Letter from the Editor

Abstract

As a journal aiming to publish papers that provide groundbreaking insights about management and organization in China and global comparable contexts, Management and Organization Review has attracted authors and readers from different countries and regions to share new discoveries and to learn new knowledge. We can take a glean of them in the six papers included in this volume. Focusing on the types of knowledge flow from incumbents to new firms during the foundation of startups, the first paper (Jiang & Murmann, 2023) conducted a detailed qualitative analysis of six private startups in the Chinese synthetic dye industry. The authors discovered eight types of knowledge that can be further categorized into either functional or strategic knowledge and found different functions for each, i.e., strategic knowledge shapes the long-term competitiveness of surviving startups, whereas functional/technical knowledge is necessary for short-term survival but insufficient for long-term success. Using the short-term, one-year after IPO performance of startup as an outcome variable, Kirschbaum et al. (2023) explored how private equity, board centrality and experience independently or jointly influence it. Based on Brazilian IPOs issued between 2004 and 2013, they found that private equity sponsorship is the most effective predictor; but for non-private equity backed IPOs, board centrality and experience significantly affected their performance. Although it is unclear how these findings would apply to shortor long-term IPO performance of startups in the China context, the findings from Li et al. (2023) may shed some light. In this paper, the authors used a sample of 508 Chinese firms to study how the exploration and exploitation strategy influence firm radical or incremental innovation, an important drive for firm success. By reframing exploitation and exploration as a duality of learning, rather than either positive or negative interaction, they identified a novel pattern of inverted U-shaped interaction between exploration and exploitation for both radical and incremental innovations. Connecting to firm innovation, the next paper (Madrid-Guijarro & GarcesTorres, 2023) examined open innovation in 543 small and medium firms in Ecuador. Taking a strategic view, the authors found that firms’ formalization of an innovation strategy promotes both inbound and outbound open innovation activities, which facilitate firm innovative performance; but the positive effect of outbound activities only exists for inbound activities when there is firm control. Management and Organization Review 19:3, June 2023, 415–416 doi: 10.1017/mor.2023.20