{"id":30460,"date":"2018-06-12T12:11:42","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T16:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/?p=30460"},"modified":"2018-06-25T12:06:48","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T16:06:48","slug":"fius-curba-lampert-on-technology-strategy-and-the-essential-role-it-plays-in-firm-competitiveness-and-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/2018\/06\/fius-curba-lampert-on-technology-strategy-and-the-essential-role-it-plays-in-firm-competitiveness-and-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Curba Lampert on technology and strategy."},"content":{"rendered":"
How do firms respond to technological change? How do firms manage the ever-increasing costs of research and development (R&D)? How do firms capture the value they create from their innovative activities? How do firms respond technologically to oil shocks?<\/p>\n
These are just some of the important research questions that Curba Morris Lampert<\/a>, assistant professor in the College of Business\u2019s International Business Department<\/a>, has been addressing in her research since arriving at FIU in 2013.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lampert studies firms\u2019 technology strategies. \u201cI focus on issues of how firms build their technical capabilities, the means they use to capture value from their innovative activities, and the consequences of shocks, technological changes, and uncertainty on technology strategies,\u201d she explained. \u201cIn this increasingly technology-driven economy, a firm\u2019s technology strategy plays an essential role in its competitiveness and performance.\u201d<\/p>\n As a researcher in the academic field of strategy, Lampert analyzes the competitive and organizational factors essential for firms to achieve superior performance using an integrative point of view and incorporating other disciplines.<\/p>\n \u201cStrategy professors emphasize to their students that one of the strengths of strategic analysis is that it builds on other areas, which is something we very much practice ourselves,\u201d she said. \u201cIn pursuing my research agenda in technology strategy, I have spanned the fields of entrepreneurship, economics, and international business.\u201d<\/p>\n Lampert\u2019s latest publication in the Journal of Management Studies, titled \u201cFearlessly Swimming Upstream to Risky Waters: The Role of Geographic Entry in Innovation,\u201d serves as a case in point. The publication lies at the intersection of technology strategy and international business.<\/p>\n In the study, Lampert and her team explored the puzzling entry pattern of the R&D activities by firms into countries with weak intellectual property rights, which runs counter to conventional wisdom, as such an environment erodes a firm\u2019s ability to capture value from its innovations. They found that firms operating regionally through downstream commercialization activities can offer complementary assets to the upstream R&D activities that help protect the firms\u2019 intellectual property. More specifically, marketing, manufacturing, and selling pharmaceuticals within a region can help firms to protect their research and development activities in countries in the same region. The regional downstream commercialization activities can substitute for the weak intellectual property rights protection of a country within that region.<\/p>\n