Enrico Forti

Strategy and organization theory

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Enrico Forti is the Gabriel Hauge Assistant Professor of Strategy in the O’Malley School of Business at Manhattan College.

His research program lies at the intersection of strategy and organization theory with a specific interest in strategy evolution in entrepreneurial ventures and coordination and performance in platforms characterized by gig and remote work. His work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Organization Science, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Research Policy.

Enrico has performed research and taught MBA, Executive MBA, MSc, and undergraduate courses at leading business schools in the US, UK, EU, and China, including Columbia Business School, the UCL School of Management at University College London, the University of Bologna, and Peking University.

He received a Ph.D. degree in Management with highest honours from the University of Bologna and was a visiting doctoral student at London Business School. Before joining Manhattan College, he was a full-time faculty member in the Strategy & Entrepreneurship group at University College London, UCL School of Management and in 2017-2021 served as Chazen Visiting Associate Research Scholar at Columbia Business School.

Publications

Papers Under Review

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Competitive Familiarity: Learning to Coordinate by Competing — with: Ching K. and Rawley E.

Organization Science (2024) https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17068 [open access] Equally contributed. Authors listed in alphabetical order.

This paper develops and tests a theory of organizational learning, proposing that prior competitive interaction improves coordination amongst teammates. We test the theory using millions of experiments in the formation of eSports teams. The results show that exogenously assigned teams of former competitors are highly effective—the marginal returns to prior competitive interaction are even larger than the returns to prior collaborative interaction. The evidence suggests that teammates learn to coordinate by competing, a finding with implications for organizational design and the management of human capital.

Extemporaneous Coordination in Specialist Teams: The Familiarity Complementarity — with: Ching K. and Rawley E.

Organization Science (2021) https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.1376 [open access] Equally contributed. Authors listed in alphabetical order.

Team production is ubiquitous in the economy, but managing teams effectively remains a challenge for many organizations. This paper studies how familiarity amongst teammates influences the performance of specialist teams, relative to non-specialist teams. Applying theories of team production to contexts where team members coordinate interdependent activities extemporaneously, we develop predictions about factors that shift the marginal returns to specialization along two dimensions of familiarity: social familiarity and functional familiarity. We test our hypotheses in the context of DOTA2, a major e-sports game where, in some formats, players are exogenously assigned to five-person teams. After analysing nearly 6.5 million matches, we find that specialist teams are relatively more successful when members are more socially and functionally familiar with one another. The results suggest that the “plug and play” perspective on specialist teams is incomplete; rather, specialization and familiarity are complements in dynamic environments where team members coordinate extemporaneously.

Does VC Backing Affect Brand Strategy in New Technology Ventures? — with: Munari F. and Zhang C.

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (2020) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/sej.1318

The resource-based view of the firm characterizes brands as important resources for firm growth and competitive advantage. Existing studies offer theory and evidence that venture capital (VC) backing enhances the growth of new technology ventures along different dimensions. It is not clear, however, whether and how VC backing affects the development of brand assets. In a study of VC-backed and non-VC-backed nanotechnology ventures in the United Kingdom, we find a positive association between VC backing and the development of brand assets. We also find that VC-backed technology ventures tend to create brand assets with a wider scope, which can be deployed across multiple different product-markets.

CrossFit in the Crosshairs: A Community-Embedded Theory of Organizational Responsiveness to Social Issues — with: Piazza A. and Rietveld J.

Revise & Resubmit at Administrative Science Quarterly

What makes firms responsive to social issues such as race relations or climate change? Existing explanations have largely focused on firm-level attributes as predictors of whether a social issue will be seen as salient by managers of global corporations, which often face homogenous pressures from stakeholders to act on such issues. Yet, the salience of a social issue may also vary within a firm’s local environment. We advance a theory of “community-level issue salience” that ties firm responsiveness to the social structure of the local community in which a firm is embedded and the degree to which the firm depends on the community for its survival. We test the theory by leveraging a scandal that affected the fitness company CrossFit in 2020, which unexpectedly prompted thousands of locally owned and operated U.S. gyms to take a stance on the thorny issue of race relations in the U.S. Results show that issue salience is greater in communities characterized by lower network closure, lower ethnic segregation, and greater issue connectedness. Firms operating in such communities, in turn, are more likely to respond to a given social issue, particularly in markets where firms show greater dependence on their local community for support. Overall, our study highlights community-level issue salience as an antecedent of firm responsiveness to social issues, underscoring the importance of understanding the heterogeneity of social structures across the communities served by a firm to formulate an effective non-market strategy.

