Many prior researchers have criticized business planning, arguing that it interferes with the efforts of firm founders to undertake more valuable actions to develop their fledgling enterprises (Bhide, 2000; Carter, Gartner, and Reynolds, 1996). In this paper, we challenge this negative view of business planning, arguing that business planning is an important precursor to action in new ventures....

This paper presents a model of the evolution of activities, risks, and required resources for innovative ventures. A key implication of the model is the importance of surprising events in the life of ventures. Such events happen in most innovative ventures and appear to be a major source of preventable failures. Reacting to these events requires significant inflows of new resources into the ven...

Joint ventures among telecommunications firms have become increasingly common in recent years. These joint ventures have occurred in almost all areas of telecommunications including information services, manufacturing, and mobile service. The firms involved in the collaboration have often been domestic U.S. corporations, such as AT&T and GTE, or international corporations, such as GPT (General ...

Edith Penrose was one of the first scholars to point out that firms may need to rely on research joint ventures (RJVs) to acquire access to resources that can help them achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. We estimate an econometric model of the propensity of firms to disclose their intension to engage in RJVs, in order to explain the recent precipitous decline in RJVs filed with the U....

Terry Jones and Mary Norris are with Wiggin & Dana LLP in New Haven, CT. Ms. Norris practices intellectual property and general business law, with particular emphasis on information technology, artistic, and copyright and trademark licensing, e-commerce and Internet issues, and publishing in all media, in the United States and abroad. She is chair of the firm’s Intellectual Property Practice Gr...

We appreciate the generous support of the National Science Foundation (IOC Award #0323176), the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and the MIT Sloan School of Management. We also thank multiple individuals for their helpful comments, including Phil Anderson, Steve Barley, Diane Burton, Tim Carroll, Rebecca Henderson, Pankaj Ghemawat, Clark Gilbert, Riitta Katila, Bruce Kogut, Dan Levinthal, ...

Social ventures balance the economic and social dimensions of value creation to alleviate the problems created by shared collective issues. While much is known about economic value creation in conventional firms, little empirical work has focused on social ventures. As the number of social entrepreneurs continues to increase, the challenge of creating both economic and social value has emerged ...

This paper investigates an unexplored rationale for organizations to enter into joint ventures. After a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on joint ventures, it develops a model in which projects require investments over time under conditions of autocorrelated productivity shocks. Internal and external interest groups are likely to pressurize owners into paying out early revenue...

We investigate whether firms learn to manage interfirm alliances as experience accumulates. We use contract-specific experience measures in a data set of over 2000 joint ventures and licensing agreements, and value creation measures derived from the abnormal stock returns surrounding alliance announcements. Learning effects are identified from the effects of unobserved heterogeneity in alliance...

An arti...cial neural network model is used to predict the performance of Sino-foreign joint ventures. Performance of international joint ventures remains a relatively under-researched area, yet its importance is well recognized due to the tremendous surge in joint venture activities in the past decade. Data on 2,416 Sino-foreign joint ventures was gathered, allowing for empirical analysis usin...