Competition and strategic interaction in new markets
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation focuses on how firms compete effectively in new markets, and explores several strategic issues faced by firms in these contexts. These include how firms strategically interact with their rivals, how they quickly and efficiently craft successful strategies and develop viable business models, and how they successfully position themselves as the cognitive referent in the new market they are creating. While prior research has examined many of these issues in the context of established markets, my research investigates new markets and traces the activities of entrepreneurial rivals. Through an in-depth, longitudinal field study of five firms in the online investing market, I develop new theory to explain how firms successfully achieve these objectives. The first theoretical framework offers an explanation for how firms win the race to develop a viable business model. As the new market emerged, high performing firms enacted three strategies in sequence, which helped them get to a business model quickly and efficiency. First, executives attended to substitutes and copied from rivals. Next, they actively tested assumptions and made major resource commitments to the most lucrative business model opportunity. Finally, they maintained loose links in the organizational activity system to accommodate emergent sources of value. The resultant middle range theory has implications for research on competition in new markets and the strategic processes of developing business models. The second theoretical framework offers an explanation for how some firms become the cognitive referent in a new market while others fail to do so. Although prior research has shown how firms and other actors use rhetoric and symbolic activities to create new markets, I analyze how entrepreneurial firms use the same cultural strategies to position themselves in a new market they are creating. Successful firms conceptualize market creation as problem solving and follow a sequence that begins with narrowly directed rhetorical attacks aimed at current solutions, progresses to shifting stories to coincide with emergent logics, and culminates with eschewing labels that audiences attach to them as these firms introduce novel products to the market. By contrast, unsuccessful firms undermine their own positions through improper use of symbolic market creation activities. The resultant theory is relevant to the literatures on cultural strategy and the performance of entrepreneurial firms.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | McDonald, Rory Morgan |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Management Science and Engineering |
| Primary advisor | Eisenhardt, Kathleen M |
| Primary advisor | Katila, Riitta |
| Thesis advisor | Eisenhardt, Kathleen M |
| Thesis advisor | Katila, Riitta |
| Thesis advisor | Byers, Thomas (Thomas H.) |
| Thesis advisor | Eesley, Charles |
| Thesis advisor | Powell, Walter W |
| Advisor | Byers, Thomas (Thomas H.) |
| Advisor | Eesley, Charles |
| Advisor | Powell, Walter W |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rory Morgan McDonald. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Management Science and Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
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