A Center for Innovation Research Seminar with Bram Timmermans, professor at NHH
Welcome to a Centre for Innovation Research seminar:
- Date: Thursday February 13th
- Time: 12:00 - 13:00
- Room: UiS Campus Ullandhaug, Elise Ottesen-Jensens hus, room EOJ 276/277 and on Teams
Link to Teams meeting, Meeting-ID: 386 489 456 825, Password: m6cJ2Rc9

- Seminar speaker: Professor Bram Timmermans, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)
- Title of the presentation: The odd one out? A portfolio perspective on board director exit. The paper is co-authored with Tatevik Harutyunyan (main author), and Lasse B. Lien
Abstract:
Board research explains director exit in terms of director-specific characteristics, board compositional characteristics, and firm-level drivers and events. This may seem to exhaust the categories to which any explanatory mechanism could possibly belong, but when directors hold multiple directorships this adds potential portfolio-level effects which the current literature has left unexplored. We show that portfolio effects are indeed empirically significant, and argue that the nature of these effects can be made sense of by applying the attention-based view (ABV) to directors.
Based on the basic premise that portfolio dissimilarity will strain the attentional resources of a director, we first show that diversity within a director’s portfolio of firms is associated with an increased likelihood of exit from one of the firms in the director’s portfolio. Next, building on the idea that directors economize with their attentional resources, we show that exit is most likely from the portfolio firm that is most taxing on such resources, i.e., the firm most dissimilar to the rest of the portfolio. Finally, we show that attentional resources and constraints are not completely immutable and fixed. If a director has built experience managing a diverse portfolio, the likelihood that they will exit the dissimilar firm decreases.