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Competence-Based Management (CBM) theory and research suggest that a firm’s competence building and leveraging processes are key factors influencing its competitive success. To achieve sustained competitive success, a firm’s competence building processes must continuously renew and extend the competences a firm has and can leverage. However, the ability of a firm to sustain strategically adequate levels of competence building – while also maintaining strategically successful competence leveraging – may be limited by various self-reinforcing managerial and organizational mechanisms that can arise from competence leveraging processes. In this paper we focus on certain managerial behaviors that may create path dependencies that lead an organization to become “locked-in” to its current competence leveraging processes and to neglect essential competence building, resulting in an inability to renew competences at a strategically adequate level and eventually in competitive failure.

In order to avoid such consequences, the management literature suggests that organizations must cultivate dynamic capabilities to overcome tendencies toward lock-in and to sustain ongoing competence building. This study investigates ways in which firms can maintain healthy competence building processes by avoiding lock-ins, especially those resulting from self-reinforcing managerial behaviors. A case study of successful competence-renewing processes in a home improvement retailing company helps to amplify the components of dynamic capabilities and to illustrate the insights that emerge from our study.

This study examines the relationship between small-firm managers' propensity to participate in a growth-oriented training program and their subsequent program outcome in terms of strategic reorientation. From a policy perspective, this relates to the important question of what benefit would come from recruiting managers who are normally not easily recruitable for training programs.

A control group design including pre- and post-training surveys is used to assess the effects of a large-scale management training program. Accounting for selection bias, the difference-in-difference method, together with propensity score matching, was applied to assess average program effects. The matching-smoothing method was used to assess heterogeneity in program effects associated with participation propensity.

Overall, program participation associated positively with change in strategic orientations. This effect was especially pronounced for managers with either low or medium to high inclinations for program enrollment, while diminishing in the modest to medium range.

The findings have important practical implications for selection of target groups and recruitment strategies in relation to small-firm management training programs. From the results, recruitment strategies may effectively include managers with either high or low participation propensities, rather than aiming to “fill up” with managers with moderately low participation propensity.

Several extant studies have examined average treatment effects from small-firm training programs. Yet there has been a lack of examination of the extent to which participation propensity modifies the effect of training on outcomes. This study brings new knowledge of the direction and magnitude of such heterogeneous training effects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between an individual's social capital context and entrepreneurship using a multi-level modelling framework.

This paper uses data from 87,007 individual level observations across 428 regions in 37 countries. The data comes from the 2010 and 2016 Life in Transition Surveys. The paper uses a principal component analysis to identify the different dimensions of an individual's social capital context. Subsequently, a multi-level model is employed examining the relationship between the components of an individual's social capital context and entrepreneurship (which is proxied by an individual's attempt to set up a business), whilst controlling for both country and regional effects.

Greater levels of networking, informal connections and tolerance of others have a significant positive relationship with entrepreneurial activity. Trust of institutions and others have a negative relationship with entrepreneurial activity. Regional and country differences are also important for entrepreneurship, demonstrating the importance of the multi-level and social contextual environment for business development.

Firstly, the authors present a broad, but comprehensive social contextual framework incorporating many measures of social capital when examining the importance of social capital for business development. Secondly, the work provides interesting results on the “bright and dark sides of trust” for entrepreneurship, answering calls for improved understandings on the positive and negative relationships between social capital and entrepreneurial activity. Thirdly, the paper extends the burgeoning but limited number of studies that examine the multi-level contextual environment of entrepreneurial activities.

This study aims to explore consumers’ motivations in the adoption of either print or digital forms of media, given the fluctuation of trends and attitudes in magazine consumption in the USA. This paper utilizes cognitive lock-in and the power law of practice to further the understanding of digital adoption through an interdisciplinary lens.

In this study, initially, five focus group sessions, including 53 qualifying non-student participants randomly placed into groups of 10 or 11, were held. Next, a 2 × 2 between-subjects quasi-experiment, using 163 undergraduate students at a large public university, was conducted.

The findings show that although the digital medium is considered less expensive, more convenient and more environmentally friendly, the print medium is regarded as more familiar, personal and visual. Further, whether the media type is a book or a magazine, consumers report higher perceived value, hedonic value and attitude toward print versus digital media.

