Strategic Management Policy Commons^™

Securing Access To Lower-Cost Talent Globally: The Dynamics Of Active Embedding And Field Structuration, Stephan Manning, Joerg Sydow, Arnold Windeler

Stephan Manning

This article examines how multinational corporations (MNCs) shape institutional conditions in emerging economies to secure access to high-skilled, yet lower-cost science and engineering talent. Based on two in-depth case studies of engineering offshoring projects of German automotive suppliers in Romania and China we analyze how MNCs engage in ‘active embedding’ by aligning local institutional conditions with global offshoring strategies and operational needs. MNCs thereby contribute to the structuration of field relations and practices of sourcing knowledge-intensive work from globally dispersed locations.Our findings stress the importance of institutional processes across geographic boundaries that regulate and get shaped by MNC activities.

New Silicon Valleys Or A New Species? Commoditization Of Knowledge Work And The Rise Of Knowledge Services Clusters, Stephan Manning

Stephan Manning

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge services. Based on prior research on clusters and services offshoring, and data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN), major properties and contingencies of KSC growth are discussed and compared with both high-tech clusters and low-cost manufacturing clusters. Special emphasis is put on the ambivalent effect of commoditization of knowledge work on KSC growth: It is proposed that KSCs attract most projects if …

National Contexts Matter: The Co-Evolution Of Sustainability Standards In Global Value Chains, Stephan Manning, Frank Boons, Oliver Von Hagen, Juliane Reinecke

Stephan Manning

In this paper, we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co-evolution of sustainability standards, based on the case of the global coffee industry. We find that institutional conditions and market opportunity structures in consuming countries have been important sources of standards variation, for example in the cases of Fairtrade, UTZ Certified and the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C). In turn, supplier structures in producing countries as well as their linkages with traders and buyers targeting particular consuming countries have been key mechanisms of …

Core Resources Of Corporate Strategy And Performance-Oriented Bank Management Practice: A Lesson For Nigeria, Andrew O. Agbada

Bullion

In the past three decades, the Nigerian banking industry has suffered from a host of vices namely miss-management, financial misappropriation, administrative recklessness, etcetera, reflecting incompetence on all levels of management and those have had dire consequences in the economy. In an attempt to re-position the industry on the path of performance, different governments in the past took various corrective steps to no avail. Thus this study seeks to explore the Core Resources of Corporate Strategy and Performance-oriented Bank Management best practice with a view to creating sustainable best practices in bank management in Nigeria. The findings from the study are …

Symposium Report: Findings From The Research Roundtable On The Economic And Community Impact Of Broadband, Edward Feser, John Horrigan, William Lehr

Edward J Feser

In December 2012, a group of experts spanning disciplines and practice in the field of broadband policy met to discuss how the research community can better serve state and local policymakers and other stakeholders. This group of subject matter experts was convened to examine how best to measure the economic impact of state and national broadband deployment and capacity/adoption building efforts. The impetus for the symposium stemmed from the widespread view that there is a deficit of research, standards, and measurements to adequately inform the widely acknowledged view that broadband Internet is a driver of sustainable economic and community development. …

Category Divergence, Straddling, And Currency: Open Innovation And The Legitimation Of Illegitimate Categories, Oliver Alexy, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The organizational literature is increasingly interested in the origins and consequences of category emergence. We examine the effects of being affiliated with categories initially considered illegitimate (‘divergence’), and of organizational attempts to blur the boundaries between categories (‘straddling’), on capital market reactions to firm announcements. We develop arguments for how these effects likely vary with increasing legitimation (‘currency’) of the category. We apply event study methodology to the complete population of firms' announcements of open source activities, an open innovation model for software development that is novel and defies the extant dominant logic of software production and valorization. Over a …

The Role Of Capabilities In Innovation Adoption Decisions, Kevin Snyder

Open Access Dissertations

Successful innovations have been assumed by prior literature to ultimately be adopted by all competitors within an industry based on social explanations or economic rationale specific to the efficiency of the innovation. However, capabilities possessed by a firm can enhance or inhibit the adoption based upon their similarity to those used in the innovation. In categorizing a firm's capabilities as complementary, substitutive, or neutralizing to the innovation, this study provides an economic explanation for the role of internal capabilities in adoption decisions.

