The Evolution of a New Industry: A Genealogical Approach (Innovation and Technology in the World Economy) - Hardcover

Drori, Israel; Ellis, Shmuel; Shapira, Zur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804772703 ISBN 13: 9780804772709

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Evolution of a New Industry traces the emergence and growth of the Israeli hi-tech sector to provide a new understanding of industry evolution.

In the case of Israel, the authors reveal how the hi-tech sector built an entrepreneurial culture with a capacity to disseminate intergenerational knowledge of how to found new ventures, as well as an intricate network of support for new firms. Following the evolution of this industry from embryonic to mature, Israel Drori, Shmuel Ellis, and Zur Shapira develop a genealogical approach that relies on looking at the sector in the way that one might consider a family tree. The principles of this genealogical analysis enable them to draw attention to the dynamics of industry evolution, while relating the effects of the parent companies' initial conditions to their respective corporate genealogies and imprinting potential. The text suggests that genealogical evolution is a key mechanism for understanding the rate and extent of founding new organizations, comparable to factors such as opportunity structures, capabilities, and geographic clusters.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Israel Drori is Professor of Management at the College of Management, Academic Studies in Israel. Shumuel Ellis is Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior in the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, Tel Aviv University. Zur Shapira is the William Berkley Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management and Chair of the Department of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business, New York University.

Israel Drori is Professor of Management at the College of Management, Academic Studies in Israel. Shumuel Ellis is Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior in the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, Tel Aviv University.Zur Shapira is the William Berkley Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management and Chair of the Department of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business, New York University.

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The Evolution of a New Industry

A Genealogical ApproachBy Israel Drori Shmuel Ellis Zur Shapira

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7270-9

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................viiPreface and Acknowledgments...................................................................................ix1 Introduction................................................................................................12 A Framework for Genealogical Evolution......................................................................113 Economic Conditions at the Time of Founding and the Founding Parents of the Genealogies.....................354 Genealogies in the Making: The Process and Structure of Their Evolution.....................................815 Founding and Genealogical Evolution.........................................................................1146 Concluding Remarks..........................................................................................134Appendix: History of the Israeli High-Tech Industry...........................................................145Notes.........................................................................................................165References....................................................................................................169Index.........................................................................................................181

Chapter One

Introduction

... The secret, then, of Israel's success is the combination of classic elements of technology clusters with some unique Israeli elements that enhance the skills and experience of individuals, make them together more effective as teams, and provide tight and readily available connections within an established and growing community. For outside observers, this raises a question: If the Israeli "secret sauce" is so unique to Israel, what can other countries learn from it? Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

Since the late 1980s, the Israeli high-tech industry has witnessed unprecedented growth. The information technology and communication (ITC) sector in particular has exhibited innovative qualities and gained a leadership position worldwide—in spite of its small size, Israel is considered a global leader in this industry. Various studies have attempted to analyze the story of the Israeli high-tech industry and its trajectory to success. Most of them have focused on the processes and conditions that led to an agglomeration of resources and infrastructure and the formation of a unique high-tech sector (see, e.g., Avnimelech 2008; Breznitz 2007; de Fontenay and Carmel 2001; Saxenian 2002). However, the history and dynamics leading to the emergence of this sector have received little attention.

This book aims to reveal the environmental and organizational processes, as well as the critical paths, that underlie the evolution, structure, and comparative advantage of Israel's high-tech industry. We do not analyze its growth as a unified process stemming from the creation of a cluster. Instead, we present a complementary view in which we argue that Israel's ITC sector evolved out of diverse organizational models of founding that were embedded in two different institutional environments: an institutional-cooperative period that was followed by a competitive economic period.

We develop an evolutionary perspective on the development of the Israeli high-tech industry in general and on the ITC sector in particular. We do so by examining the context of inheritance and transmission of the sector's organizational characteristics while analyzing the prevailing institutional environments that represent the bedrock of its emergence and founding. Our theoretical conceptualization attends to both initial conditions and change, and uses a processoriented mechanism to account for each. Furthermore, we predicate the evolution of the high-tech industry on its historical foundation.

As Stinchcombe (1965) asserts, initial conditions, including "the groups, institutions, laws, population characteristics and set of social relations that form the environment, have an enduring impact on industry evolution" (p. 142). This assertion implies a major challenge in explaining how the genesis of the institutional environment and the initial conditions under which key organizations were founded intertwined to create a particular momentum of growth for an entire industry.

We assert that initial conditions, socioeconomic processes, and geopolitical considerations, and the policy environment in particular, together influence the evolution of an industrial sector. They do so through the multilevel processes of inheritance and the intergenerational transmission of organizational forms, practices, routines, skills, and blueprints (see Phillips 2002, 2005). Furthermore, the evolutionary path of any industrial sector is shaped in response to the forces of competition, which affect an organization's mix and rate of change (Carroll 1984) and its corresponding entrepreneurial norms and opportunities.

The evolutionary mechanisms of competition and institutionalization dovetail with the persistent structures of organizational inheritance composed of certain practices and activities. In this perspective, both organizational and external forces are drivers of the Israeli high-tech industry's evolution. Such a comprehensive view allows us to assert the continuity between those who laid the foundation of the industry and their progenies who followed in their evolutionary path through direct inheritance structures. In the same vein, we can trace the changes in inheritance structures and processes that fostered a variety of organizational forms (Baum and Rao 2004; Stinchcombe 1968).

We first identify the origin of the founding firms in Israel's high-tech industry and their respective institutional environments; then we propose a genealogical framework for describing and analyzing the evolution of this industry. In organizational terms, a genealogy is a system of affiliation among organizations that originate from the same founding parents. Because we focus on the founding process, we claim that the influence of founding parents is enduring and shapes the evolutionary trajectory of the entire genealogy. Thus, understanding the historical conditions at the founding of each genealogy is critical to our story. According to Stinchcombe (1965), the external environment at the time of founding is highly influential in shaping organizational characteristics that are imprinted with the "social resources available" (p. 168). Stinchcombe, a proponent of the imprinting perspective, explicitly contended that "organizations which are founded at a particular time must construct their social systems with social resources available" (p. 168). Once such social systems are built (in terms of structure, processes, and culture), they are maintained and further imprinted because "traditionalized forces, the vesting of interests, and the working out of ideologies may tend to preserve the structure" (p. 169).

Furthermore, founding parents of genealogies may not only constitute the potential bearers of new organizations through the spawning process (Klepper 2001)1 but also be carriers of knowledge, values, and characteristics that encourage the spawning of new organizations. The assertion...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804772703
• ISBN 13: 9780804772709
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande