The other five cases parallel MB in terms of receiving operational knowledge. Skills: physical abilities used to perform activities or tasks. The founder told us in 2009 that they were prepared to shut down the firm anytime (I.22). We expect that the first conjecture holds only for latecomer startups in technologically mature industries but not necessarily for emerging high-tech industries. As the analysis went on, some knowledge was found repeatedly to be present and hence was extracted as first-order codes. We did not have the quota of steel in the state plan to purchase it. We summarized and coded the interview data and other materials and developed analytical tables to navigate through the data (Miles & Huberman, Reference Miles and Huberman1994). <>>><>>>] Administrative Title Declarative Vs. Functional Knowledge. However, with hope that the market of sulfur dyes might recover soon, it escalated its commitment to Sulfur Black 1, which was indispensable for a full-fledged sulfur dye manufacturer, as FA's initial investments actually positioned itself. This theory has sought to establish the influence of knowledge transfer on the performance of startups and industrial agglomeration (Furlan & Cainelli, Reference Furlan and Cainelli2020). As mentioned above, private startup founders in our focal industry, seeking to overcome initial knowledge scarcity, could not find reliable sources of knowledge other than incumbents. If you are expert in technical skills you can be trained for particular domain. Or do you mean something else when you say "reference material"? Received a 'behavior reminder' from manager. Is this an at-all realistic configuration for a DHC-2 Beaver? He disbanded FA in 1990. For example, you would say Microsoft Excel (working knowledge).. As verbs the difference between functioning and working is that functioning is (function) while working is (work). FA ran into great difficulties before it secured an initial set of clients. Consequently, the four cases did not select the technical trajectories for early products on a well-informed comparison across different trajectories, but simply employed the most common or traditional one for which technical assistance was readily available (I.6, 9, 22, 52). 1. If some one is trying to rape you and you were in this position then stretch your hands horizontally as far as you can, this will bring the pers Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site, Learn more about Stack Overflow the company. " rev2022.12.9.43105. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. While proxies such as a longer life span do imply an incumbent firm's knowledge enjoys a better evolutionary fit within the given environment, this relationship does not necessarily imply flows of that knowledge (in higher quality or in greater volume) to startups (Fryges et al., Reference Fryges, Mller and Niefert2014). This study develops a richly grounded framework for considering what types of knowledge flow from incumbents to startups and what influence of different types of knowledge have on the performance of startups over time. Japanese girlfriend visiting me in Canada - questions at border control? Those that did not could register as a dye firm but in name only. For this purpose, we juxtaposed and compared the two cases in every group to note their similarities and differences. The numerous studies on knowledge inheritance and knowledge spillover from incumbents typically illustrate the vehicles and mechanisms through which knowledge generated within established firms is transmitted and enables startups to exploit opportunities using the knowledge (Acs et al., Reference Acs, Audretsch and Lehmann2013; Audretsch & Belitski, Reference Audretsch and Belitski2013; Di Lorenzo & van de Vrande, Reference Di Lorenzo and van de Vrande2019; Feldman et al., Reference Feldman, Ozcan and Reichstein2019; Gambardella, Ganco, & Honor, Reference Gambardella, Ganco and Honor2015). At that time, a Chinese dye startup that met the low threshold requirements of functional effectiveness could achieve enough sales, survive, and even grow regardless of production scale, product quality, and cost structure. Now, can you direct me to what the. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The International Association for Chinese Management Research. These startups, without exception, started businesses by making technologically mature products using product formulas and manufacturing procedures shared by incumbent employees. For example, when SB chose to focus on Reactive Blue 19 in 1989, as mentioned above, there existed two competing technical trajectories for this dye the conventional and widely applied Early Esterification versus the new and rarely implemented Late Esterification. Better way to check if an element only exists in one array. You might need some supervision at the front end, or some correction/editing/feedback at the back end, but you could bear the main burden of the task. Our sampling was thus guided by the goal to choose cases that can help to gain a full picture of concrete incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows following a replication logic, to maximize understandings of whether the variance in the types of knowledge passed into startups translate into the variance in performance following a comparison logic, and to eliminate potential confusing effects of other influential factors on startup performance. This can be seen from a comparison of early performance between SB and FB, both established in 19851986. Instead, the strategic knowledge passed from incumbents helps startups get positioned to adapt, utilize, and develop functional knowledge including technologies based on strategic understandings of where the industry is headed. Finally, industrial settings that have been introduced in prior studies are within a limited range of emerging high-tech industries or technologically complex industries, whereas traditional or technologically mature industries are largely missing from the discussion. #:@$!ZsH\0=i1=b9'GU!{+C;iv aFv9Dbx.