Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

In many creative industries, content creation and content distribution are organized by publishers (e.g., Random House, Paramount, or Hasbro). International distribution of content (e.g., books, films, board games) is often organized by licensing alliances with other publish-ers. We study these licensing alliances, more precisely the antecedents of alliance stability and alliance formation. According to our hypotheses, licensing alliances are dependent on the up-stream producers who create the content for the publishers (e.g., authors, film directors, game designers). If a publisher has a stable set of upstream producers or if a publisher relies on new producers for its content has implication for the dynamics of licensing alliances. To test our hypotheses, we use a dataset from the board game industry (n=178 publishers, time period from 2005 to 2019). For the analysis, we use SAOMs a tool designed to study longitudinal network data. Results show support for our assumptions.

The management of R&D alliance portfolio dynamics and their link to new ventures’ innovation are still a white spot on the map of alliance research. Extant studies provide important insights into the drivers and outcomes of a venture’s formation and dissolution of direct ties with alliance partners over time. Yet, we still know little about the temporal ordering and progression of these events and how they relate to innovation outcomes. We address this shortcoming and adopt a longitudinal configurational approach to explore how the temporal attributes of new ventures’ alliance formation and their complex interdependencies over time relate to firm innovation. We draw on a proprietary longitudinal dataset of 50 pharmaceutical biotechnology firms to track when, how frequently, for how long, in what rhythm and how concentrated in time these firms form R&D alliances during their early development phases. Our findings reveal that within each development phase different configurations of temporal patterns of alliance formation are associated with high innovation. Furthermore, our findings suggest two distinct equifinal trajectories—consistent time-pacing and switched to time-pacing—that highly innovative firms take to (re-)configure their alliance portfolio across the early phases of their development and one less successful trajectory—frequent punctuation. By showing how the temporal attributes that characterize the patterns of alliance formation relate to ventures innovation this study contributes to applying a dynamic lens to alliance portfolio research.