Three Essays on Dynamic Capabilities in the Context of Innovation, Networks and Entrepreneurship

A recent study by McKinsey & Company (Benson-Armer, Otto and Webster 2015) found that half the executives they survey rate capability building as one of their firms’ top three priorities. This research also concludes that building capabilities in the domains of strategic marketing and entrepreneurship represents an urgent task in capability management. The importance of capability development and management is also recognized by leading strategic marketing and entrepreneurship scholars (e.g. Moorman and Day 2016; Day and Schoemaker 2016; Teece 2012). These authors suggest that managers demand new ways to help firms compete in today’s fast-changing environment. Dynamic capabilities are considered as high potential ways to help address this challenge. Surprisingly, the extant marketing and entrepreneurship literatures provide limited theoretical and empirical insight into: 1) how dynamic capabilities affect the firm’s resource base to create value; and 2) how firms develop these types of capabilities. My dissertation aims to push the frontier of dynamic capability research on these issues. I develop three essays in my dissertation, each of which focuses on distinct research questions. The first two essays are empirical and focus on the deployment of a dynamic capability critical to strategic marketing and entrepreneurship – Dynamic Network Capability (DNC). Building upon extant dynamic capability frameworks and definitions, I define DNC as the firm’s ability to sense, seize and transform external collaborative relationships. My empirical context is new product development (NPD). Specifically, Essay 1 investigates how DNC shapes major innovation capability under turbulence and Essay 2 investigates how DNC drives competitive performance through speed of product reconfiguration among firms of different ages. Essay 3 is conceptual and develops a theoretical framework explaining the development and sustainability of dynamic capabilities. I clarify the learning experience that underlies dynamic capabilities and introduce a new concept that specifies the connection between entrepreneurship and dynamic capability development. I apply this new thinking to offer a set of propositions that inform high-stakes research areas in the dynamic capability literature