The potential to digitally attract and lock-in consumers in the media industry has immense implications. Individuals consume media because of fashion marketing, personal space and advertisements, among other reasons.

This paper contributes to existing research by uncovering qualitative and quantitative insights into media consumption through a multilayered analysis of focus group participants and a quantitative experiment. The findings indicate that both the power law of practice theory and cognitive lock-in are plausible explanations for the choice of print over digital media format.

This chapter addresses ambidexterity at the individual level. Ambidexterity is defined as a company's ability to guarantee both short- and long-term successes by simultaneously exploring new market or new technological paths and improving existing products. We demonstrate that this ability can result from the evolution of social networks linking individuals involved in idea development. We used a longitudinal approach that combined case study and social network structure analysis of the R&D center of a semiconductor company. Six cases have been selected according to the level of disruption of the first idea generated and the end result in terms of exploration and exploitation. For these six cases, data have been gathered from monthly project reviews, press articles and listings of patents. Seventy-four interviews with key actors in the idea-development process have also been conducted.We mapped the relationships between actors who have contributed to the development of the idea through creative thinking and/or helped it to be accepted both internally and externally over three-year windows. Consequently, two network pictures are drawn for each case, and network structure indicators are computed for these two representations. We created a description of network evolution and the consequences of this process on the level of disruption of the ideas involved. This research demonstrated that different network structures and types of connections are relied upon depending on the explorative or exploitative objectives of teams of individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons why customers often cannot or do not exit a negative service encounter (lock-in) and to discuss how this affects their well-being and coping responses. This contributes to the research on how negative service encounters emerge and evolve and how such encounters impact customer well-being and subsequent responses.

An inductive, exploratory approach was used. Interviews with 20 service customers yielded over 90 detailed lock-in experiences across 25 different services. A multi-step, iterative coding process was used with a mixture of coding techniques that stem from a grounded theory approach.

Four categories of factors that caused customers to endure a negative event were identified (physical lock-in, dependency on the service, social lock-in and psychological lock-in). Customers either experienced inner turmoil (if they perceived having the option to stay or leave) or felt captive; both impacted their well-being and coping strategies in different ways. Three characteristics of negative events that caused lock-in to persist over time were identified.

This is a qualitative study that aims to identify factors behind customer lock-in, reduced well-being and coping strategies across different types of service encounters. Future research may build on these themes to investigate lock-in during specific service encounters in greater depth.

This research provides insights regarding how service providers can anticipate lock-in situations. In addition, the findings point to several ways in which frontline employees can assist customers with the coping process, during lock-in.

Customer lock-in during a service encounter is a common, yet unexplored phenomenon. This research contributes to a better understanding of why customers endure negative events and how such perceptions are reflected in their experiences and behaviors.

In many industries, customers are offered the opportunity to revise their initial decision in return for a superior but more expensive service option, a selling technique that is typically referred to as upselling. Drawing on the research on customers’ service experience, cognitive effort, decision justification, and goal framing, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize upselling as a two-stage decision process where the process of making the first decision (i.e. deciding on an initial service option) affects the final decision (i.e. the decision for or against the upsell offer).

First, qualitative interviews were conducted both with customers as well as managers. Moreover, in two experimental studies, different scenarios depicted an upsell situation that is common in many service encounters. After choosing a hotel room or rental car for reservation, participants were confronted with differently framed arguments to induce a shift toward an enhanced but more costly version of the initially chosen service option.

The qualitative interviews reveal that upselling is a common practice in many companies and that the manner in which the upsell is communicated has a considerable influence on its effectiveness. The first experimental study finds that the cognitive effort that customers expend in the initial choice moderates the effect of upsell messages using different goal frames. The second experimental study shows that customers are only affected by different goal frames when they feel responsible for the outcome of the final decision.

The findings provide a number of useful guidelines for designing upselling strategies and may also be used to segment a firm’s customer base. On a more general level, this research also raises managers’ awareness of the sequential nature of upselling decisions and the customer’s intrinsic need to justify an upsell choice.

The studies contribute to the literature on customers’ service experience and upselling strategies. Upselling is conceptualized as a two-stage process in which customers’ experience in one phase influences their behavior in later stages. The underlying psychological mechanisms of this effect are also highlighted by referring to customers’ need to justify service choices to themselves.

