In the present paper, we analyse the association between the skill composition of young firms and the firms’ subsequent survival. This is made possible by means of a matched employer-employee dataset from Statistics Sweden on a cohort of firms that started between 2001 and 2003. Our findings show that, compared to firms that exit, the firms that survive at least until 2012 have teams with higher complementarity at the start, and successively increase their skill complementarity over time. Subsequent discrete time hazard models, controlling for several well-known determinants of firm longevity, show that complementarity plays a crucial role for firm survival. Higher skill synergy within firms, as compared to high degrees of substitutability, is associated with a lower conditional probability of failing. The role of skill complementarity is stable across different specifications and outweighs many other determinants of firm survival, such as starting size and experience of the founder.
Ecosystems of actors that need to interact to create value for end users are becoming an integral part of firms' strategic realities as they reach new markets. However, the phenomenon of ecosystem internationalisation has not been explored in comparison to its practical prevalence. We conceptualise this phenomenon as agent-led structuration on new markets. We build on the structural ecosystem literature and literature on internationalisation challenges to create our recursive process model of ecosystem creation on foreign markets. Creating ecosystems on foreign markets necessitates new ecosystem structures that are adjusted to value propositions by orchestrators through interaction with foreign market actors. The model explains how ecosystem orchestrators drive the international expansion of ecosystems through blueprinting and aligning mechanisms and how these mechanisms help manage liabilities of foreignness. The model accounts for the agency of involved actors, and with the help of the bottleneckconcept bridges international business and ecosystem literatures.
Research demonstrates that digital technologies stimulate industrial transformation by enabling new interdependencies with firms outside and across firm and industry boundaries. However, we know little about the degree of novelty and breadth of digital technologies that have the potential to transform industries. Understanding the degree of novelty (spanning from radical to incremental) and breadth (spanning from one sector to multiple sectors) of digital technologies is important for measuring their impact on industrial transformation. Through a topic modelling research approach on autonomous vehicle technology patents from firms operating in Sweden and a confirmatory survey with the inventors of those patents, this paper reveals 26 digital technology topics that are transforming the automotive industry. The digital technology topics are distributed across four ideal-typical technology categories for transformation: augmenting, spanning, transforming, and disrupting. This study illustrates the value of studying digital technologies’ transformative nature using an integrating framework; it reveals that digital technologies in the automotive industry have mainly incremental characteristics but that these characteristics provide necessary preconditions for the few more radical technologies to achieve their potential in transforming the industry.
Cluster evolution research suggests that maintaining an optimal technological heterogeneity that is exploitable by cluster actors is key to sustainable cluster development. This paper argues that exploring this optimal span and its influence on local synergy creation calls for understanding the interaction between cluster actions, local conditions for collaboration, and heterogeneity requirements over time. For this purpose, a longitudinal case study is conducted, tracing the development of a digital creative cluster that has experienced the initiation, rise, and decline of local technological heterogeneity exploitation. By applying institutional logics as a sensitising device, the analysis explores how actors interact with local and theme structures in this process. Findings show how hub-firms draw on creative norms and technologies to produce situated heterogeneity requirements. These are assessed with co-location factors and accumulated experience of local collaboration to produce local organising rationales that guides decisions to engage in local collaboration.
The aim of this paper is to introduce an organisational dimension to the discussion of knowledge flows and relatedness. We hypothesise that not only the degree of technological relatedness influence the extent of skill integration in a firm but also that familiarity with firm routines (intra-organisational proximity) should smoothen absorption. Longitudinal micro-data are used in pooled ordinary least square- and fixed effect models to estimate the impact on plant productivity growth of 18,051 labour flows within, and to, four large Swedish firms between 2003 and 2006. Our findings suggest that intra-regional related flows are economically beneficial. Their link to localised capabilities and community creates a weaker but more productive link between individuals than do organisational proximity, which generate too much similarity to allow for cognitively related inflows to impact productivity growth. Also, we find a positive relationship between unrelated flows and plant performance.