Since the publication of Oliver Williamson's "Economic Institutions of Capitalism" in 1985, new institutional economics approaches have increasingly been used to understand strategic challenges. "Economic Institutions of Strategy" (EIS) offers an interconnected set of papers that reviews and extends the economic institutional approach to business and corporate strategy bringing together the disparate strands of new institutional economics-based strategy research in a single comprehensive source. The contributors to this volume focus on new institutional economics' insights regarding diversification, alliances, franchising, geographic location, innovation, and other strategic choices. Each contributor uses either a single influential article - with excerpts reprinted - or a survey of the literature to ask and answer three questions: What is the current state of the art in new institutional economics' contribution to fundamental strategic questions? Where has this approach succeeded most, and what gaps remain?

It has been long understood that value creation by corporate strategists is determined by their ability to effectively deploy resources across multiple business units. Recently, scholarly attention has been dominated by studies of "synergy", or sharing resources across businesses. However, a second type of resource deployment, "resource redeployability" or "resource configuration", where resources are withdrawn from one business unit and reallocated to another may not only effect firm value creation, but also firm and industry evolution. This volume advances the resource deployment and synergy debate, and how they differentially affect value and firm decision-making. It clarifies the theoretical determinants and effects of each, revisiting prior work that investigates the benefits of synergy-based strategy, and assessing the benefits of an increased focus on redeployability.

Technology-based industries have come to account for ever-greater shares of economic activity during the last 30 years. Recently, rapid, digitally-enabled technological change has generated new opportunities for value creation, enabled new ways of capturing value, and stimulated the emergence of new organizational forms such as platforms and ecosystems. Together with the development of supporting institutions, including incubators, accelerators, and increasingly creative ways of funding new ventures, this has led to an explosion of interest in entrepreneurial activity across industries and sectors. Scholars, policymakers and practitioners recognize the importance of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for competitive advantage, comparative advantage, and society's economic well-being. There is tremendous academic and practical interest not only in how new ventures assemble resources necessary to deliver value, but also on how incumbent organizations may adapt to harness technological innovation, and on how industries evolve in the face of this pervasive technological change. Despite recent advances in our understanding of how innovation and entrepreneurship impact the creation and appropriation of value, numerous questions remain unanswered. This volume draws together scholars working at the forefront of entrepreneurship-, strategy-, and innovation-related domains to explore these questions. The volume makes particular contributions to the entrepreneurship, innovation, and platform literatures.

Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that limited firms' geographic scope, and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities to create value globally. Globalization presents managers with an environment to create value that is more complex, risky, and also more promising than ever before. Despite recent advances in our understanding of how locations impact the creation and appropriation of value by firms, the speed of these changes has often surpassed the speed of research on the connections between geography and firms. This volume draws together researchers working at the forefront of this area in a variety of disciplines-economics, geography, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and strategy-in order to explore the many ways that locations matter for firms. In 11 varied papers, the authors draw on newly available data, recently developed theory, and diverse methodology to understand the relationships between firm boundaries, firm activities, and geographic borders.

The research featured in this volume is devoted to understanding the competitive and collaborative challenges that firms face as they manage interactions with different actors in dynamic environments, in what are coming to be referred to as business or innovation 'ecosystems'. Rapid technological change, globalization, and recent financial turbulence have brought us to a point where managers are painfully aware that 'no man [or firm] is an island.' Success in business, in both the profit and non-profit sectors, increasingly relies upon collaboration with upstream suppliers, alliance partners, and downstream complementors. This volume presents new findings of how innovation and value are created in collaborative networks, specifically 'ecosystem analysis' and the unique roles of individual actors within this system

Business historians and economic historians frequently contribute to our understanding of strategic management, and strategy scholars often rely on a deep understanding of historical context to make sense of classic strategy issues. Historically, the two sets of scholars have not always communicated with each other as effectively as one might hope. They also have different approaches to methodology and assessment of validity of results, which adds to this 'two solitudes'. In this volume, strategy scholars, business historians, and economic historians are brought together to develop a volume that explores the complementarities of approaches.