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Organizational innovation efforts in multiple emerging market categories: Exploring the interplay of opportunity, ambiguity, and socio-cognitive contexts
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Organizational innovation efforts in multiple emerging market categories: Exploring the interplay of opportunity, ambiguity, and socio-cognitive contexts

Jade Y. Lo, Rajiv Nag, Lei Xu and Shanti D. Agung
Research policy, v 49(3), 103911
Apr 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.103911
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel

Abstract

Emerging market categories Innovation Socio-cognitive approach
•Examining the effects of multiple emerging market categories and a firms’ socio-cognitive environments on incumbent firms’ innovation efforts.•Taking a socio-cognitive approach to innovation, contextualizing firms' innovation efforts in the broader industry dynamics.•Finding an inverted-U shaped relationship between an increasing number of emerging market categories and a firm's R&D intensity.•The aforementioned curvilinear relationship is moderated by collective industry identity and presence of industry associations. Industries with emerging market categories offer greater opportunities for firms to innovate. However, such opportunities are not a matter of “the more, the better.” An increasing number of emerging market categories poses a dilemma. While more emerging market categories arguably bring about increasing growth opportunities, they can also generate greater ambiguity for incumbent firms, which may hinder their innovation efforts. This study attempts to address this dilemma by proposing that the number of emerging market categories in an industry will have an inverted U-shaped relationship with incumbent firms’ innovation efforts. We further argue that this curvilinear relationship will be influenced by the socio-cognitive context of a firm's focal industry, in the sense that the degree of collective identity incoherence at the industry level will intensify the proposed inverted U-shaped relationship, whereas the prevalence of trade associations in the industry will depress this relationship. We test our hypotheses by examining research and development (R&D) investments of a sample of U.S. high-technology manufacturing firms and find support for our main prediction and the hypothesized effect of collective identity incoherence. We also find a surprising but intriguing moderating effect of trade associations.

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16 citations in Web of Science
14 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

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Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Management
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