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The Growth Lab Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.
Speaker: Gianluigi Giustiziero, Assistant Professor of Strategy, IE Business School
Abstract: Digital firms tend to be both narrow in their vertical scope and large in their scale. We explain this phenomenon through a theory about how attributes of firms’ resource bundles impact their scale and specialization. We posit that highly scalable resource bundles entail significant opportunity costs of integration (versus outsourcing), which simultaneously drive “hyperspecialization” and “hyperscaling” in digital firms. Using descriptive theory and a formal model, we develop several propositions that align with observed features of digital businesses. We offer a parsimonious modeling framework for resource-based theorizing about highly scalable digital firms, shed light on the phenomenon of digital scaling, and provide insights into the far-reaching ways that technology-enabled resources are reshaping firms in the digital economy.
Please register in advance, and contact Chuck McKenney with any questions.
About the speaker:
Gianluigi Giustiziero is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at IE Business School. He received his PhD in Strategy from the University of Michigan. Inspired by the classical work of Adam Smith and George Stigler, Gianluigi studies the impact of resource attributes and demand characteristics on the division of labor. At the time of their writing Adam Smith drew insights from butchers, bakers and brewers in the Highlands of Scotland in 1776, and George Stigler from the Lancashire textile industry in 1951; nowadays the productive system in developed economies is mainly devoted to the tertiary and quaternary sectors. Moving with the times, Gianluigi applies and extends the classic theories to service and high-tech industries.