Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. Thesis. 1968. M.S. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Bibliography: leaves 116-117. / M.S.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-82). / Rapidly growing companies often start out well, but hit a "wall" as they continue to expand. This wall is partly due to a lack of structure within the organization, but is also due to a lack of leadership and training to build new initiatives or to implement change. This thesis examines two components of the company: the organizational behavior at the company level and the leadership development at the level of individual stakeholders within the company. By examining the organizational structures and leadership teams of successful and failed rapidly-growing companies, this thesis proposes a new organizational developmental model to better understand and predict what makes a growing company successful in getting over the "wall" and to its next phase of development. The first part of the study examines the leadership and organizational needs of small- and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) at early and midlife stages of development. This thesis then examines leadership and organizational process theory before drawing on developmental psychology to propose a new model to address the stages of growth through which a company passes. Using the proposed developmental model as an analytic framework, two case studies are examined. The model provides insights into the kinds of leadership and organizational structure that are predictive of successful - or unsuccessful - growth in the SME. Lessons for SMEs are suggested, including what a company can do early in its life cycle to prevent it from hitting the wall. / by Michelle Macaux. / M.B.A.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three related essays which explore new approaches to modeling and measurement of consumer decision strategies. The focus is on decision strategies that deviate from von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory. Essays 1 and 2 explore decision rules that consumers use to form their consideration sets. Essay 1 proposes disjunctions-of-conjunctions (DOC) decision rules that generalize several well-studied decision models. Two methods are proposed for estimating the model. Consumers' consideration sets for global positioning systems are observed for both calibration and validation data. For the validation data, the cognitively simple DOC-based methods predict better than the ten benchmark methods on an information theoretic measure and on hit rates. The results are robust with respect to format by which consideration is measured, sample, and presentation of profiles. Essay 2 develops and tests an active-machine-learning method to select questions adaptively when consumers use heuristic decision rules. The method tailors priors to each consumer based on a "configurator." Subsequent questions maximize information about the decision heuristics (minimize expected posterior entropy). To update posteriors after each question the posterior is approximated with a variational distribution and uses belief-propagation. The method runs sufficiently fast to select new queries in under a second and provides significantly and substantially more information per question than existing methods based on random, market-based, or orthogonal questions. The algorithm is tested empirically in a web-based survey conducted by an American automotive manufacturer to study vehicle consideration. Adaptive questions outperform market-based questions when estimating heuristic decision rules. Heuristics decision rules predict validation decisions better than compensatory rules. Essay 3 proposes a model of product search when preferences are constructed during the process of search: consumers learn what they like and dislike as they examine products. Product recommendations, whether made by sales people or online recommendation systems, bring products to the consumer's attention and impact his/her preferences. Changing preferences changes the products the consumer will choose to search; at the same time, the products the consumer chooses to search will determine the future shifts in preferences. Accounting for this two-way relationship between products and preferences is critical in optimizing recommendations. / by Daria Dzyabura. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, February 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 374-387). / This dissertation is about multinational firms and the geography of technological innovation. It addresses a series of questions about the spatial location of the knowledge sources that underpin and inform innovations developed by foreign subsidiaries. Where foreign subsidiaries draw their scientific, technical, and commercial ideas from during the process of generating knowledge is a central concern in current debates about the nature of foreign direct investment and the multinational enterprise. An emerging notion in the literature is that the multinational firm may be evolving toward an institution specializing in the assimilation, diffusion, and, ultimately, creation, of knowledge on a worldwide scale. A key conjecture in this perspective 1s that what makes the multinational unique as a learning organization is its structural position spanning heterogeneous institutional environments. To date there exists little in the way of systematic evidence that foreign subsidiaries assimilate knowledge originating in the host countries in which they are located - much less that this knowledge is actually being utilized, either locally by the subsidiary or elsewhere within the multinational firm. This study seeks to advance this debate through an empirical investigation of the subsidiary-environment interface in the context of technological innovation. Three research questions are addressed: 1. Where, geographically, do foreign subsidiaries derive their scientific and technical ideas from during the process of technological innovation? 