Dr Beverly Tyler visits the Surrey Business School
Tuesday 3 July 2012
Dr Beverly Tyler from Poole Management School, North Carolina State University, USA visited Surrey Business School on 20th and 21st June. Beverly, who is an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU), received her PhD from Texas A&M University (Chair Jay Barney) where she focused on the strategic management process, top executive decision making, and organizational information processing.
Beverly applies cognitive, organizational, and relationship management lenses to the domains of new products in market oriented firms, supply chain management, international investment decisions, and sponsored research relationships.
Although she is primarily a behavioral theorist, she values multiple theoretical perspectives and uses a multi-method approach. She has used policy capturing experimental designs, secondary data analysis of databases, codification of documents, interviews, mail surveys, and cognitive mapping methods.
During her visit to Surrey Business School, Beverly held a Seminar/Round table discussion on her paper: A Behavioral Theory of the Reciprocal Relationship Between Innovative Output and R&D Alliances, and presented a paper entitled: Who I Am and How I Contract: The Effect of Contractors’ Roles and Responsibilities on the Evolution of Contract Structure in University-Industry Research Agreements.
Dr Tyler’s research has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Journal of Operations Management, and Journal of Supply Chain Management, among others.
A behavioral theory of the reciprocal relationship between innovative output and R&D alliances
The behavioral theory of the firm maintains that when firms perform below their aspiration, they will engage in problemistic search and invest in novel solutions to improve subsequent performance. Using a pooled time series analysis of 667 observations for 131 biopharmaceutical firms operating in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, we find support for behavioral theory expectations. Furthermore, our data suggest that the relationship between past below aspiration innovative output and subsequent innovative output, defined as new product introductions, is mediated by the number of R&D alliances established, while the relationship between past above aspiration performance and innovative output is not. We contribute to the behavioral theory and alliance literature, illustrate how firms’ innovative output influences R&D alliance formation, and suggest directions for future research.
Who I am and how I contract: The effect of contractor's roles and responsibilities on the evolution of contract structure in university-industry research agreements
In this paper, we explore how contract structure is influenced by contractors’ organizational roles and responsibilities in cross-boundary innovation-based relationships. We hypothesize that as scientists gain contracting experience with an exchange partner, their focus on knowledge creation supports the establishment of a relationship based on technical competence, behavioral experience, and operational routines which cause subsequent contracts to become less detailed. We also hypothesize that contract administrators, because of their focus on knowledge protection (mitigating opportunism and enforcement), primarily accumulate joint governance experience and establish negotiation routines which cause subsequent contracts to become more detailed. Analyzing the monitoring terms and intellectual property terms of corporate sponsored university research agreements, we find support for both of our theoretically-grounded hypotheses.