When entrepreneurs introduce innovations, incumbents must respond, yet may fail to do so in due course. I characterize the incumbent's optimal policy, specifying the conditions under which an incumbent ignores the threat or decides to acquire or imitate the startup. Incumbent inertia may arise if the incumbent waits until the market is ripe or if it is ambivalent about the appropriate response. This second rationale has not previously been identified as a cause for incumbent inertia.

When composing their innovation portfolios, firms can rely on their internal R&D units and invest in projects that are promoted internally; or they can acquire projects that originated outside their boundaries. We ask: How should a firm allocate its scarce resources across the different sources? We investigate this decision by designing a stylized game-theoretic model, and we identify the firm’s optimal resource allocation policy.

Although the participation of firms in cooperative ventures that benefit all firms, such as industry alliances and generic advertising campaigns, has been well-studied in the literature, prior studies have not explored how the firms decide their participation levels when the underlying market conditions change. In this paper, we investigate the impact of boom and bust conditions of the market on two firms' strategic decisions, when they face the prospect of cooperating with their competitor.