ABSTRACT

A firm’s success critically hinges on its strategies in selecting its portfolio of products and services. In this paper, we study how differentiation and market alignment at the offering level impact firm performance. To that end, we mine firms’ 10-K filings to characterise the portfolio of offerings through the lens of outward relatedness, inward relatedness, and digitisation. We define outward relatedness as a measure of alignment of firm offerings within its market space, inward relatedness as a measure of differentiation of firm offerings with its own past offerings, and digitisation as a measure of the firm’s focus on IT. We find that markets react positively to firms that operate with high levels of outward relatedness, low levels of inward relatedness and high levels of digitisation. However, we find that highly digitised firms do not have to conform to peers’ offerings. Digitisation enables these firms to differentiate by internally diversifying their offerings. Interestingly, our results show that only firms already highly digitised benefit from further digitisation.

摘要

一家公司的成功关键取决于其选择产品和服务组合的策略。在本文中，我们研究了产品级别的差异化和市场一致性如何影响公司绩效。为此，我们挖掘公司的 10-K 文件，通过外部相关性、内部相关性和数字化的镜头来描述产品组合。我们将外部相关性定义为衡量公司产品在其市场空间内的一致性，将内部相关性定义为衡量公司产品与其过去产品的差异化程度，并将数字化定义为衡量公司对 IT 的关注程度。我们发现，市场对外部关联度高、内部关联度低和数字化程度高的公司反应积极。然而，我们发现高度数字化的公司不必遵循同行的产品。数字化使这些公司能够通过内部多样化的产品来实现差异化。有趣的是，我们的结果表明，只有已经高度数字化的公司才能从进一步的数字化中受益。