| Summary: | This dissertation comprises three essays that explore the locus of learning and innovation in organizations and their environments, and the resulting impact on firm strategy.
The first essay examines how firms can learn from a diverse set of sources. The returns to social learning are expected to be low in contexts rife with interdependencies, where practices from one context may be incompatible with those from another. Using a computational simulation, this essay shows that centralized social learning proves surprisingly robust to this challenge, and that to resolve it, firms should counterintuitively double down on social learning.
The second essay examines how firms can leverage the market for systemic innovation. This is a task typically understood to be best accomplished through vertical integration, where the firm can easily explore alternative resource combinations. However, using a qualitative archival analysis of an opera company and a computational simulation, this paper shows that specialized producers’ reputational concerns lead them to undertake systemic innovation, the value of which a firm can in fact undercut by trying to vertically integrate.
The third essay examines how firms should take audience learning into account during experimentation. While firm learning calls for its experiments to be conducted as separately as possible from their core activities, audience learning (especially in cultural markets) often necessitates their integration in order to properly value an innovation. This essay uses a qualitative archival analysis of a ballet company to elucidate the challenge this creates for experimentation, and how firms can address this by strategically choosing their audience, and periodically replacing their experimentation units.
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