Reflections on entry timing and innovation strategy

• Author: Ronald Klingebiel,John Joseph
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2680
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Published date: 01 September 2017

Strategic Management Journal

Strat. Mgmt. J.,38: 1948–1949 (2017)

Published online EarlyView in WileyOnline Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/smj.2680

Received 28 June 2017

COMMENTARY

REFLECTIONS ON ENTRY TIMING AND INNOVATION

STRATEGY

RONALD KLINGEBIEL1,*and JOHN JOSEPH2

1Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Frankfurt, Germany

2Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, California, U.S.A.

Ronald Klingebiel and John Joseph received the

2016 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper

Award for their article “Entry timing and innova-

tion strategy in feature phones,” 2016, Strategic

Management Journal 37(6): 1002– 1020.

It is a privilege to receive the Ralph Gomory

Best Industry Studies Paper Award from the Indus-

try Studies Association (ISA) for our SMJ paper

on entry-timing strategy (Klingebiel & Joseph,

2016). The paper shows how managers approach

innovation-entry timing and align their entry-timing

position with wider aspects of their innovation strat-

egy, particularly as regards portfolio breadth and

resource-allocation selectiveness.

We do not know what exactly swayed the selec-

tion committee, but we would like to believe that

it had something to do with the paper’s internal

validity and reection of real-world phenomenon.

Although the feature-phone era is safely behind us,

its fundamental strategic trade-offs in innovation

timing continue to bedevil rms in all manner of

sectors.

Our take on the value of in-depth industry studies

is not only that they allow us to get closer to issues

of practical relevance, but that they also present

opportunities for studying theoretical mechanisms

*Correspondence to: Ronald Klingebiel, Frankfurt School

of Finance and Management, Frankfurt 60314, Germany.

E-mail: r.klingebiel@fs.de

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

in homogenous settings bound in space and time.

Our paper insights hinge on the rules of the game,

competition on feature-based innovation, which

remained stable between 2004 and 2008, and on the

ability to observe the universe of actors and their

actions, which were handset makers’ competitive

launches of feature innovations. This provides a

quasi-population study setting, for which regres-

sions become less important tools of analysis. Non-

parametric analysis and detailed inductive insights

gain in usefulness.

It has been a long road to publishing the paper and

receiving the ISA award. We had been in contact

with executives since the turn of the millennium. In

2005 we started a tentative relationship with GfK,

later complemented by ones with Informa and Strat-

egy Analytics. We co-located at Duke University

in 2010 to accelerate the project, supported by no

fewer than a dozen research assistants. Through-

out, we kept talking with our industry contacts, yet

it became harder and harder to motivate them to

weigh in on aspects that had ceased to be relevant to

their daily work. When we had a rst draft in 2012,

practitioners increasingly viewed it as a historian’s

exercise. Only just recently we managed to rekindle

some practitioner interest in the wider implications

of the study by publishing a companion piece on

HBR Online.

As with most academic publishing, it wasn’t easy.

Our respected academic colleagues tended to be