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This paper explores how two understudied characteristics of a firm's product portfolio, namely, aging of products and (non)innovativeness of products, affect firm survival. The influence of these product portfolio characteristics on organizational mortality can be observed both at the firm and at the industry levels. Paradoxically, the portfolio's influence at the firm and at the industry levels may go in opposite directions. Specifically, I predict that portfolios with aging products make their firms weaker competitors and survivors. However by weakening these firms, “aging” portfolios reduce competitive pressures at the industry level and, therefore, improve firm survival indirectly by changing industry vital rates. In contrast, firms with innovative product portfolios should be stronger survivors. At the same time, they are likely to intensify competition in the industry and, as a result, diminish survival chances of all firms, including those with innovative products. The analyses of all firms’ product portfolios in the worldwide optical disk drive industry, 1983–1999, support these predictions.

Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.

We examine how the organizational identity of established firms affects their strategic outcomes during the emergence phase of a new market. Drawing on cognitive theories of analogical learning, we build theory about how the established identities of producers influence the fluency with which consumers make sense of novel products, and hence affect valuations. We illustrate this theory through an empirical study of consumer evaluations of de alio entrants during the emergence of the digital camera industry.