Social networking sites (SNS) follow the same diffusion pattern and are subject to the same phenomena as other technologies (e.g. QWERTY keyboard, Microsoft Office and VHS) that were subject to increasing returns. Since they may lock-in users, increasing returns significantly alter the way a technology is used and should be managed. The purpose of this paper is thus to verify if SNS are subject to increasing returns and, if so, to better understand their impacts in this context.

A research model that combines path dependency theory (PDT) tenets with the push-pull-mooring (PPM) model of information technology (IT) switching was developed and tested with data collected from 416 SNS users via a field survey. Participants were voluntary students at a North American university enrolled in a compulsory undergraduate course in business administration. Partial least square analysis structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to validate our research model and test our hypotheses.

Results show that SNS are subject to three forms of increasing returns: those stemming from device complementarity, learning and adaptive expectations. In addition, the findings show that increasing returns stemming from SNS use have the potential to lock-in SNS users by increasing their switching costs.

SNS users should be careful when using an SNS since such use can create a path that is self-reinforced and that can lock them due to the increasing returns it yields. SNS vendors/providers need to learn how to manage increasing returns if they want to foster continued use of their SNS and/or poach users from their competitors. Lastly, SNS regulators should revise or put in place new governance mechanisms since increasing returns, when properly leveraged, may undermine fair competition by allowing companies to lock-in users and lock-out competitors.

This study contributes to IS research by: (1) empirically demonstrating that increasing returns are present in the context of SNS use, (2) identifying increasing returns as key antecedents of user switching costs, (3) validating a theoretical framework that allows for the appraisal of PDT tenets in a variance model and (4) instantiating PDT tenets at the individual level.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of cognitive proximity, by studying it as a process in groups and dissecting how cognitive proximity is related to knowledge creation that results, for example, in articles and technological applications. Cognitive proximity, i.e. similar knowledge bases, is essential in creating knowledge in groups whose members have different professional and cultural backgrounds, which is often the case in internationalizing universities and companies.

The case study includes four top‐level international academic groups from Finnish universities that have a foreign leader. The groups were followed from 2007‐2009. Interviews and diaries are analysed using mental mapping.

According to the results, cognitive proximity is achieved through cooperation and suitable tasks. Knowledge is created during cognitive friction – when members are becoming cognitively proximate through knowledge base content, but developing a cognitive distance through a knowledge base structure.

This paper is one of the earliest efforts to study cognitive proximity as a process in groups. Cognitive proximity has especially raised interest in the fields of knowledge management and economic geography.

Following the line traced by two previous works of Albino et al. and Messeni Petruzzelli, the paper aims to analyze how technology districts reach and acquire external competencies and capabilities by means of organizational and cognitive proximity. This allows districts to modify their geographical boundaries and evolve into technology clusters.

The research design is based on a case study methodology. In particular, two actual technology districts are analyzed, namely Castel Romano and Toulouse, in order to show how they use organizational, and cognitive proximity to acquire external knowledge sources and re‐shape their geographical boundaries.

Based on the findings of the empirical study, two main propositions are formulated. The first proposition refers to the negative relationship between the geographical distance to the district's actors and the use of organizational proximity as a means for reaching external knowledge sources. By contrast, the second proposition indicates the positive relationship between the geographical distance to the district's actors and the use of cognitive proximity as a means for reaching external knowledge sources.

As regards the firm strategic behaviors, it seems particularly crucial to exploit all the three dimensions of proximity, in order to guarantee openness and sustain innovativeness and competitiveness. Concerning policy implications, the local governments should address their actions to help and promote the openness of technology districts and the formation of technology clusters. With this aim, actions should be devoted also to sustaining single local firms that are part of a technology cluster but not of a technology district. These, in fact, by increasing their competitive position, may generate positive externalities in the local area, fostering the diffusion and sharing of knowledge in the area and, then, acting as knowledge gatekeepers for the whole area.

The paper extends the findings of previous works linking three proximity dimensions in a holistic framework that explains the different use of organizational and cognitive proximity to acquire knowledge, according to the geographical distance between organizations.