Using a sample of professional football teams adopting the West Coast Offense, I find that capabilities influence the …

Sustainable Fashion At Nordstrom: Think, Adapt, Anticipate, Crystal Kizanis, Garret Mark, Natnael Tekeste, Mitchell Gould

MICCSR Presentations

This CSR mini-case focuses on CSR issues related to the supply chain in the fashion industry. The case is based on the Fashion Futures 2025 report by the Forum for the Future, and focuses on anticipated supply shortages, workforce issues, technological advances, water shortages, high energy prices, re-use and remanufacturing changes. The case calls for students to develop a strategy for Nordstrom as they prepare for this changed new world.

Due to length, the video was uploaded in 2 parts. Part II

Sustainable Fashion At Nordstrom: Its Sustainable Future, Lehualani Shiroma

MICCSR Presentations

This CSR mini-case focuses on CSR issues related to the supply chain in the fashion industry. The case is based on the Fashion Futures 2025 report by the Forum for the Future, and focuses on anticipated supply shortages, workforce issues, technological advances, water shortages, high energy prices, re-use and remanufacturing changes. The case calls for students to develop a strategy for Nordstrom as they prepare for this changed new world.

The second-place team was originally composed of students from a variety of participating universities. The other three students dropped out, citing irreconcilable differences. The student from the University of Puget …

China's New Energy Vehicles: Value And Innovation, Chris Kimble, Hua Wang

Chris Kimble

The overarching theme of this article is the importance of innovations that are created within the emerging economies. More specifically, the article aims to focus on the development of various alternatives to vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine, new energy vehicles (NEVs), within China. The broad strategic approach of two sectors within the NEV sector in China, the pure electric vehicle (EV) and the low-speed electric vehicle (LSEV) sectors, are compared using recent data and conclusions are drawn. The EV sector is viewed by central government as a key sector for China's future industrial growth and is heavily supported. …

Strategic Planning In Construction Professional Service Firms: A Study Of Irish Qs Practices, Roisin Murphy

Articles

The role and usefulness of strategic planning has been documented over several decades of strategic management research. Despite the significant body of existing knowledge in the field of strategic planning, there remains limited empirical investigation of the construction sector, specifically professional service firms operating within it. The construction sector is hugely important to the Irish economy, yet until now, no empirical investigation has been undertaken to determine the strategic planning process in construction professional service firms in Ireland. A two-phase mixed methods study was undertaken to ascertain the extent of strategic planning within quantity surveying (QS) practices in Ireland. Characteristics …

Managing A Global Partnership Model: Lessons From The Boeing 787 'Dreamliner' Program, Suresh Kotha, Kannan Srikanth

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Little research has examined the integration challenges in globally disaggregated value chains in a complex NPD effort or the tools managers use to overcome such challenges. Drawing on Boeing's 787 program, we highlight integration challenges Boeing faced and how it addressed them through recourse to partial co-location, establishing a centralized integration support center, reintegrating some activities performed by suppliers, and using its bargaining power to facilitate changes. The integration tools Boeing employed were geared toward two primary objectives: (1) gaining increased visibility of actions and visibility of knowledge networks across partner firms; and (2) motivating partners to take actions to …

A New Look At The Corporate Social-Financial Performance Relationship: The Moderating Roles Of Temporal And Inter-Domain Consistency In Corporate Social Performance, Heli Wang, Jaepil Choi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors develop the argument that the establishment of good stakeholder relations is influenced not only by a firm’s having a high level of corporate social performance but also by its ability to deliver consistent social performance. Therefore, both level and consistency in corporate social performance should have significant financial implications. More specifically, the authors suggest that level and two types of consistency in corporate social performance—temporal consistency and interdomain consistency—interact positively to influence a firm’s financial performance. Using a sample of 622 firms and 2,365 firm-year observations based on the Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini, & Co. data, the authors found …