~>94Aaur}hlX9 Enlightened by a manager at the Shanghai No.9 Dyestuff Factory and three engineers from Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd., he quickly realized the need to create a formal R&D department after startup foundation. In more market-type conditions prevalent in most advanced economies, there are several vehicles to ship knowledge from incumbents to startups. Many studies show receiving knowledge from incumbent firms fosters the formation of startups (Adams et al., Reference Adams, Fontana and Malerba2016; Gambardella et al., Reference Gambardella, Ganco and Honor2015; Knoben, Ponds, & Van Oort, Reference Knoben, Ponds and Van Oort2011; Yeganegi, Laplume, Dass, & Huynh, Reference Yeganegi, Laplume, Dass and Huynh2016) and improves the probability of their survival (Agarwal et al., Reference Agarwal, Echambadi, Franco and Sarkar2004; Furlan, Reference Furlan2016; Muendler et al., Reference Muendler, Rauch and Tocoian2012; Phillips, Reference Phillips2002). It includes in-depth knowledge in one or several areas related to the processes and model in question. Although no crisis seemed to be looming, two senior managers at Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd. separately suggested that SB quit producing other dyes and focus on Reactive Blue 19, which alone would constitute a large market segment because of its diverse uses (I.28, 34, 42). It encouraged the initiation of organized in-house R&D and fueled the introduction of new products. It simply means that the company is looking for someone that has basic to intermediate knowledge and ability in a particular area. As its founder said, A workshop director of the Shanghai No.10 Dyestuff Factory gave us a copy of The Procedure to Make Sulfur Black, which was published internally by his factory. English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. All remaining errors remain our own. The founders were also poorly financed initially, and every founder collected only limited funds from family and/or friends. This caused an immediate nationwide oversupply and SOEs responded by cutting prices 5%10%. You should if you are interested in knowing how to close knowledge-based performance gaps in any area of life. This allowed the startup to boost its market share in the forthcoming recession with a higher price/performance ratio. In this setting, startups that enter early and accumulate technical knowledge may have a strong advantage over latecomer startups that would find it extremely difficult to catch up. Functional knowledge helps professionals understand how a company operates and what are the standard business processes. One of the two FA workers who got to know the manufacturing procedure first noted, The most challenging part was how to start production using our primitive equipment. The memorandum, which becomes effective on August 31, 2015, aims to provide guidance on how USCIS adjudicates such petitions. 2. As the General R&D Manager who joined SA in 1993 the year SA started mass production of disperse dyes recalled: My old boss [the cofounder] told me that, thanks to the advice from employees at Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd., the firm had a clear road map for expansion early in the 1980s. We take several measures to mitigate potential maturation and subjective biases of interviewees, which meanwhile increase research validity and reliability (Lincoln & Guba, Reference Lincoln and Guba1985). Interviewees also highlighted the flow of this type of knowledge into six cases during foundation, when dye-related products including key intermediates and some dye production equipment were still purchased and sold according to government plans in the 1980s (I.1; T.5). Even fewer take into account traditional domains such as the tire (Buenstorf & Klepper, Reference Buenstorf and Klepper2009) and laser (Klepper & Sleeper, Reference Klepper and Sleeper2005) industries. <> We are working very hard to keep the quality of the tutorials available here to be the best in their class. {;Ix#(0t:l4[[:/~QC*?%mkmYp)ME W,"om\0iz9riR#md}80 u"?eCbQI*c'3|iUS[eqE8W]8[+V-}P$ As a scrum master, how do I get everyone to take deadlines seriously? A competency is not limited to cognitive elements (involving the use of theory, concepts, or tacit knowledge); it also encompasses functional aspects (involving technical skills) as well as It lays down the function to perform. Otherwise, we would lack the minimum inputs to start a dye business and would always remain nascent entrepreneurs (I.8, similar points by I.22, 42, 52, 53, 67). As reviewed above, existing literature on knowledge-inheriting spinoffs and knowledge spillover entrepreneurship rarely assesses the incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows per se but instead uses proxies such as the identity of knowledge holders and the longevity of incumbents (Andersson & Klepper, Reference Andersson and Klepper2013; Dahl & Reichstein, Reference Dahl and Reichstein2007; Eriksson & Kuhn, Reference Eriksson and Kuhn2006; Srensen & Phillips, Reference Srensen and Phillips2011). Absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levinthal, Reference Cohen and Levinthal1989) plays a critical role in determining whether and how much a startup can recognize the value of external knowledge, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends. We got to know under which conditions we should make the temperature a bit lower than that explicated in the standard instructions (I.49, 50). License No license the key to this is how people acquire and categorise data often functioning knowledge. Since we focus on a not-so-recent sample of firms to look beyond the survival of startups and to facilitate the collection of formerly sensitive or even confidential information, this study may be subject to retrospect sensemaking (Eisenhardt & Graebner, Reference Eisenhardt and Graebner2007). We undertook additional interviews in 2017 to establish with even greater accuracy the early performance of our six cases. Meanwhile, this trajectory also had a disadvantage. Knowledge: cognitive or mental abilities used to retain and process information. Proficiency implies a higher theoretical understanding than working knowledge. Two former SB employees said, It was not until 1993 [the eighth year of SB's existence] that we saw the good effects of early strategic investments to concentrate on the production of Reactive Blue 19. First, the relative richness of initial strategic knowledge received did not set a startup apart until strategic moves equipped the firm with idiosyncratic characteristics (e.g., costs significantly lower than average competitors), especially when the industry flourished in the early-to-middle 1980s. But there were still differences after we helped to make the techniques more adapted to the materials and equipment that SB had. SA should attempt to create relationships with established distributors of good reputation, rather than trying to sell all the products directly (I.40). The cofounder and managers of SB received the above knowledge as early as 1988 (the third year after SB's foundation) and discussed with incumbent employees a potential switch to the Late Esterification trajectory many times. Where does the idea of selling dragon parts come from? Initially, the nationwide dye shortage of the early 1980s led to profitability for a large number of startups. Many other startups were fatally trapped by poorly selected early technical trajectories given the high costs of shifting to other trajectories. 