Search

Organizational aspirations research has largely overlooked the direction of external innovative search, i.e., "where" firms look for innovative inspiration, as a response to persistent performance feedback. We contribute to this research by introducing the concepts of sustained innovative over- and underperformance and applying them to study two dimensions of target selection in external corporate venturing: target relatedness and international venturing. We find that firms move from local to distant search by selecting more unrelated targets when faced with continuous innovative underperformance. Our surprising findings for innovative overperformance underline the importance of the ongoing debate around the role of time in organizational aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]