Technology and demand mechanism in firm diversification strategies.
An
experimental method to discriminate the fundamental drivers[1]
Elena Santanera National Research Council
of Italy
CNR-CERIS
Institute for Economic
Research on Firm and Growth
Collegio Carlo Alberto - via
Real Collegio, n. 30
10024 Moncalieri (Torino) – ITALY
Tel.: +39 011 68 24
946;
fax : +39 011 68 24
966;
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Abstract:An essential part of any firm’s corporate strategy is the choice of the
business portfolio through which to compete. When the portfolio’s decision
involves more than one business, firms are said to implement a diversification
strategy, which is put into action through the firms concomitant entry in
different market segments. It implies that the nature of the market segmentation affects the firms’
differentiation degree. The aim of this paper consists in exploring a method
for determining the market segmentation that is most informative to understand firms’ diversification strategies,
or in other words the market segmentation that most clearly reveals about
firms’ main diversification drivers. Given that each business can be described
according to a set of business characteristics and by using different levels of
detail, in the perspective of understanding firm diversification strategies, it
is fundamental to determine the directions in the space of business characteristics
along which it is “mostly convenient” to claim the business diversity and which
is the “best” level of aggregation at which assess the businesses boundaries.
This paper proposes an experimental method to do it. In particular, it
empirically discerns which of two particular criteria – functional versus
technological – mostly enrich our understanding of the diversification
strategies adopted by Italian plastic processing machinery suppliers, finding
out the most instructive level of aggregation of the market segmentation –
namely the best segment dimension – to investigate the firms diversification
strategies.