20AGL005). In this way, we ensured that what we coded as knowledge flows reflected a collective understanding independent of individual bias or possible memory distortion. How did muzzle-loaded rifled artillery solve the problems of the hand-held rifle? Each session was recorded whenever possible, and detailed notes were taken for every interview. (More detailed evidence about this case is in Supplementary Appendix 3. You'd get points for being exposed to it vs. a candidate who had never seen it before, but I'd keep it at that level on my resume. A common example is someone saying that they have a working knowledge of the spreadsheet software, Microsoft Excel. A good rule of thumb when youre thinking about whether or not you have a good working knowledge of something is whether or not you would feel comfortable completing some basic exercises in that area as a part of a job interview process. (Reference Gilbert, McDougall and Audretsch2008) collect only startup growth through two years after IPO. (Reference Wennberg, Wiklund and Wright2011). It simply means that you have some experience in that field in your past. /Group <> As the founder and a former employee said, It took much longer to train workshop supervisors than ordinary workers. But it would take years to accomplish the change. The fewer the other sources of knowledge, the more likely incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows would expose effects. Job candidates may list that they have a working knowledge of a particular technology. From this date forward, the private sector has been officially endorsed by the central government. With no formal hypotheses developed a priori, our analysis followed an established process of inductive theory building (Strauss & Corbin, Reference Strauss and Corbin1998). Abstracting these eight types of knowledge into two general categories of functional knowledge and strategic knowledge, we find the reception of strategic (not functional) knowledge shapes the long-term competitiveness of surviving startups. But other startups could gradually develop reliable suppliers of their own and catch up with us as long as they could find enough materials to stay in business through the early years. People often think of functional knowledge as the same Assisted by these incumbent employees, SA quickly understood the agency model widely used in the industry, developed distributors of their own, and marketed to large clients through their own agents (I.40). Working knowledge is notion oriented towards applications whereas basic knowledge is oriented towards theory. <> Having experience in a particular area doesnt necessarily mean that you will be immediately able to come in and execute basic to intermediate tasks in that particular working area. All six cases received this knowledge from incumbent firm employees during their foundation. Here are some common levels of compentency required for job applications: In some business environments, working knowledge will not suffice, and you will be asked to be proficient to get hired. Find The Perfect Job: 2,430,571 Jobs Are Available on Salarship. What about being able to fluently code in something using reference materials? Working knowledge demonstrates a practical application of a project. Working Knowledge: 1.A knowledge of how to make something work without any deeper understanding of why it works, or of how to fix it if it breaks. Other phrases to say Working Knowledge? We refer to these firms (including the six cases in this study) also as privately owned. The founders recalled they casually introduced profitable dyes for which manufacturing technologies or distribution channels were available (I.22, 52, 53, 67), which is to say they missed the opportunity to penetrate the most promising dye segments as early as possible. Better would be to say you have a "working knowledge" of car engines. No Subject Society & Social Sciences Administrative Title Declarative Vs. Functional Knowledge H5P ID 12264 Last Update 1 year ago Created 03 Nov 2020 License No license type has been selected. Table 3. Their founders and executives were either ignorant of the value of having a well-structured product portfolio to facilitate cost reduction (MA and FA) or they realized the importance but did not have sufficient knowledge themselves to make the right choice (MB and FB). Only such forward-looking studies, where one would follow firms in real time without knowing the end result, would convince skeptics to accept our causal conjecture that the possession of strategic knowledge improves long-term performance. Our findings show that the performance implications of initial knowledge flows from incumbents hinge on the type of knowledge, contributing to a more explicit explanation of how incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows affect entrepreneurial performance. But, what is the difference between working knowledge and proficiency? Finally, roughly 100 short follow-up phone calls were made for information verification. For anyone pursuing a career in corporate finance, it can be important to include your level of language fluency on your resume and job When performance is measured by the number of employees in the third or fourth year after their foundation, the three firms were still quite close in terms of employment size as shown in Table 1 (6070 full-time employees). The founder of FB said, Since we could use raw materials of relatively lower purity [to make cationic dyes], we had a bit [of an] advantage over some cationic dye makers in terms of finding and securing qualified suppliers. In particular, the roles of contextual factors such as local institutions and endogenous factors such as incumbent's response in the knowledge transfer process deserve attention. Only a few scholars perform analysis at a sectorally aggregated level without regard to specific industries (Dahl & Sorenson, Reference Dahl and Sorenson2013; Gambardella et al., Reference Gambardella, Ganco and Honor2015; Minola et al., Reference Minola, Hahn and Cassia2021; Santarelli & Tran, Reference Santarelli and Tran2012; Yeganegi et al., Reference Yeganegi, Laplume, Dass and Huynh2016). A key task for future research is to confirm the robustness of this link. } Startup founders had to be very careful in deciding what equipment to get and how, meaning that many favorable deals were initiated and facilitated thanks to information from incumbent employees. The inconsistency may stem from the different types of knowledge or the different time periods considered, while the sample startups in Wennberg et al. While our overall analysis involved iteration between the data and emerging theoretical categories, it can be generally divided into three stages. We distinguished success from marginal survival by showing that successful firms had much higher sales (market share and growth) and employment (size and growth) as shown in Table 1. As its founder said, A 0.5-ton reactive vessel was indispensable to make Resin CPU [the first product of SA]. Nevertheless, they were eventually convinced by two managers at Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd., who both accentuated that clients preference would change as long as you can keep providing the greenish dyes cheaper (I.34). Functional knowledge is the understanding of a specific function, like management or human resources. People often think of functional knowledge as the same as domain knowledge, and they are similar. Functional knowledge differs from domain knowledge, however, in that it is still fairly general. It is not required to have