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How firms capture value from their innovations has long interested strategy and innovation scholars. Prior work has focused on legal, economic, and social mechanisms for isolating knowledge from imitation as crucial to this process. Our contribution extends this stream of research by identifying how design choices about the way knowledge is manifested (e.g., into routines, blueprints, prototypes, or products) can inhibit a counterparty’s ability to imitate knowledge relating to a focal innovation. We derive six theoretically distinct types of knowledge manifestation that can be used for these ends, consider their impacts on the awareness, motivation, and capability of a counterparty seeking to imitate the focal knowledge, and organize them into a novel two-dimensional conceptual framework for comparison. By doing so, we add design mechanisms to the strategic toolbox of isolating mechanisms available for capturing value from innovation. This addition opens up a new channel through which organizational choice endogenously shapes appropriability regimes and introduces knowledge manifestations as an important unit of analysis for understanding innovation strategy.

When is imitation of follower actions an effective competitive strategy for a leader? Building on prior work in competitive dynamics from the Austrian School perspective, we propose that imitation ...

Knowledge is a source of competitive advantage for organizations but its public good character makes attempts at expropriation difficult to detect and guard against. While prior work has considered...

Organizational routines play an important role in a number of organizational and strategic management theories, including the capability, resource-based, knowledge-based, evolutionary and practice perspectives. However, to date the concept of organizational routines has proven difficult to operationalize. This has severely restricted the use of this concept in empirical work and limited new theory development. Building on prior work conceptualizing routines as (components of) firm capabilities and on the knowledge-based view of the firm, this paper identifies a number of attributes which can be used to characterize organizational routines. I then discuss the relationships between routine attributes, routine value and routine imitability, as well as the moderating role of the environment in which the organization competes. Finally, I consider how a firm's choices regarding routine structure and knowledge management affect routine attributes, and how these relationships are moderated by the broader organizational context. The resulting theoretical framework can be used to consistently theorize about and analyze routines that operate in different contexts. This framework contributes to the literature on organizational routines by opening the door for more empirical work that takes the routine as its unit of analysis, and by providing a foundation for new theory development.

When is imitation of follower actions an effective competitive strategy for a leader? Building on prior work in competitive dynamics and rivalry-based imitation, we propose that imitation is an effective means of staying ahead in winner-takes-all competition in uncertain environments with low information asymmetry. This is because imitation reduces likely differences in performance between rivals, therefore reducing the likelihood of the follower overcoming the initial advantage of the leader. Furthermore, we argue that the effect of imitation is moderated by the degree of environmental uncertainty and by the relative competitive positioning of the leader with respect to the follower. Our theoretical arguments are supported by an analysis of data on head-to-head boat races from the America’s Cup World Series. By illuminating the importance of environmental contingencies in competitive interaction we extend our understanding of competitive dynamics and of the performance consequences of imitation.