Recognizing new complementarities before they become common sense – The role of similarity recognition

What do Ray Ban sunglasses and Facebook have in common? Nike and Apple? Understanding complementarity as one of the key sources of new strategic opportunities is crucial for the performance of firms. While plenty of work has concentrated on the outcomes of strategic complementarity, the literature on its antecedents is still very scarce. So what, then, influences managers’ capability to recognize new strategic complementarities before they become common sense? We use recent insights from cognitive psychology to explore factors that influence the recognition of new strategic opportunities. Our theorizing builds on two different processes of categorization, taxonomic and thematic similarity (which are neurologically as well as behaviorally distinct). We outline how these types of similarity are related to the perception of complementarity, the conditions under which each type occurs, as well as their implications for opportunity recognition.