a deep theoretical understanding of how it works under the hood to have a working knowledge. Later startups would face strong competition not only from incumbents but also from earlier startups who are ahead in the learning curve and can more readily keep up with a fast-moving technological frontier. Their production was frequently discontinued (I.48, 56). Nor did I have time or capabilities to do the search. The only five exceptions thus far are studies by Gifford, Buenstorf, Ljungberg, McKelvey, and Zaring (Reference Gifford, Buenstorf, Ljungberg, McKelvey and Zaring2021), Basu et al. Significance of an Educational Game in Teaching ERIC. Evidence from a linked employeremployee panel, Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook, The relationship between origin and performance of innovative start-ups: The role of technological knowledge at founding, Organizational improvisation and organizational memory, Employee spinoffs and other entrants: Stylized facts from Brazil, Qualitative research and evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice, A genealogical approach to organizational life chances: The parent-progeny transfer among Silicon Valley law firms, 19461996, Localized competition in the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, Comparing alliance network structure across industries: Observations and explanations, The parent's legacy: Firm founders and technological choice, Growth of incumbent firms entrepreneurship in Vietnam, Constructing markets and shaping boundaries: Entrepreneurial agency in nascent fields, Bureaucracy and entrepreneurship: Workplace effects on entrepreneurial entry, Competence and commitment: Employer size and entrepreneurial endurance, Liquidity events and the geographic distribution of entrepreneurial activity, Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm, The process of knowledge transfer: A diachronic analysis of stickiness, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Replication and theory development in organizational science: A critical realist perspective, Don't leave me this way! Drivers of parental hostility and employee spin-offs performance, The effectiveness of university knowledge spillovers: Performance differences between university spinoffs and corporate spinoffs, Competitive implications of interfirm mobility, Organizational forms and multi-population dynamics: Economic transition in China, Where do spinouts come from? Does integrating PDOS give total charge of a system? Second, the relative value of strategic knowledge would be even more revealing in other contexts where private entrepreneurship is endowed with stronger institutional support and a more developed technology and labor market than was present in 1980s China. "I have a functional understanding of Other Comparisons: What's the difference? After synthesized individual case histories had been developed, we employed the standard two-cycle coding techniques to extract the precise types and categories of knowledge passed from incumbent firms to startups during the founding period of startup. As long as you can use that tool on a daily basis, even if you don't know how to do everything with that tool or even the 'best practices' of using that tool, you can say you Take SA for example: it was able to obtain necessary equipment to start production only with the assistance of incumbent employees. Third, we recommend that future research be conducted into the dynamic process of knowledge transfer between incumbents and startups, as well as the impacting factors such as institutional changes over the process. That doesn't seem to describe you. 3 0 obj Third, private startups were the largest beneficiary in the upheaval of this industry, even while still exhibiting significant variation in performance by the 2000s. Business Process knowledge is conventionally acquired through experience of performing transactional or knowledge-based work. Private Chinese synthetic-dye startups in the 1980s relied heavily on full-time employees from incumbents, mostly state-owned enterprises (SOEs), for initial knowledge. What does the term "Flexible work ethics" on a job ad mean? However, a startup that received less (albeit enough to meet the basic requirement to stay in business) of this knowledge initially could enhance and extend its base of functional knowledge through learning by doing. Once the categorization of incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows was completed, we sorted the six cases into three groups: failure, marginal survival, and success as detailed above. Is it appropriate to ignore emails from a student asking obvious questions? This effect is probably idiosyncratic to mature technologies. However, I have never done any coding of my own in the language so I do not feel like I could do any useful work with my assembly knowledge. Although many startups exploiting the knowledge of incumbent firms invoke technologies and relevant managerial skills, we find that some startups explicitly receive strategic knowledge from incumbents. Neither did they run significant risks by divulging knowledge, because intellectual property rights (IPR) were not effectively enforced, and their salaries were not performance-based at the time. Such a sample would allow for replication logic in establishing the reality of what knowledge actually flows from incumbents to startups and enhance the validity of our findings by cross-case checking (Eisenhardt, Reference Eisenhardt1989). No. Programming languages, especially those Turing complete general-purpose languages, have huge feature sets. Its very hard to know all the thing In 2008, both high-performing cases occupied a market share of over 30% in terms of sales volume in at least one of the dye segments and had hired more than 1,000 employees, whereas the two moderate survivors had a much lower and decreasing share in all of the segments and hired fewer than 500 employees (see Table 1 for an overview of the key features of the six firms). What does "Copy" means in a job description? Third, this knowledge received set the tone for MA's subsequent R&D direction. In addition to functional knowledge, two longer-term successful cases received also three types of strategic knowledge from incumbents whereas the four cases that languished or failed in the long term did not receive any (see Table 5). This makes it easier to balance accounts, give change, manage inventory and solve real-world problems with "I do not feel like I could do any useful work with my assembly knowledge." Created 03 Nov 2020. In contrast to that, Working knowledge only requires that you are able to perform at the expected tasks succesfully. Comparatively, we encountered several other new firms founded during the same period, which also aimed to launch vat dyes of high procedure complexity as MB. We discover eight types of knowledge that flow from incumbents to new firms during the foundation of startups. 