Being Extraordinary: How CEOs’ Uncommon Names Explain Strategic Distinctiveness – Reminds me of this episode on Freakonomics exploring how names can influence the career paths that people take (like people named Dennis become dentists). In a similar vein, CEOs with uncommon names pursue uncommon strategies.
A history of insatiable intellectuals – A review of the book The Polymath by Peter Burke. I listened to the podcast episode where the author gives a lecture about the book. It was really fascinating to see how polymaths and the tension between specialization and being a generalist have evolved over time.
The Strategic Allocation of Inventors to R&D Collaborations – they find that companies send their inventors with strong IP protection to collaborations. These inventors serve to balance value creation with value protection.
Mapping technological trajectories and exploring knowledge sources: A case study of 3D printing technologies – Maps 3D printing technologies using patents. I like their path analysis showing the contributions of the different countries in the development of this technology. I explored this technique in a previous post.
Optimal distinctiveness in platform markets: Leveraging complementors as legitimacy buffers – This studied optimal distinctiveness by comparing MOOC platforms. They found that “a standard deviation increase in distinctiveness (from low to moderate) increases the expected number of platform users by 1.7 million (+55.1%) for platforms with an above-average share of high-status complementors, but decreases the number of users by 2.9 million (-53.5%) for platforms without high-status complementors in their ecosystem.”