Associate Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Manuela Hoehn-Weiss

Overview
Overview
Publications

Overview

Biography

Dr. Manuela N. Hoehn-Weiss is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at Oregon State University. She earned her doctorate at Boston University. Before joining the faculty at Oregon State, she held an Assistant Professor position at the University of Washington Bothell. She is an award-winning researcher and teacher with international, high-technology industry experience and first-hand knowledge of the high-tech centers of Silicon Valley, Boston, and Seattle. In her research, Dr. Hoehn-Weiss investigates resource acquisition by firms, specifically, how firms obtain access to, acquire, and configure acquired resources critical to their operations. Her research has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Organization, Journal of Private Equity, and Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. She currently teaches entrepreneurship and research methods in the College of Business, serves on the editorial review boards of the Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of Management Studies, and holds leadership committee positions within the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society.

Career Interests

Dr. Manuela N. Hoehn-Weiss is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at Oregon State University. Before joining the faculty at Oregon State, she held an Assistant Professor position at the University of Washington Bothell. She is an active researcher and award-winning teacher with international, high-technology industry experience and first-hand knowledge of the high-tech centers of Silicon Valley, Boston, and Seattle.

In her research, Manuela investigates resource obtainment by firms. The overarching research question that drives her work is how firms obtain access to, acquire and configure acquired resources critical to their operations. She focuses on three related themes that each address a different facet of resource obtainment: (1) alliances and alliance portfolios (to investigate mechanisms of how firms obtain access to resources), (2) resource configurations (to examine what happens after firms have acquired resources), and (3) new ventures (to investigate resource obtainment by a specific type of firm). Her research has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Organization, Journal of Private Equity, and Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. She has presented her work at the Academy of Management annual meetings, the Strategic Management Society International annual conferences (where her work was nominated twice for the SMS Best Conference Paper Prize), the Entrepreneurship and Collaboration Conference, the West Coast Research Symposium on Technology Entrepreneurship, the annual Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conferences (BCERC), the Society of Entrepreneurship Scholars Conference & Manuscript Boot-Camp, and the Colloquium for Competition and Cooperation (CCC). Manuela was selected as one of four finalists for the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division's Heizer Award for outstanding dissertations in entrepreneurship. She is currently a member of the Executive Committee for the Strategic Management Division of the Academy of Management (AOM); previously, she served on the Research and Teaching Committees of the AOM and served as Representative-at Large for the Entrepreneurship & Strategy and Cooperative Strategies Interest Groups of the Strategic Management Society. She currently also serves on the Editorial Review Boards of the Strategic Management Journal and Organization Science and is a former Editorial Review Board Member of the Journal of Management Studies.

Manuela teaches strategic management and entrepreneurship in undergraduate, MBA, and Executive Education programs as well as a PhD seminar on research methods, and has been recognized with several MBA and undergraduate teaching awards. She currently teaches entrepreneurship in the College of Business.

Manuela earned her doctorate at Boston University in Strategy and Policy, and she holds a B.S.C. degree (magna cum laude) in Marketing from Santa Clara University. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, Manuela worked in industry in Silicon Valley. She held program management and product marketing positions at Cisco Systems, as well as international marketing management and product marketing management positions at Livingston Enterprises (a start-up) and Lucent Technologies.

Publications

Academic Journal
Strategy & Entrepreneurship

“Improve Workflows by Managing Bottlenecks”

Organizations can find their activities slowed down due to bottlenecks in their workflows. To address these, managers must look at both work system design and resource portfolio management. The authors find that companies perform better when their work systems’ complexity and decentralization are aligned (either both high or both low), and when they have fungible and slack resources. Aligning both task and resource characteristics further reduces delays and improves overall efficiency.
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Academic Journal
Strategy & Entrepreneurship

“Examining alliance portfolios beyond the dyads: The relevance of redundancy and non-uniformity across and between partners”

In this research, we unpack how interdependencies affect not just individual dyads but also value creation across an alliance portfolio and ultimately a focal firm’s performance. Moving beyond the collection of dyadic relationships of individual alliances, we examine more holistically the distribution of power imbalances and mutual dependences within alliance portfolios, as well as the impact of redundancies in portfolio partners’ resources. Building on resource dependence theory, we develop and test arguments on a sample of 59 firms in the U.S. passenger airline industry during 1998–2011. We find that nonuniform distributions of power imbalances and mutual dependences within the alliance portfolio as well as redundancy affect firm performance in different ways, which has implications for the management of alliance portfolios.
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