1. Why does the USA not have a constitutional court? For example, several interviewees confirmed that they divulged market information to startups which enabled the startups to approach new clients before their own incumbent firms a fact that they would not have admitted in the 1990s when they had not yet retired and their former employers were still active in business. Should teachers encourage good students to help weaker ones? The effects of spatial agglomeration, Spinoffs and their endowments: Beyond knowledge inheritance theory, Using what you know: Patented knowledge in incumbent firms and employee entrepreneurship, The emergence of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, Variety in founder experience and the performance of knowledge-intensive innovative firms, Clusters, knowledge spillovers and new venture performance: An empirical examination, Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm, The development and application of a qualitative approach to researching the marketing networks of small firm entrepreneurs, Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Regional institutions, ownership transformation, and migration of industrial leadership in China: The case of the Chinese synthetic dye industry, 19782008, Employee startups in high-tech industries, The capabilities of new firms and the evolution of the US automobile industry, Disagreements and intra-industry spinoffs, Employment from new firm formation in the Netherlands: Agglomeration economies and the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, Transnational transfer of strategic organizational practices: A contextual perspective, Regional determinants of ICT new firm formation, Is inter-firm labor mobility a channel of knowledge spillovers? Without working knowledge in X, I would expect to have to give you some sort of training before you could carry out tasks to do with X. These supervisors should know well not only about our products and our workers but also about how to coordinate production and material storage, how to eliminate waste, how to arrange production schedules of different dyes and so on. We adopted the theoretical sampling approach (Glaser & Strauss, Reference Glaser, Strauss and Denzin2017) involving deliberate selection of cases that provide rich information on incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows the focal unit of our analysis. Why does the distance from light to subject affect exposure (inverse square law) while from subject to lens does not? In fact, sulfur dyes remain the only dye segment that is to this day led by SOEs that were all established before 1978. Functional Skills Business Process knowledge is conventionally acquired through experience of performing transactional or knowledge-based work. Entrepreneurial performance and innovation in the medical device industry, Innovation and learning: The two faces of R&D, Initial human and financial capital as predictors of new venture performance, Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, Beyond answers: Dimensions of the advice network, Are you experienced? This consequentially leads to rapid change in traditional operational job content and makes learning them a tedious job. Eventually, we created a framework that includes eight types of knowledge, which in turn can be theoretically aggregated into two broad categories (see Table 2). Since the differences in technical trajectories could not be easily discerned from final products, the startup founders and employees who were all poorly educated in chemistry were either unaware of other technical trajectories or did not understand the respective strategic and economic values of various technical trajectories when deciding which one was suitable. In particular, when the Chinese dye market turned down sharply in 19881989, most Chinese dye firms tried to weather the unfavorable change by introducing more low-volume products. "Working Knowledge" reflects a low-level competency in an area - you will be expected to work with the tool, but not necessarily to be an expert in that tool. Yet, even as these studies have established a positive relationship between incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows and new firm superiority, they provide little explicit evidence of actual knowledge flows, especially a full view of the knowledge flows per se that go into startups and their potentially distinct effects. The founder admitted, I did not understand the difficulty and importance of establishing a complete lab for a dye firm, let alone what facilities and human resources composed a minimum R&D system (I.22). As adjectives the difference between working and functional is that working is that is or are functioning while functional is in good working order. Most often, you would put the term working knowledge in parentheses after the relevant skill. You do not have "working knowledge" of assembly. Second, the diverse background of interviewees provides a rich range of perspectives on events at different times so that the eventual accounts we synthesized would not suffer from distorted accounts given by any particular respondents. You wrote basically what I'd write if I wrote an answer. (More detailed evidence about this case is in Supplementary Appendix 3.). SA owes its expansion decisions largely to several informants from Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd. As one of these incumbent employees recalled, in the early 1980s they counseled SA that it was not worth chasing the latest or the most advanced products since the firm's limited funds would be exhausted by intensive R&D on too many advanced products before it could put any into mass production or extract revenues from any (I.21). Later on, the startup utilized information from incumbent firms to identify potential customers, approach customers, and close sales. QGIS expression not working in categorized symbology. Independent of material rewards, these SOE employees were motivated to share knowledge by the desire for self-realization and to enhance their reputation in their local family and village circles. [4] We obtained a copy of the book and had a German dye chemist confirm that the instructions in it are very helpful for learning to make dyes. For example, Wennberg et al. The Late Esterification trajectory was relatively new and immature at that time. This enabled SA and SB to see what the priority of investments should be an economy of scale, what products and technical trajectories were suitable for large-scale production, as well as the proper timing and rhythm of expansion. Later on, at the introduction of two employees at Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd., SA found and bought some well-maintained old equipment lying idle in a branch [of Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd.], which was more than enough and qualified to make acceptable products at an incredibly low price (I.21). SB followed the advice, withdrawing from all products other than Reactive Blue 19[Footnote 5] and related intermediates after 1989 (the fourth year after its foundation). [2] Many of the Zhejiang-based private dye firms of the 1980s were under the de