On Wednesday, April 4, the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School will present a lecture by private equity guru and philanthropist Steve Schwarzman. The event, which is part of the 2017-18 Dean’s Speaker Series, will take place at 2:30 p.m. at the Kenan Center in Chapel Hill.
Faced with demand uncertainty and heterogeneity in a nascent industry, entrants often consider how many customer segments to serve by tailoring the usage breadth of their product portfolios. Portfolio usage breadth is the extent to which products in a portfolio collectively span distinct customer segments. We suggest that when entrants have use experience in contexts that are potential users of the new product, their portfolios exhibit low usage breadth, due to demand-oriented cognition and knowledge.
How long do nascent industries take to become commercially viable? This paper applies historical methods to the two contemporaneous cases of emergence of the airlines and insulin industry in the early 1900s.
Innovation has long been seen as the engine of economic growth. But as barriers to innovation such as patent thickets and patent litigation have risen dramatically in recent years, firms are beginning to examine the role that patents play in driving innovation. We examine how shifts in a firm’s intellectual property (IP) strategy can affect future innovation.
Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions.
Interorganizational relationships connect people affiliated with organizations rather than corporate actors themselves. The managers and owners of organizations therefore do not always control these connections and consequently often cannot profit from them. We discuss the circumstances under which individuals (versus organizations) own these relationships (and therefore also the social capital generated by them).
Kenan Institute Distinguished Fellow John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland talks about why the Hollywood story of rising from the mailroom to the boardroom is less likely to happen now.
A survey of family business owners conducted a number of years ago by John Ward, co-founder of The Family Business Consulting Group, found that lack of a shared vision for the family business and weak next-generation leadership were two of the top three threats to long-term family firm success. John’s finding was one of the inspirations for my own research on developing next-generation leadership talent in family businesses. In my study of several hundred family firms, it turned out that those two factors were highly related. A shared vision for the family enterprise was strongly predictive of the presence of effective next-generation family leaders.
We study the impact of widespread adoption of work-at-home technology using an equilibrium model where people choose where to live, how to allocate their time between working at home and at the office, and how much space to use in production. A key parameter is the elasticity of substitution between working at home and in the office that we estimate using cross-sectional time-use data.
Urban Investment Strategies Center Director Jim Johnson weighed in on the initial surge and subsequent decline in Black bookstore sales during the COVID-19 pandemic in a recent article by CNN Business.
We estimate the causal effects of employee-friendly scheduling practices on store financial performance at the US retailer Gap, Inc. The randomized field experiment evaluated a multi-component intervention designed to improve dimensions of work schedules – inconsistency, unpredictability, inadequacy, and lack-of-employee control – shown to undermine employee well-being and productivity.
Social media is a major part of our everyday lives. It's a way for us to communicate and share with those that follow along. But most will tell you, these connections are passive and surface-level. In this video, Isa Watson, founder and CEO of Squad, discusses why she made a career change, pursued an entrepreneurial path and created an app to help build authentic human connection on the internet.
Corporations face constant pressure to respond to a wide range of social, environmental and governance issues, many of are outside the company’s core mission. Determining whether or how to respond to such pressures is a complex process, often requiring substantial time and resources on the part of senior management. In a new paper, “Willing and Able: A General Model of Organizational Responses to Normative Pressures,” Olga Hawn, University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School Assistant Professor for Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainability; Rodolphe Durand of HEC Paris; and Ioannis Ioannou from the London Business School provide a dynamic framework for understanding how companies analyze and respond – or don’t respond – to “normative pressures” on matters that include global warming, environmental stewardship, occupational health, executive compensation and corporate governance, among others. This pressure comes from a wide range of interest groups that may include activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other stakeholders.
In business-to-business markets, top marketing and sales executives (TMSEs) have considerable influence on their organizations’ customer strategies. When TMSEs switch firms, a pattern of informal organizational connections results; this pattern reflects the flow of information and knowledge among firms and creates managerial social capital in the process. To model this information flow, the current study considers information reach and richness, conceptualized according to the network position (i.e., centrality and brokerage) of the firm in the TMSE mobility network, which can be constructed by tracing executive movements through the work experience records of TMSEs in an industry.
Firms are increasingly offering engagement initiatives to facilitate firm–customer interactions or interactions among customers, with the primary goal of fostering emotional and psychological bonds between customers and the firm. Unlike traditional marketing interventions, which are designed to prompt sales, assessing returns on engagement initiatives (RoEI) is more complex because sales are not the primary goal and, often, direct sales are not associated with such initiatives.
We contribute to the emerging literature on strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its antecedents by undertaking a systematic analysis of the effect of rivalry on firm and industry CSR. We deal with the codetermination of competition and CSR by using instrumental variables in the firm-level analysis and by modeling it directly in the industry-level analysis.
We explore the impact of Knightian uncertainty on contracting within a multi-layered firm. We study a setting where, absent uncertainty, division managers should be paid based on their division performance, but not other divisions' performance.
European economies are now dominated by services, and virtually all companies view service as critical to retaining their customers today and in the future. This European edition provides students with a complete introduction to the unique marketing challenges that services present. Guiding students to recognize and understand these special characteristics, the text also explores frameworks for developing and implementing service strategies for competitive advantage across a wide array of industries.
We present preliminary work to construct a knowledge curation system to advance research in the study of regional economics. The proposed system exploits natural language processing (NLP) techniques to automatically implement business event extraction, provides a user-facing interface to assist human curators, and a feedback loop to improve the performance of the Information Extraction Model for the automated parts of the system.
The local levels of economies have felt the impact of technological change and globalization. These forces have triggered the need to understand the dynamic mechanisms that enable locales to respond to such changes. For example, the downsizing of traditional employers because of a major loss in market share due to new competitors, acquisition by global firms, or off-shoring of production or services was traditionally thought to be beyond the scope of powers of local policymakers, thinkers, and business leaders.