Fostering Enterprise

This chapter uses an evolutionary lens to depict a journey that is also a destination for a lifelong learner passionate about upward mobility in intellectual, psychological, and economic realms. A mainstay of the research endeavors has been the study of innovation and enterprise. Starting as an economist studying the evolution of technologies and industries, the scholarly journey progressed to strategic management to examine firm and industry evolution and then to strategic entrepreneurship to examine individual, firm, and industry evolution. Currently, the research focuses on the interplay of enterprise and markets through an integration of economics, psychology, and sociology perspectives to understand the causes and consequences of enterprising individuals, organizations, and economies.

Manufacturing employment in the Southeast: examining the last 30 years

U.S. manufacturing has been in decline for the last forty years, bringing real economic impact. This paper examines the Southern region experience. Variation in rate of decline and industry evolution are shown across states. The important transportation equipment manufacturing industry is explored in more detail. The overall takeaway is that manufacturing looks different across the Southeast.

History-Friendly Modeling: An Evolutionary Tool for Strategy Research

History-friendly models have been increasingly adopted to study innovation and industry evolution, the catch-up of latecomer firms and countries, and public policies. However, they have been used less in the field of strategic management. In this article, we first provide a review of the history-friendly literature, identifying its intellectual roots in evolutionary economics. Then, we discuss three possible motivations that could explain the history-friendly paradox. Finally, we propose history-friendly models as a promising tool to study current research questions in strategy.

A Spanner in the Works: Category-Spanning Entrants and Audience Valuation of Incumbents

Previous work has examined how audiences evaluate category-spanning organizations, but little is known about how their entrance affects evaluations of other, proximate organizations. We posit that the emergence of category-spanning entrants signals the advent of an altered future state—and seeds doubt about incumbents’ prospects in a reordered industry-categorization scheme. We test this hypothesis by treating announcements of funding for startups as an information shock to investors evaluating incumbent financial service providers between 2010 and 2017—a period marked by atypical category combinations at FinTech startups. We find that announcements by startups that embodied unusual combinations of categories resulted in lower cumulative average returns for incumbents, both in absolute terms and in comparison with typical startups. Our theory and results contribute to research on categorization in markets and to theories of disruptive innovation and industry evolution.

Industry evolution: Evidence from the Italian brewing industry

This paper provides historical evidence about structural change in the Italian brewing industry. After the WWII, the industry gradually became highly concentrated, dominated by multinationals. In the late 1980s, a new wave of entrants, i.e. craft breweries, revolutionized the industry. This paper discusses the causes of rising of concentration and the successive advent of the craft breweries. In the discussion, we highlight how the evolution of the brewing industry conforms to the predictions of the industry life cycle and resource-partitioning models. Various factors played a key role in rising concentration and successive late-stage entries although some of these have been disregarded in the economic literature on industry evolution. The findings and analysis provides important insights and help advance our understanding of the current and future competition and business strategies in this industry.