Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

We argue that female representation in top management brings informational and social diversity benefits to the top management team, enriches the behaviors exhibited by managers throughout the firm, and motivates women in middle management. The result should be improved managerial task performance and thus better firm performance. We test our theory using 15 years of panel data on the top management teams of the S&P 1,500 firms. We find that female representation in top management improves firm performance but only to the extent that a firm's strategy is focused on innovation, in which context the informational and social benefits of gender diversity and the behaviors associated with women in management are likely to be especially important for managerial task performance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Does female representation in top management improve firm performance? A panel data investigation

Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief—an imperative of universal health coverage: the Lancet Commission report

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

The call for global sustainability is echoed by societal, environmental, and economic needs across the globe. In answering this call, a design innovation process that properly considers the needs and context of citizens in the developing world is necessary in order to develop appropriate, adaptable, affordable, and accessible solutions, products and services. This process, called “Frugal Innovation,” is rapidly becoming a standard against which sustainable solutions are assessed. Through an exploration of Frugal Innovation Core Competencies (Frugal Innovation Lab, Santa Clara University), and corresponding case studies of field solutions, a model is presented to begin sustainably addressing global human needs.

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Frugal Innovation: Core Competencies to Address Global Sustainability

Resetting the Shot Clock The Effect of Comobility on Human Capital

We examine the conditions around firm use of ‘inventor bricolage,’ or the reconstruction of technological capabilities through reallocation of extant individual inventors to address new opportunities embodied in patents. Empirically, we examine the dynamics of both firm and individual patenting activity in publicly traded Life Science Diagnostic firms to explore how inventor bricolage is related to firms' existing research and development (R&D) capabilities and firms' acquisition of external capabilities through merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. Evidence at the firm level suggests that breadth of inventors' human capital and collaboration with co-researchers with relevant experience is positively related to inventor bricolage. At the inventor level, the fewer patents an inventor has, the broader the individual's prior patent portfolio, and the more co-researchers with relevant experience, the more likely inventors will patent in a new area. M&A does not appear to have an impact on the utilization of existing human capital. Our findings suggest that R&D managers should assign inventors with less assimilative capacity and more creative capacity in teams where there is relevant experience in order to promote inventor bricolage.

Preeta M. Banerjee

Papers

Frugal Innovation: Core Competencies to Address Global Sustainability

Resetting the Shot Clock The Effect of Comobility on Human Capital

Inventor bricolage and firm technology research and development

Measuring patent's influence on technological evolution: A study of knowledge spanning and subsequent inventive activity

Breadth-of-impact frontier: How firm-level decisions and selection environment dynamics generate boundary-spanning inventions