Emerging Capability Or Continuous Challenge? Relocating Knowledge Work And Managing Process Interfaces, Stephan Manning, Thomas Hutzschenreuter, Alexander Strathmann

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This study examines interface management as a dynamic organizational capability supporting an increasing global distribution of knowledge work, based on an in-depth case of an automotive supplier. We show how local responses to experiences of task and interface ambiguity following the relocation of R&D processes may lead to a shift of organizational attention from ex-ante process design to continuous process and interface management. Findings suggest that flexible interface manager positions and partnership structures across locations facilitate local experimentation with effective transfer and handling of ambiguous and partially tacit tasks. This enhances the firm’s capacity to distribute an increasing variety of …

New Silicon Valleys Or A New Species? Commoditization Of Knowledge Work And The Rise Of Knowledge Services Clusters, Stephan Manning

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge services. Based on prior research on clusters and services offshoring, and data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN), major properties and contingencies of KSC growth are discussed and compared with both high-tech clusters and low-cost manufacturing clusters. Special emphasis is put on the ambivalent effect of commoditization of knowledge work on KSC growth: It is proposed that KSCs attract most projects if …

Sustainable Fashion At Nordstrom, Joe Lawless

MICCSR Case Studies

This CSR mini-case focuses on CSR issues related to the supply chain in the fashion industry. The case is based on the Fashion Futures 2025 report by the Forum for the Future, and focuses on anticipated supply shortages, workforce issues, technological advances, water shortages, high energy prices, re-use and remanufacturing changes. The case calls for students to develop a strategy for Nordstrom as they prepare for this changed new world

Knowledge Assessment Methodology – Results For Poland, Anna Ujwary-Gil

Anna Ujwary-Gil

The object of this paper is to present the latest findings relating to the Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM), with particular regard to Poland, which the author has compared to other countries in Europe and Central Asia (taken as one grouping of countries according to region). The four main pillars of this tool for elementary analysis in the area are, eg. the economic and institutional regime, education, innovation and ICT. The article begins by presenting evidence of an emerging knowledge-based economy, its importance and issues concerning its definition. Subsequently the author discussed the key elements of KAM in order to present …

Towards The Definition Of A Tourism Cluster, Magdalena Kachniewska

Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation JEMI

The concept of tourism clusters is becoming central within the tourism development planning process and the EU perceives cluster arrangements as the preferred form of introducing innovations in different economic fields, including tourism. The Polish Tourism Organization (POT) is to launch the subprogram aimed at the commercialization of the tourism product and intensification of SMEs’ integration processes (vertical and horizontal ones), which shall boost the innovativeness of Polish tourism regions and enterprises. The main purpose of this article is to find rationale for tourism cluster formation in Polish TDAs and to formulate the definition and main attributes of the tourism …

Context And Animacy Play A Role In Dynamic Decision-Making, Magda Osman, Alexandros Ananiadis-Basias

Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation JEMI

Perception, judgment, and reasoning are all processes that are sensitive to cues to animacy (i.e. the presence of signals that indicate an object behaves as if it has intentions and internal goals). The present study investigated the following question: Does animacy facilitate decision-making in a dynamic control system? To address this, the present study used a dynamic decision-making task and compared behavior in four different contexts (Abstract, Animate-Social, Inanimate-Social, Inanimate- Non-social). Participants were randomly allocated to one of these contexts, and in each version they were required to learn to manipulate variables in order to bring the dynamic system to …

Entrepreneurial Orientation In Mexican Microenterprises, Héctor Montiel Campos, Luis S. Alvarado Acuña, José Pablo Nuño De La Parra, Francisco A. Aguilar Valenzuela

Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation JEMI

Over the past 30 years research on Entrepreneurship Orientation (EO) has provided valuable information regarding strategy, entrepreneurship and aspects of performance at the firm-level. In the entrepreneurial universe, microenterprises play a very special role in the business context of the economy. However, they have not been relatively present in the EO research. This paper studies the EO-performance relationship in a group of microenterprises in Mexico and includes the Dominant Logic (DL) as a variable that moderates this relationship. The results indicate that risk taking, proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness variables from the EO influence the microenterprise performance. In addition, the external …