Style and Quality: Aesthetic Innovation Strategy under Weak Appropriability — with: ^Ching K., Katsampes S, Mammous K.

Research Policy (2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733323002317 [open access] ^ These authors contributed equally. Authors listed in alphabetical order.

Counterfeiting challenges firms to capture the value created by product innovation. We characterize style and quality as key dimensions of product innovation strategy in contexts where aesthetic attributes drive product success. We examine distinct aesthetic innovation strategies that firms may use to innovate their existing products — developing new style variants, using higher quality attributes, or both. Our empirical test exploits unique data on authentic plastic model kits matched to product-specific counterfeits. Controlling for several confounders, we find that new style variants that include higher quality attributes are 20% more likely to be copied relative to style variants that do not. We discuss implications for aesthetic innovation strategies in weak appropriability regimes.

To Start or To Finish: Technology Commercialization Strategy under Ambiguity — with: Rindova V. and Jong S.

In preparation for submission.

Scientific breakthroughs create new markets fraught with ambiguity, which makes it challenging for entrepreneurial firms to commit to competitive or cooperative commercialization strategies. They similarly struggle whether to invest their resources in pursuing a single opportunity, or to hedge their bets by pursuing multiple ones. Our inductive study of two start-ups that pioneered the cell therapy market explores how new firms navigate these dilemmas and identifies two key dynamics of ambiguity that affect entrepreneurial strategies in nascent markets: knowledge gaps hinder the execution of cooperative commercialization strategies, whereas noisy feedback strains the pursuit of competitive commercialization strategies. We theorize the effects of two different approaches to managing these frictions: sustained commitment versus opportunistic overreach.

Continuity, Change and New Product Performance: The Role of Stream Concentration — with: Sobrero M. and Vezzulli A.

Journal of Product Innovation Management (2020) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jpim.12521

Product development teams often face the challenge of designing radically new products that cater at the same time to the revealed tastes and expectations of existing customers. In new product development projects, this tension guides critical choices about continuity or change concerning product attributes and team composition. Research suggests these choices interact, but it is not clear whether they are complements or substitutes and if the level of change in one should match or not the level of change in the other. In this article, we examine the interaction between product attribute change, team change, and a new team-level factor, which we term stream concentration, as it captures differences among team members in terms of familiarity with the knowledge domain of the new product being developed. We assess the effects of stream concentration on the management of change in new product development projects using longitudinal data from the music industry. We analyze 2621 new product development projects between 1962 and 2008 involving 34,265 distinct team members. Results show that stream concentration is a critical factor in new product development projects that, together with product attributes and team composition, affects new product performance. We discuss implications for research and practice.

Naturals over Strivers: Perceived Naturalness affects Resource Allocation — with: Lee J. and Tsay C.

Under review at PNAS

Crises intensify scrutiny of resource allocation practices. We characterize a preference for “naturalness” as a psychological mechanism that may affect resource allocation under scarcity. Across a series of tests conducted over four years, including a survey, analyses of 254,259 crowdfunding campaigns, and four experiments in healthcare settings, we find a counterintuitive discrepancy between people’s reported preferences and the outcomes of actual resource allocation decisions. Although striving and hard work are ostensibly prioritized as critical determinants of health outcomes, actual resource allocation across different settings show that beneficiaries perceived to be “naturally” advantaged are generally deemed more deserving of medical care than those perceived as “strivers.” The patterns we report are consistent across both large-scale field studies using observational data and controlled experiments. Furthermore, we report a preference for naturalness across studies of resource allocation decisions about a wide range of individual needs and types of resources, including medications, hospital equipment, and financial support. The preference for naturalness we document in decision makers yields implications that can help scholars and healthcare practitioners develop novel strategies for mitigating the psychological, health, and moral consequences of resource allocation under scarcity.