2. Under what conditions do innovations generated by foreign subsidiaries build upon sources of science and technology in the home and/or host country? 3. To what extent and under what conditions do other parts of the multinational firm derive a learning benefit from a foreign subsidiary's capacity to assimilate knowledge in its local environment? New insights often come from new data and the development of new methods to use those data. In this study, I take advantage of a unique source of subsidiary-level innovation data derived from U.S. patent records. Briefly, for every patent issued to U.S.- based subsidiaries of foreign multinationals between 1980 and 1990 - over 16,000 patents - I have assembled a variety of geographic, organizational, and technological indicators. Most importantly, this patent database contains detailed information on the reference "citations" to prior patents listed on every subsidiary patent record. These citations represent the technological antecedents of the patented invention. In the empirical analysis, I use the geographic information contained in these citations to draw inferences about the extent and conditions under which innovating subsidiaries are drawing upon home or host country sources of science and technology, and the extent to which this knowledge is eventually diffused to other parts of the multinational network. The patent citation methodology is modeled on the pioneering work of Jaffe, Tratjenberg and Henderson (1993). This study is explicitly inter-disciplinary in its theoretical orientation. In addition to the multinational literature, I draw upon concepts and ideas originating in the literatures on innovation and economic geography. The argument has two main steps. First, drawing on March (1991), I argue that the innovative activities of foreign subsidiaries can be categorized into two broad "logics": a logic of exploitation and a logic of exploration. Exploitation - "the refinement and extension of existing competencies, technologies and paradigms" (March, 1991: 85) - is hypothesized to be associated with sources of knowledge in the home base of the firm, most fundamentally from within the parent firm itself Exploration -- "experimentation with new alternatives" (1991: 85) - is hypothesized to be associated with knowledge sources originating in the subsidiary's host country locale. Second, drawing on what I term the "embeddedness" perspective on external innovation networks, I argue that the ability of subsidiaries to participate effectively in local knowledge sharing networks will be conditioned on a set of subsidiary and parent-level factors influencing the credibility and legitimacy of the subsidiary within those networks. In short, the argument is that agency - the logic or strategy of subsidiary innovation - will be moderated by structure, the social and institutional obstacles to the subsidiary's effective participation in external innovation networks. Important findings emerging from this study include: -- A substantial amount of evidence that U.S. subsidiaries assimilate localized spillovers of technical knowledge during the process of technological innovation. The results are especially strong at micro geographic levels - host state and region. -- This finding is quite robust over the 1980 to 1990 time period and is not driven by the presence of acquired U.S. firms in the subsidiary sample. Greenfield subsidiaries also show considerable evidence of being able to "tap into" localized sources of knowledge. -- U.S. subsidiaries also build importantly upon sources of knowledge originating in their home country, most fundamentally upon knowledge generated by the parent organization itself, a finding that is consistent with a more conventional view of the multinational firm than is implied by the above results. -- Some evidence is also found that other parts of the multinational firm derive a learning advantage from having a subsidiary that is geographic.ally proximate to sources of knowledge in the host country.-- Supporting the hypotheses developed in the study, structural characteristics of subsidiaries as well as specific features of their innovations are found to be important predictors of the location of the knowledge sources that underpin subsidiaries' innovations. Some of these factors also influence the likelihood of local knowledge being diffused through the multinational network. Findings from this research have important implications for theory and practice. Perhaps the study's most fundamental theoretical implication is the doubt it casts on the notion - frequently advanced in the multinational literature -- that there is a single "model" of innovation in the multinational firm, or even that firms are converging toward a panicular model. The empirical results contained in this thesis show important and sustained variation across, and even within, particular subsidiaries in the geographic underpinnings of their technological innovations. For managers, the most far reaching implication of this study is the evidence it provides of the importance of location (and all that term implies) to the process by which firms generate new and valuable technical knowledge. / by Anthony S. Frost. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-108). / by Teruyuki Daino. / M.B.A.