Dr. Axel Zeijen

With Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel

Platforms have made their way into many industries. In the music industry, streaming platforms solved the piracy problem; but will they turn out to be a mixed blessing for the dominant upstream labels?

We study how Spotify uses its playlist functionality to reduce its dependence on major-label content, by testing and discovering more potentially attractive indie songs, and by driving streams towards these songs by promoting them on playlists.

external page Platform Power Struggle: Spotify and the Major Record Labels (NBER)

With Luigi Marengo and Stefano Brusoni

Much of innovation and organization theory and practice assumes that product architectures form a stable basis upon which to organize, innovate, and strategize. However, digital technologies such as additive manufacturing seem to affect these architectures and thus challenge this idea.

We use a modeling approach to explore the implications of this new phenomenon, and understand how the ability to redesign product systems can benefit firms in different ways, depending on their vertical scope and positioning.

external page Search and Performance in Ecosystems: The Changing Role of Product Architectures (LEM WP Series)

Viewing a search space as a "fitness landscape" is widespread in management theory and common in practice. However, when firms do not stand alone and rely on each other to create value, "fitness" is only part of the story of firm performance.

Combining the task environment of NK models with elements from cooperative game theory in Value-Based Strategy, I develop an approach to study how technology factors and competition jointly shape firms' opportunities for value capture.

With Stefano Brusoni and Daniella Laureiro-Martínez

3D printing, or additive manufacturing, has unlocked many new design and manufacturing possibilities, yet its promised industrial revolution is long overdue. What can we learn from the gap between its promised benefits and actual application?

Through a qualitative study of the 3D Printing, focusing on the technology providers, users, and application areas, we shed light on how the "technology frame" of 3D printing got partially stuck in the idea of 3D printing as a prototyping technology. Direct manufacturing applications of 3D printing required a different integration of machines in user's industrial environments, and led to contests over control over the technology.

With Stefano Brusoni, Fernando Suarez, and Richard Tee

The idea of an industry lifecycle, revolving around a "dominant design," is fundamental in any discussion of innovation and strategy. With the emergence of platforms as shaping how innovation and competition play out, is it time to revisit this foundational framework?

We develop a conceptual framework of the life cycle of platform industries to complement expected patterns in product industries. While there are many parallels, the evolutionary mechanisms underlying platform industry development are often different, and so are the implications for theory and practice.

A core idea in strategy and innovation is that some parts of a system are more critical than others, and occupying a "bottleneck" is a recipe for success. But bottlenecks are not all created equal, and perhaps should not all be leveraged in the same way.

I develop an extension of the NK model to control and study in a unified way how the structure of complex systems affects their evolution - and how one individual component can affect the system as a whole. Critical components can "bottleneck" systems because they constrain performance, or because they constrain their development. The success of bottleneck strategies depends on understanding not just that a component is critical, but why it is so.

With Jerker Denrell, Manuel Romagnoli, and Luigi Marengo

There are few ideas more intuitive than that aiming high is good - as long as one has time to reap the benefits of what is accomplished. But does this idea depend on whether high targets are interpreted as "doing as well as you can," or as "doing well compared to others" instead?

We develop a simple analytical model to study optimal aspirations under different specifications. While we replicate that optimal absolute aspirations decrease with turbulence, optimal rank-based aspirations instead increase with turbulence, and optimal average-based aspirations provide the simple rule to simply do better than average.

With Manuel Romagnoli and Luigi Marengo

Organizations search for new ideas when current ones no longer suffice. In a world with path-dependence and complexity, how do satisficing targets and limits on risk-taking shape the direction of such search efforts, and the likelihood of finding suitable outcomes?

In an extension of the NK model, we incorporate peer comparison in the search strategies of organizations. We show how such "reference points" guide the options that organizations explore, and study the trade-offs between being able to find satisfactory outcomes - and those satisfactory outcomes actually helping in the long run.