facto control of private owners but guised as collectively owned enterprises to lower the potential political and economic risks. %PDF-1.4 This gave SB sufficient time to expand the production of Reactive Blue 19, to start in-house manufacturing of intermediates for further cost reduction, and to consolidate its position as the globally dominant supplier of Reactive Blue 19 and related intermediates. It allows us to track the chronological implications (Fraenkel & Wallen, Reference Fraenkel and Wallen1996; Santos & Eisenhardt, Reference Santos and Eisenhardt2009) of incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows during the founding period of startups, a period we define as the first four years of a startup given that over 60% of startups survive no more than five years (Kirchhoff, Reference Kirchhoff1994). These startups initial techniques were also quite identical. @Asmageddon, People always code with "reference material" like Stackoverflow and code manuals / wiki. Table 5. As a result, the Late Esterification trajectory could reduce significantly the manufacturing costs of Reactive Blue 19 and the client's dyeing costs. This study aims to help fill this gap by answering two questions: (1) What types of knowledge flow into startups from incumbent firms during the founding period of startups? It is imperative to rule out two alternative explanations for entrepreneurial superiority. For example, - how to copy an array using javascript in a declarative way. As this speculation originates from new, technology-intensive industries, and as we find evidence in a different context a technologically mature industry our conclusions regarding the beneficial role of strategic knowledge for longer-term success appear broadly generalizable. The startups sampled received the know-how and valuable contacts concerning raw material provision and, as a result, ensured supply of intermediates shortly after foundation. Data show the thriving cases in the long run did not necessarily outperform other cases during their founding years. Within this article, well be unpacking what the term working knowledge means in a professional context (on a resume or job posting) and share some examples of how its used. Second, unlike SA and SB, which set a proper schedule for new product introduction to balance scaling-up and resource constraints, these startups did not sequence and integrate product launches at different time points; rather, they focused on isolated trends in the present. All of these processes share some common logics and fundamentals that remain true and valid for all domains, and this section is about understanding those fundamentals and standard business processes. SA was able to make the first move and secure this new client who did not intend to contact non-SOE suppliers (I.43, 44; R.8). By comparison, strategic knowledge received in the founding period drives a startup's long-term success although it does not necessarily facilitate a firm's immediate survival. Published online by Cambridge University Press: endobj functional knowledge is any piece of stored information that can be adapted and applied to different circumstances. the key to this is how people acquire and categorise data often referred to as schema by cognitivst learning theory. As one early SB manager described, We were running out of supply and sent purchasing agents everywhere to search for H-acid. Levels of Language Proficiency. At best, you might be viewed as an "advanced beginner" or potential trainee. The success of these R&D activities hinged more upon managerial than innovative capabilities. The FB founder said, the employees from the Shanghai No.3 Dyestuff Factory told us how to make this dye, but did not lead me to think about other technical trajectories or tell me other trajectories (I.53). Most importantly, we believe our findings on the importance of strategic knowledge for the long-term success of startups are broadly generalizable. Hebrews 1:3 What is the Relationship Between Jesus and The Word of His Power? In sum, while incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows are accepted as a crucial driver of startup creation and survival, a more complete and detailed picture of what knowledge actually flows and how the knowledge impacts the receiving startups would be a valuable addition to the literature. For example, several outsiders noted that one senior engineer from the Shanghai No.8 Dyestuff Factory brought very impactful knowledge to SB in the 1980s. This lends support for our key finding that the reception of strategic knowledge from incumbent firms during a startup's foundation plays a pivotal role in determining long-term success as compared to startups that performed well in the short and medium terms. A case in In the first cycle of coding, we compared and categorized the materials in regard to the knowledge that flowed. Society & Social Sciences. Functional competencies are specific to a specific department or type of job. The role of technology relatedness and institutional context, Categorization of knowledge transferred from incumbent firms to sampled startups during their foundation, Knowledge transferred from incumbent firms during startup foundation and the startup's long-term performance, Functional knowledge transferred from incumbent firms to sampled startups during their foundation, Strategic knowledge transferred from incumbent firms to sampled startups during their foundation, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. As incumbent employees expected, Chinese dyeing firms came to favor the greenish shade of inexpensive Reactive Blue 19 and this shade was accepted as the new standard by the late 1990s. For example, we dropped one respondent's descriptions of how MB launched new products in its early years because the sequence of product introduction differed significantly from what was listed in MB's internal records. Second, MA also received codified knowledge a book that detailed the formulas and prevailing technical trajectories of all synthetic dyes made in China. This was very significant since we had to compete by offering cheaper dyes than SOEs (I.53; P.2). Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. This type of knowledge is found to be received by both longer-term high-performing cases in the form of simple heuristics. Being Fired: Whats the Difference? These materials helped to reduce retrospective bias in at least two ways. These categories are often referred to as KSAs. H5P ID 12264. Functional knowledge is the knowledge that can be included in different domains. stream Log in. Or a job posting may say that a working knowledge of a particular subject matter is required. Five types of functional knowledge are found to flow from incumbents to startups. After purposely scaling up its production of Disperse Black 300, which consumed lentine in large amounts, and while extending its business to include several other dyes (e.g., a disperse purple) that shared this intermediate, SA's annual lentine consumption went beyond the preset threshold amount of 2,000 tons in 2002. Existing studies on incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows mainly relate to the positive effects of this phenomenon with respect to the formation and survival of startups but not much as to other performance indicators. Methods to advance working knowledge require forming the right connections and mentoring under experts. Receiving technical knowledge one type of functional knowledge during the founding period is necessary for startups short-term survival but insufficient for long-term success. @Zibbobz what enderland said. If you told me you had working knowledge of X, I would expect that I could assign you tasks to do with X and you could carry them out. These insights enabled a startup to intentionally avoid being distracted by ephemeral profitability in the period of exuberance and to establish a product mix of dyes and key intermediates that fit with a low-cost/high-volume strategy. "I hope I enjoy myself very much" is this correct? For each focal firm, we interviewed founders (all were still owners or directors in the surviving cases) and present managerial/R&D personnel to ensure within-firm accuracy. 4 0 obj Benefiting from the knowledge received, SA was the first among all Chinese township enterprises to produce disperse dyes. How many transistors at minimum do you need to build a general-purpose computer? Although our research design does not fully eliminate the effects of such factors, it is important to emphasize that we control for many of such potential confounding variables i.e., finance, innovation, startup experiences, industry-specific experiences, and senior management experiences by holding them as equal as possible across the six cases in the sampling process. Important questions that emerge in the context of this literature are what knowledge (aside from technical knowledge) actually flows from incumbents to startups and relative contributions of different knowledge to startups. Dan is the founder of Best Fit Work and is a business professional with over 10 years of experience. Its not uncommon to have to complete some basic tasks to prove your skills in a job interview process. Strategic knowledge transferred from incumbent firms to sampled startups during their foundation. Some (Chatterji, Reference Chatterji2009; Klepper, Reference Klepper2001) have even challenged the conventional conjecture that technical knowledge plays a critical role in startup performance, a contention that supports our call for a more comprehensive consideration of the elements of incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows. (More detailed evidence about this case is in Supplementary Appendix 3. Comparatively, our factory [the Shanghai No.3 Dyestuff Factory] formally collaborated with a collectively-owned firm in Jiangsu to produce cationic dyes. Operational Competencies are specific to each process the person is supposed to be a part of or execute. Did neanderthals need vitamin C from the diet? The firm erected an R&D department in 1992 the sixth year after its foundation once China's policies changed to enable the hiring of R&D personnel from the open market. As startups conducting technology-intensive businesses tend to source more technical knowledge from incumbent firms (Chatterji, Reference Chatterji2009), and their fates hinge more on technical innovativeness (Dencker, Gruber, & Shah, Reference Dencker, Gruber and Shah2009), the current literature may be skewed toward overstating the effects of technical knowledge passed from incumbents while undervaluing other knowledge (Chatterji, Reference Chatterji2009; Feldman, Ozcan, & Reichstein, Reference Feldman, Ozcan and Reichstein2019). It was the same for Direct Black EX [another early product of MA] (I.22). That might include understanding how car engines function, but if you wanted to make that clear this is not the sentence to use. You don't actually expect people to rote-memorize everything do you? Second, we made great use of primary materials to make sure the evidence chain was not built on the maturation effect. 7 0 obj Attitudes: feelings or emotional about someone or something. By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. RV[L**Q/zH|~ iq)I.tP&Mjg~&^7"_>N_a~}aWC5&s6&=Nc`I\r[MHjyAs''ryHb[xd@wp#lfnyZ OW'`vL%n:cI?o6Kp12cK"#nx9g]kdY3~~-2m[2-;&F]F/7O~Cx5@Qb!s*=`~>$Hoo. If you like our efforts please do help us by recommending this website to your friends so that we can keep this knowledge base accessible to all for free. Phrases for Working Knowledge (alternative phrases for Working Knowledge). Functional knowledge is the understanding of a specific function, like management or human resources. (2) FB was much smaller than the high-performing cases in 1994 (ten years after FB's foundation). PSE Advent Calendar 2022 (Day 11): The other side of Christmas. This time period is long enough to demonstrate the founder's intention to grow, which would affect a startup's development (Delmar & Johan, Reference Delmar and Johan2008). He has been a hiring and people manager on multiple occasions, and has also gone through the hiring process himself at a variety of different companies. Only when the knowledge received from incumbent firms was referred to as an important contributing factor would we follow up with questions regarding what types of knowledge were passed and what was the influence of this knowledge on the startup. That might include understanding how How to tell my possible employer about a technical showstopper in performing a task. Large SOEs found little motivation to make a planned amount of this dye and contracted out production. The startup became the largest disperse dye manufacturer in terms of output volume in 1998 and the largest dye firm in 2005, but its primary products remained disperse dyes and related chemicals, just as suggested by the employees at Shanghai Dyestuff Co., Ltd. thirty years before. Salarship.com is the sole proprietorship of. Another example is FA. Otherwise, we had to wait god knows how long to get the quota and equipment. Working knowledge is the ability to get the work done successfully, in time, and without training/assistance from your colleagues. These phrases align with similar "types" of knowledge; such as book smarts, intelligent on paper, lab smart. In addition, it would enable intra-group replication and inter-group comparison, which can help to corroborate whether the cases of the same group received similar types of knowledge from incumbent firms and whether the cases of different groups differed in the knowledge received. As a developer you might need to work on various domains but the technology will be similar. To ensure that we could distinguish startup success from real failure, we expended considerable effort finding two failed cases in addition to finding really successful firms. In most cases, early exposure to a broad scope of advanced technical knowledge from incumbents would help an early startup recognize new high-potential technological opportunities, search externally for related technologies, create