UCI assistant professor of strategy is co-author of award-winning study

John Joseph, an assistant professor of strategy in UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business, is the co-author of a research report that received a 2016 Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award. The study, published in the June 2016 issue of the Strategic Management Journal, examined how mobile handset manufacturers decide when to introduce new product features into the market. Through qualitative and quantitative data analysis, Joseph and co-author Ronald Klingebiel, professor of strategy at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, found that during the development phase, firms weighed the scale and likelihood of features’ success. “Early movers aim for big hits to compensate for a higher failure rate, so they launch a broader set of features and exert little selective pressure on the development portfolio,” Joseph said. “By contrast, late movers’ lower payoffs reduce their tolerance for failure, so they choose features more discriminantly.” The annual award, sponsored by the Industry Studies Association, recognizes excellence in academic research.