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-112). / The pharmaceutical industry is an $837 billion a year industry that is being plagued by low R&D productivity. This decline in productivity has resulted in significant erosion of value. From December 2000 to February 2008, the top 15 pharmaceutical companies lost about $850 billion in shareholder value and their stock price fell precipitously from 32 times earnings to an average of 13 (Garnier, 2008). In an attempt to boost R&D productivity, pharmaceutical companies are jettisoning their old lumbering and bureaucratic R&D organizations for de-centralized and entrepreneurial models in a wave of organizational redesigns that is aimed at delivering innovation and creating value. In this research, I have studied this new trend in organizational redesign by finding out what went wrong with the old model, what are the drivers for change, what is the new model and what strategic imperatives are they aimed at achieving. I have undertaken this by studying the top 5 research-based pharmaceutical companies. I have used interviews and extensive secondary research to gather facts and gain insight into issues and questions mentioned above. I then used the Three Organizational Lenses Framework by (Ancona et al, 2005) to analyze the new model at play in each of the 5 companies studied and proposed recommendations going forward. I found that whilst organizational design provides strong tools, techniques and systems for enhancing R&D productivity, implementing a new organizational structure alone will not suffice. There has to be a comprehensive approach that involves structure, systems and incentives; as well as paradigm shifts in both leadership and culture. / by Sunny O. Adeusi. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three essays that explore hiring criteria, skill demands and labor market outcomes. The first essay investigates the use of worker credit status as a hiring screen. The practice has sparked debate, with opponents asserting that it amounts to discrimination and proponents maintaining that it is an important tool for employers to assure the quality of new employees. This study uses a unique identification strategy along with credit proxy variables in a national dataset to test whether credit status reveals information about an employee's character that is predictive of employee productivity. The study finds that the character-related portion of credit status is not a significant predictor of worker productivity. The second essay addresses the question of whether U.S. manufacturers face a skill gap in hiring production workers. This study explores the issue by presenting and analyzing results from an original, nationally representative survey of U.S. manufacturing establishments that directly measures concrete employer skill demands and hiring experiences. The results indicate that demand for higher-level skills is generally modest, and that three quarters of manufacturing establishments do not show signs of hiring difficulties. Among the remainder, demands for higher-level math and reading skills are significant predictors of long-term vacancies, but, contrary to some theories of technical change, demands for computer skills and other critical thinking/ problem-solving skills are not. In terms of mechanisms, factors that complicate the interaction of supply and demand and that are associated with communication/coordination failures appear to play an important role. The third essay combines data from an original manufacturing skill survey with industry-level data on capital and equipment to explore the connection between capital intensity and current skill demands. The results indicate that contemporaneous capital intensity does predict higher level skill demands, but the effect is driven by higher-level reading skills rather than the math and computer skills that dominate the current debate. With regard to historical patterns, the study finds that the relationship between historical capital intensity and current skill demands changes over time, with increasing capital investment per worker showing opposite effects in the 1990s and 2000s. / by Andrew Weaver. / 1. Credit status a good signal of productivity? -- 2. Skill demands and mismatch in U.S. manufacturing -- 3. Variation in manufacturing skill demands by industry-level capital intensity. / Ph. D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1983. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Thomas Joseph Langan. / M.S.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-241). / Japanese major alcoholic beverage companies, whose businesses are mainly the production and sale of beer products, stand at a strategic crossroads. There are several reasons: a slow decrease in the Japanese population, which leads to a smaller drinking population; diversification of customers' tastes and preferences; a totally saturated beer and low-alcohol beverage market; and a globalization trend that is now entering Asian countries. Therefore it is essential for the alcoholic beverage companies to adopt strategies for future sustainability--one to strengthen its core liquor business and offer a range of beverages other than beer; the other is to expand business opportunities into areas other than the liquor business. These diversified businesses are basically either vertically integrated or founded upon the core competencies, both of which are close to their main business, namely alcohol beverage business. At the same time, other large international beer brewers such as Anheuser-Busch, Heineken, and Lion Nathan, are pursuing a different strategy from the Japanese companies: these competitors are focusing even more on their core beer business. I will explore future strategies for the alcoholic beverage companies. / (cont.) I will compare Japanese companies that have diversified their business including the historical backgrounds of diversification and future strategies of other international players. Subsequently, the thesis narrows down to diversification strategies for a Japanese brewing company, Kirin Brewery, which is trying to nurture another pillar for its future growth after almost 30 years of diversification. To evaluate the long- and mid-term business strategies of this new pillar--health foods and functional foods-as a new joint venture, I will apply in some detail the Delta Model Integrated Business Framework proposed by Arnoldo Hax. / by Toru Yoshimura. / M.B.A.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 208-228). / by Michael J. Gallivan. / Ph.D.