Rotman School of Management

ABSTRACT: This paper reports on the―CEO's-eye-view‖ of the 1990 commercial real estate crisis at Citibank using unique data from CEO John Reed's private archives as well as a series of oral histories conducted with Reed, Board Members, other Citi executives and bank regulators.

Abstract Convinced that the nature of today? s scientific and technological problems demand interdisciplinary solutions, research policy makers and funders are increasingly demanding coordination among academic disciplines. Yet, research on interdisciplinarity has with few exceptions treated it monolithically as a style of research or research outcome rather than considering the coordination as it happens. It is thus difficult to identify mechanisms of coordination and the consequent policy implications.

Abstract Previous research on breakthrough innovations has used patent data to identify them and assess their impact. The main proxy for breakthroughs uses forward citation counts, where patents at the top of the distribution are considered breakthroughs. Scholars have found this metric correlates with the economic value of patents (ie, stock market valuations), yet, it does not tell us much about their technological content.

Knowledge has received increased attention as the basis to explain differences in firm performance. Yet, the knowledge-based view of the firm in strategic management is still a contested and unmapped terrain with no unified clear-cut theories. This paper critiques existing contributions to knowledge-based views and highlights tensions in the field. We introduce an integrated knowledge-based view of the firm that encompasses and extends previous contributions and acts as a foundation for a future research agenda.

Much research has sought to understand why technological discontinuities are difficult for firms to manage. While the literature devotes little attention to the role played by managerial cognition, in such equivocal situations as those created by rapid technical change, executives' cognitive frames of the environment, not the" objective" characteristics of the situation, should be essential for shaping outcomes.

ABSTRACT We explore the double-edged sword of recombination in generating breakthrough innovation: recombination of distant or diverse knowledge is needed because knowledge in a narrow domain might trigger myopia; but, recombination can be counterproductive when local search is needed to identify anomalies. We take into account how creativity shapes both the cognitive novelty of the idea and the subsequent realization of economic value. We develop a text-based measure of novel ideas in patents using topic modeling to identify those patents that originate new topics in a body of knowledge. We find that, counter to theories of recombination, patents that originate new topics are more likely to be associated with local search, while economic value is the product of broader recombinations as well as novelty.