or recombine impactful technologies (Basu et al., Reference Basu, Sahaym, Howard and Boeker2015), and pioneer in unexpected shifts of favorable products. Hostname: page-component-5959bf8d4d-dtbwl But, what level of competency does working knowledge describe? In the interest of achieving a more systematic understanding of knowledge passed from incumbents to startups, our inquiry begins with a phenomenon rather than any extant theory, allowing us the opportunity to produce an inductive categorization of knowledge. As a consequence, these four new ventures ran into trouble when large-scale production and low prices became a competitive requirement in the post-1990 market. Meanwhile, technologies of dye products introduced by Chinese startups were all mature and readily copied or applied without much additional R&D effort (I.14). As SA tried to sell to more customers from 1981 to 1982, the sales team discovered the kickback approach that had worked well for small township enterprises did not perform well with large collectively owned and SOEs. Would it be possible, given current technology, ten years, and an infinite amount of money, to construct a 7,000 foot (2200 meter) aircraft carrier? In sum, the utility of incumbent-to-startup flows of technical knowledge during a startup's foundation is conditional on the rate of technological change. SOEs knew it but did not implement it. However, it is important to note that our key finding regarding the central and lasting role of incumbent-to-startup flows of strategic knowledge during foundation in the long run is broadly generalizable. Prominent categorizations of knowledge tacit versus explicit (Grant, Reference Grant1996) and procedural versus declarative (Moorman & Miner, Reference Moorman and Miner1998) differentiate knowledge in an abstract way. It occasionally enhanced manufacturing capacities of the dyes that sold well and were technically feasible (I.22) and frequently withdrew from ongoing expansion projects to launch new products with higher profit margins. First, while our study corroborates prior research showing that incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows matter for the success of startups, it extends the empirical foundation of this finding by replicating it in a underexamined industrial context a technologically mature industry (Tsang & Kwan, Reference Tsang and Kwan1999). We contribute to the knowledge inheritance theory and knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship research by clarifying the type of knowledge is central to understanding the utility of incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows. When the formerly suppressed domestic demand for dyes was suddenly released by the economic reform of 1978, hundreds of private startups emerged throughout the next decade. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. This way, respondents would not be induced to make sense of the knowledge flows. Why does my stock Samsung Galaxy phone/tablet lack some features compared to other Samsung Galaxy models? Dan writes to share content, tools, and resources to help people discover and thrive in their own best fit work. SA's continual improvement and expansion of dispersant manufacturing in the middle 1980s, as well as its sequence of product introduction in the early 1990s, once it started to make disperse dyes, mirrored the large-scale, low-cost strategy principles of scaling up and reducing the costs of the highest-volume dyes (I.2, 3, 4). These outsiders advised that Disperse Blue 2BLN and Disperse Black 300 the two most abundantly consumed disperse dyes would be a very good starting point to enter the segment of disperse dyes when SA could afford the move. If information on one event collected from an interviewee was very consistent with evidence in documents, the other information and remarks on this event from the same interviewee, even if not covered by documents, could be taken as credible. While some startups receiving knowledge confront hostility from incumbents and others get supported (Vaznyte, Andries, & Demeulemeester, Reference Vaznyte, Andries and Demeulemeester2021), the impact of incumbent reactions on the process of incumbent-startup knowledge, as well as how the impact may vary across the type of knowledge and over different time periods, also warrants research. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? Table 4. Is this an at-all realistic configuration for a DHC-2 Beaver? (Reference Wennberg, Wiklund and Wright2011) find the commercial knowledge passed from incumbents raises the sales growth rate of spinoffs, whereas Gilbert et al. Hence, we narrowed our focus to incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows, tracking what knowledge underpinned a startup's key moves, whether the knowledge came from incumbent firms, and how the knowledge was put into use and what effect it had. This suggests the focus on technical knowledge or even functional knowledge alone is too limited and a broader and more nuanced exploration of incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows is appropriate. View all Google Scholar citations Following these principles, a startup could steadfastly consolidate a cost advantage and prepare to beat its competitors in a price war. Contrary to our expectations based on existing literature, the strategic knowledge flowing from incumbents to startups in their founding years a category of knowledge underexamined in prior studies is of paramount importance for startups as they seek to create a sustained advantage in a technologically mature industry, although this knowledge does less for firms facing immediate survival challenges in the founding period. These remarks were confirmed by interviews with incumbent engineers (I.5, 13). Our typology of different types of knowledge and their effects was induced from a grounded analysis of the technically mature synthetic-dye industry, but investigations in other contexts might reveal more types of knowledge and similar or different performance effects over time. This was not easy in the 1980s. For instance, startup exits include M&A and IPOs that represent success rather than failure. Today I went into work. As always, I found my crew and said hello to them. They were all talking, and I decided to stay and listen. They asked me w As a senior level engineer (28 years experience) I've sat in on many interviews; generally when we ask a candidate about "working knowledge" in, for example, a programming language, we want to know if he/she can sit down and write functional program in that language. It is a reasonable inference that the firm was at most selling stock if it was still operational in 1996. Once the dye shortage ended in 19881989 and the market was saturated, price became the compelling selling point. (Reference Gilbert, McDougall and Audretsch2008), and Wennberg et al. Intra-group analysis centered on uncovering precisely what types of knowledge each group received from incumbent firms during foundation. 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