Three Essays on Reputation for Innovation

Scholars have been studying firm innovation as a process or an outcome. Recently a couple of studies have examined the less tangible aspect of firm innovation, that is, a firm’s reputation for innovation, and have suggested that reputation for innovation is a distinct resource. However, these studies have never dug deeper to uncover the mechanism of this reputation. As a result, it is unclear how this reputation is built, maintained, or utilized. Innovation, as a form of creative destruction, is associated with uncertainty, complexity, conflict, and setback. It is thus expected that the characteristics of innovation may endow reputation for innovation with distinctive organizational implications. Yet no systematic study that integrates innovation research with reputation research exists. The purpose of the dissertation is to provide a general theory that systematically explores the antecedents, outcomes, and nature of reputation for innovation. In the first chapter, I provide a literature review of reputation multiplicity and introduce a configurational framework that maps each reputation into the following facets: actor, attribute, audience, intermediary, and valence. In the second chapter, I integrate innovation research into reputation research to build a general theory of reputation for innovation and further conclude that reputation for innovation has a paradoxical nature, since it is easy to manipulate but hard to sustain. In the last chapter, I study how a firm’s reputation for innovation impacts its response strategy for a negative event: being sued for patent infringements. I propose and find that a firm’s reputation for innovation has differential effects on its response strategies for patent litigation initiated by different parties. By providing an integrative literature review, a conceptual framework, and an empirical verification of reputation for innovation, the dissertation builds a solid foundation for future research.