Specializing in Generality: Firm Strategies When Intermediate Markets Work

This paper studies the relationship between two decisions shaping the organizational configuration of a firm: whether to make the upstream resources more general and deployable to more markets (versus keeping them tailored to a few markets) and whether to trade with downstream firms as an upstream supplier of intermediate products and services (versus directly entering downstream markets). Although the literature has looked at these two decisions separately, we argue that they depend on each other. This has the important implication that they can generate organizational complementarities, inducing firms to implement them jointly. Link to the article

CONTI, R., GAMBARDELLA, A. and NOVELLI, E. (2019). Specializing in Generality: Firm Strategies When Intermediate Markets Work. Organization Science, 30(1), pp. 126-150.