationships with other product markets in the industry; and (3) by dynamically and purposefully responding to the changing product market complementarities: (a) reconfiguring resource allocations of its products to strengthen the complementarities of its product portfolio and (b) undertaking entry and exit moves that reposition the portfolio in a stronger complementarity position. These dynamic capabilities enable the ISV to coevolve with the changing complementarities, change and improve its performance rank, and trigger new competitive moves by rivals; and accordingly, contribute to the escalation of rivalry in the industry. The study finds support for these ideas in a study of 1,200 ISVs from 1990 to 2002.
This section is a collection of shorter "Issue and Opinions" pieces that address some of the critical challenges around the evolution of digital business strategy. These voices and visions are from ...thought leaders who, in addition to their scholarship, have a keen sense of practice. They outline through their opinion pieces a series of issues that will need attention from both research and practice. These issues have been identified through their observation of practice with the eye of a scholar. They provide fertile opportunities for scholars in information systems, strategic management, and organizational theory. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
T-cell responses against highly conserved influenza antigens have been previously associated with protection. However, these immune responses are poorly maintained following recovery from influenza ...infection and are not boosted by inactivated influenza vaccines. We have previously demonstrated the safety and immunogenicity of two viral vectored vaccines, modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) and the chimpanzee adenovirus ChAdOx1 expressing conserved influenza virus antigens, nucleoprotein (NP) and matrix protein-1 (M1). We now report on the safety and long-term immunogenicity of multiple combination regimes of these vaccines in young and older adults.
We conducted a Phase I open-label, randomized, multi-center study in 49 subjects aged 18–46years and 24 subjects aged 50years or over. Following vaccination, adverse events were recorded and the kinetics of the T cell response determined at multiple time points for up to 18months.
Both vaccines were well tolerated. A two dose heterologous vaccination regimen significantly increased the magnitude of pre-existing T-cell responses to NP and M1 after both doses in young and older adults. The fold-increase and peak immune responses after a single MVA-NP+M1 vaccination was significantly higher compared to ChAdOx1 NP+M1. In a mixed regression model, T-cell responses over 18months were significantly higher following the two dose vaccination regimen of MVA/ChAdOx1 NP+M1.
A two dose heterologous vaccination regimen of MVA/ChAdOx1 NP+M1 was safe and immunogenic in young and older adults, offering a promising vaccination strategy for inducing long-term broadly cross-reactive protection against influenza A.
Medical Research Council UK, NIHR BMRC Oxford.
•Heterologous prime-boost vaccination regimens of MVA/ChAdOx1 NP+M1 are safe and immunogenic in young and older adults•All MVA/ChAdOx1 NP+M1 regimens tested significantly increased cross-reactive T-cells•Responses were durable and were maintained 18 months after vaccination•The fold-increase after a single MVA-NP+M1 vaccination was significantly higher compared to ChAdOx1 NP+M1
Current seasonal influenza vaccines induce antibody responses to external glycoproteins, which are highly susceptible to the accumulation of mutations within antigenic sites, allowing escape from serological immunity conferred by prior infection or vaccination. In this phase I clinical study, we present the results of using two replication-deficient viral vectors expressing conserved influenza A antigens in four different vaccination regimens, administered at intervals of either 8weeks or one year. We found that vaccination was safe and boosted T cell responses to influenza antigens substantially, with a further increase after the second vaccination, both in young and older adults.
We examined how network structure (density overlap and embeddedness) and technology characteristics of a platform (dominance and newness) shaped interorganizational coordination of product launches ...in the U.S. video game industry. We found that the developers' choices to launch games for particular game consoles were significantly explained by these four factors using multiprobability regression on a primary data set of 2,815 launches between 1995 and 2002. This analysis was complemented with application of a network visualization technique.
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