London Business School

About: London Business School is a education organization based out in London, England, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Portfolio & Equity (finance). The organization has 1138 authors who have published 5118 publications receiving 437980 citations. The organization is also known as: LBS.

Do Accelerators Accelerate? A Study of Venture Accelerators as a Path to Success?

Abstract: A fundamental challenge for new ventures is overcoming liabilities of newness - particularly, lack of business knowledge and lack of social embeddedness. Accelerators, intense, time- compressed entrepreneurial programs, attempt to alleviate these liabilities and accelerate venture development by facilitating learning and network development in new ventures. However, because of time compression diseconomies and the potential for inappropriate standardization, the literature suggests that such attempts at acceleration may be ineffective or even counterproductive. We test these competing ideas by comparing performance effects of accelerator-backed new ventures to a matched set of non–accelerator new ventures. Compared to the non-accelerator new ventures, we find that ventures backed by top accelerators are faster in raising venture capital and gaining customer traction. Intriguingly, our results also indicate that prior founder experience (e.g., prior entrepreneurial experience, formal education) is not a su...

Promotion to Partner in Professional Service Firms

Abstract: A shift away from "up-or-out," the conventional promotion system in professional service firms, has been explained as part of a wider set of changes in internal labor market arrangements and management methods. This is investigated empirically in a sample of large partnerships in one profession. Up-or-out was used by less than one-third of the sample of firms but is common among the largest firms. Internal reforms to the professional firm do not fully explain its rarity; up-or-out appears to be adaptable to new forms of management and internal labor market policies. This raises a number of questions about the utility of theoretical explanations of how professional service firms work or are changing.

Organizational Change and the Corporate Career: The Restructuring of Managers' Job Aspirations

Abstract: For managers in large-scale organizations, careers have traditionally provided a set of organizing principles around which they have been able to structure both their private and professional lives. Through them, they have been able to experience a sense of security, stability, and order. Personal feelings of growth and advancement have been achieved through jobs which provide not only the opportunities for the completion of specific tasks but also a mean whereby longer-term personal goals can be achieved. Indeed, the combined promise of job security and advancement within corporate hierarchies-as linked with incremetal increases in authority, status, and pay-have constituted the major rewards of the modern managerial career. It has been largely through these mechanisms that large-scale organizations have been able to obtain the motivation and commitment of their managerial staff. During the 1980s, however, a variety of technological, organizational, and broader social changes have led many observers to s...

Innovation and the Sectoral Sources of UK Productivity Growth

Abstract: This paper examines the effects of the innovations used in seventy-nine three-digit U.K. industries, 1976-79, on productivity growth. A time pattern of effects is identified lasting at least eleven years and possibly as long as sixteen. Innovations used in particular sectors are traced back to the producing sectors from which they originated, the result suggesting that engineering (especially electronics and electrical engineering) innovations have the largest impact on users' productivity. Finally, only very small spillover effects were identified flowing from adjacent using or producing sectors. Copyright 1991 by Royal Economic Society.

Customer-Base Analysis in a Discrete-Time Noncontractual Setting

Abstract: Many businesses track repeat transactions on a discrete-time basis. These include: (1) companies where transactions can only occur at fixed regular intervals, (2) firms that frequently associate transactions with specific events (e.g., a charity that records whether or not supporters respond to a particular appeal), and (3) organizations that simply use discrete reporting periods even though the transactions can occur at any time. Furthermore, many of these businesses operate in a noncontractual setting, so they have a difficult time differentiating between those customers who have ended their relationship with the firm versus those who are in the midst of a long hiatus between transactions. We develop a model to predict future purchasing patterns for a customer base that can be described by these structural characteristics. Our beta-geometric/beta-Bernoulli (BG/BB) model captures both of the underlying behavioral processes (i.e., customers' purchasing while "alive", and time until each customer permanently "dies"). The model is easy to implement in a standard spreadsheet environment, and yields relatively simple closed-form expressions for the expected number of future transactions conditional on past observed behavior (and other quantities of managerial interest). We apply this discrete-time analog of the well-known Pareto/NBD model to a dataset on donations made by the supporters of a public radio station located in the Midwestern United States. Our analysis demonstrates the excellent ability of the BG/BB model to describe and predict the future behavior of a customer base.