Knowledge that Transforms

AbstractThis ethnographic study of more than 90 surgeries (referred to as episodes of care) identifies the antecedents to operating room (OR) supply waste. The study specifically considers the role of planning instances and communication patterns among members of the surgery team on supply waste within the OR. We operationalize planning instances in terms of the number of changes to the physician preference card (PPC), the key document that is used to plan items needed for surgery. Communication patterns among members of the surgery team are captured by measuring the density of communication among the OR team members during an episode of care. The unplanned costs during an episode of care are used as a measure of OR supply waste. Hundreds of hours were spent observing episodes of care and tracking supplies. A combination of participant‐observation, survey, and secondary data were analyzed to extract theoretical and practical insights. The results show that planning instances have a curvilinear relationship with unplanned costs. In particular, as the number of changes to the PPC increases, unplanned costs first increase and then decrease. Higher density of the OR team's communication network is associated with lower unplanned costs. This study has significant theoretical and managerial implications that we discuss and offer directions for future research.

AbstractOvercrowding poses a serious challenge to the operations of health care facilities, especially those with a mandate to provide emergency care. A better understanding of emergency department (ED) performance during disaster‐level overcrowding is a key to increasing a facility's resilience, optimizing patient outcomes, and more effectively allocating resources. With this in mind, this study quantitatively examines the extent to which different factors contribute to the resilience of hospital EDs during disaster‐level overcrowding events. A modeling framework was developed in collaboration with the Carilion Clinic ED, a level one trauma center in Virginia. The testing and analysis of the approach is based on data from actual disaster‐level overcrowding events that occurred in the Spring of 2016. Results indicate that by considering not only the capacity for resisting such events but also the capacity for recovering from them more quickly, hospital decision makers can improve both their operational effectiveness and the patient experience. Furthermore, by using our framework to identify precipitating factors and predict severe overcrowding, hospital decision makers can implement changes to improve the future resilience of their ED to such overcrowding events.

AbstractFirms are increasingly sourcing innovation from their supply chain partners. Meanwhile, supply chains have evolved into complex networks, which complicates the role that supply chain partners play in innovation and financial performance of firms. Previous research has mainly focused on the direct effect of innovation on a firm's financial performance, overlooking the innovativeness and complexity of supply networks. In this research, we focus on a firm's supply base, defined as the first tier of a supply network, and investigate the relationship between the intensity of R&D within the supply base and the financial performance of the focal firm. We also examine the moderating role of three aspects of supply base complexity—Number of suppliers, differentiation, and inter‐relationships among suppliers. Utilizing secondary data from Bloomberg and Compustat, we find that the R&D intensity of a firm's supply base is positively associated with the firm's financial performance. Further, all three aspects of supply base complexity negatively moderate this relationship. These findings make important contributions to the literature by establishing a direct, positive relationship between supply base R&D and firm financial performance, which is attenuated by complexities within the supply base.

AbstractWe focus here on questions regarding the craft of producing operations management (OM) research manuscripts. Are the journals we publish in too siloed, with regard to participating authors and institutions? Likewise, are the OM departments we work in too intellectually siloed by virtue of journal choice—are there too many like minds? In light of who publishes in our journals and who we coauthor with, is our field “global enough” or is North America weighing too heavily? We also strive to answer a question faced by many OM departments: should highly published faculty be hired from other schools? How do such highly published authors influence those around them? We arrive at partial answers to these questions by exploring an extensive history of publication data from four journals: Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Management Science.

AbstractWe investigate how common institutional investors (CIIs) in supply chains affect supplier performance. Social network theory suggests that buyer–supplier relationships are influenced by networks of ties in which they are embedded. While prior research has concentrated on networks of trade interactions, we instead examine the influences of networks through common investors. Utilizing a large sample of buyer–supplier relationships, we find that the presence of CIIs improves suppliers' operating and market performance, especially for suppliers with greater dependence on buyers. In addition, supplier performance increases with the common ownership stakes held by CIIs, but decreases with the asymmetric ownership stakes of CIIs across supply chain partners. We find that better financial collaboration between the partners appears to be a mechanism through which CIIs enhance supplier performance. Lastly, we find that the role of CIIs in strengthening supplier performance is distinct from that of direct equity links. Collectively, our findings highlight a novel role of indirect cross‐ownership in fostering supply chain collaboration and coordinating vertical relationships and, in turn, improving supplier performance.

AbstractFirms have increasingly relied on their supply network for improving their innovation performance. Although the relationship between the supply network structure and innovation has been investigated, the link between supply network complexity and a firm's innovation remains unexplored. By employing transaction cost economics and the concept of a recombinatory search, we propose that the complexity dimensions (horizontal, vertical, and spatial complexity) of a supply network impact the innovation performance of a firm and that such relationships are moderated by a strategic emphasis on value creation and the influence of the firm over the supply network. With a large‐scale network data of 201 firms across six industries and 20 countries, we take a robust empirical approach that accounts for endogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity and intrafirm error correlation to test our theory. We find strong support for a nonlinear relationship (with diminishing growth) between both horizontal and vertical complexity with respect to innovation performance. We find that spatial complexity is negatively related to innovation performance. Additionally, we find that a firm's strategic emphasis and its influence indeed moderates the link between the complexity dimensions and innovation performance. Based on our findings, we offer specific managerial guidance for the effective implementation of sourcing practices.

AbstractThis article investigates the development of supplier–supplier innovations that occur when two firms that are part of the same supply network co‐patent a new product. This study unravels how the structure of the supply network influences each firm's ability to form supplier–supplier innovations with other network members. Specifically, we investigate how supplier degree centrality influences the generation of supplier–supplier innovations, and the extent to which this relationship is moderated by the structural embeddedness of firms in the supply network. Using data from the Toyota supply network, the results reveal that a firm's ability to co‐develop supplier–supplier innovations with other network members depends on its number of ties and their direction within the supply network. Although betweenness centrality has no significant moderating effect, closeness centrality, and embeddedness in small world clusters negatively moderate the relationship between supplier degree centrality and supplier–supplier innovations. Additionally, the number of manufacturing plants a firm operates in Japan strengthens the positive effect supplier degree centrality has on the development of supplier–supplier innovations.