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Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, the authors first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they wish to have completed; (2) broadcast to a pool of potential contributors; (3) attract a crowd of contributors; and (4) select among the inputs they receive. For each of these phases, the authors identify the key decisions organizations make, provide a basic explanation for each decision, discuss the trade-offs organizations face when choosing among decision alternatives, and explore how organizations may resolve these trade-offs. Using this decision-centric approach, the authors continue by showing that there are fundamental interdependencies in the process that makes the coordination of crowdsourcing challenging.

Industry platforms can alter relations among exchange partners in such a way that the industry structure is changed. The focus of much industry platform research has been on how platform creation and leadership offers advantages to the most central firms, but platforms can also be advantageous for small specialist firms that compete with the most central firms. We examine book publishing as an example of an industry in which the central players – large publishing firms – are losing power to self-publishing authors because the distributor Amazon has a powerful platform for customers to communicate independently, and the non-publishing platform Twitter also serves as a medium for readers to discuss and review books. Our empirical analysis is based on downloaded sales statistics for Amazon Ebooks, matched with Amazon reviews of the same books and tweets that refer to the book or the author. We analyze how Ebook sales are a function of publisher, Amazon reviews, and tweets, and we are able to assess the importance of each factor in the sale of book titles. The main finding is that Amazon reviews are powerful drivers of book sales, and have greater effect on the sales of books that are not backed by publishers. Twitter also affects book sales, but less strongly than Amazon reviews.

The study draws on the resource-based view and the contingency view of strategy. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to international strategy literature by extending the current understanding of foreign subsidiary’s competitive strategy in terms of cost leadership and product differentiation.

Hypotheses concern associations between corporate support building on product and skills relatedness and subsidiary strategies. Also, it is hypothesized that strategies are due to the type of local competitive intensity. The hypotheses were tested on wholly owned subsidiaries of Swedish industrial firms in Germany, the UK and the USA.

Product and skills relatedness between the subsidiary and the corporate core unit are positively associated with the subsidiary’s emphasis on cost leadership. Also, a positive association was found between skills relatedness and product differentiation, and extensive competitive intensity strengthens the relationship.

The study specifies what business relatedness is needed for a subsidiary’s competitive strategy; skills relatedness is more important than product relatedness; the type of local competitive intensity is important; corporate support and local strategy operate simultaneously.

Management is advised to implement a foreign subsidiary’s competitive strategy by recognizing the mechanisms identified in this study.

In a unique way, the study captures the role of corporate support of a foreign subsidiary’s competitive strategy relying on business relatedness and the importance of aligning the strategy with competitive intensity.

This paper aims to investigate the moderating impacts of seasonality on the effectiveness of new product commercialization strategies in short-lifecycle markets. The authors contextualize their theory in the vast and culturally significant entertainment industry sector and contrast the effects between independent films and big budget movies.

This study uses an econometric modeling approach.

This study finds that unlike new films by well-resourced studios, which must launch in a high season for best performance, independents can generate more revenue in low seasons under certain conditions. The study shows how seasonality moderates the effectiveness of new films’ commercialization strategies and how new product outcomes are different for small independent products than for big-budget productions with regards to distribution duration, advertising expenditure and product characteristics.

This research extends the literature on launch timing, which examines various strategic tradeoffs. In contrast with the few extant studies whose concern is sensitizing to the effects of seasonality (Siqueiraet al., 2016), this research treats seasonality as an exploitable opportunity that can be strategically factored into business planning for small producers. Accordingly, this is the first study to theoretically and empirically investigate the moderating relationship between seasonality, marketing decisions, product characteristics and performance.

To achieve useful specificity, the study constructs its discussion around the highly seasonal entertainment industry sector. The study shows that seasonality moderates the effectiveness of new films’ commercialization decisions and that the strategic outcomes are different for small independent products than for major studio productions in particular.

In contrast with extant research whose concern is sensitizing to the effects of seasonality, our research treats seasonality as an exploitable opportunity that can be strategically factored into business planning. Accordingly, ours is the first study to theoretically and empirically investigate the moderating relationship between seasonality, marketing decisions, product characteristics and performance.