Business Commons^™

The Complexity Of Business Schools, Kai Peters, Howard Thomas

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Kai Peters and Howard Thomas wonder how long business schools can survive the growing complexity of their industry.

Scarcity In The Twenty-First Century: How The Resource Nexus Affects Management, Simon J. D. Schillebeeckx, Mark Workman, Charles Dean

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Since theadvent of the 21st century and especially since the food andfinancial crisis in 2008, concerns about natural resource availability haveresurfaced. While scarcity concerns date back hundreds of years and arefoundational to economics, how scarcity is interpreted or framed has evolved significantlyin the last two centuries. In this chapter, we recount the evolving scarcity discourseand specifically address the most recent iteration that centres on the idea ofa resource nexus. While significant attention to the nexus has been paid bypolicy-makers and scholars interested in especially water, management scholarshave so far remained absent from these debates. Given recent calls to address grand …

Bridging The Mutual Knowledge Gap: Coordination And The Commercialization Of University Science, Reddi Kotha, Gerard George, Kannan Srikanth

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine why commercialization of interdisciplinary research, especially from distant scientific domains, is different from commercialization of inventions from specialized or proximate domains. We argue that anticipated coordination costs arising from the need to transfer technology to licensee firms and from the need for an inventor team's members to work together to further develop a technology significantly impact commercialization outcomes. We use a sample of 3,776 university invention disclosures to test whether variation in the types of experience of the scientists on a team influences the likelihood that an invention will be licensed. We proffer evidence to support our hypotheses …

The Upstart's Assault, Marco Bertini, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The article presents a fictional case study that focuses on how to manage competition in the telecommunication services industry. The issue is that one company could lose customers and market share because another company is offering free broadband. Georg Tacke, co-chief executive officer of Simon-Kucher & Partners company, and Anne Gro Gulla, a branding director at Telenor Group company, offer their views on how to respond to a competitive attack without causing a price war.

India Unleashed, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporations in the developed world increasingly see India as a high-growth market and its companies as acquirers of their assets, global competitors, partners for enhancing the competitiveness of their global value chain and a source of new energy and dreams for the world economy. How did this all happen? The author shares the essence of what he learned from 10 trips to India to interview more than 30 CEOs and top executives who are unleashing the new global power of Indian firms.

The Effects Of Entrepreneurial Growth Orientation On Organizational Change And Firm Growth, Wee Liang Tan, Thomas Menkhoff, Yue Wah Chay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Managing growth in an enterprise as it grows beyond the startup phase is a challenge for many entrepreneurs. One key element that can help or hinder growth is the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial growth has been linked to micro variables (motivations and psychological attributes of the entrepreneur) and macro variables. However, few studies have examined the role of the growth aspirations of the entrepreneur on the necessary elements of organization change related to growth.

This paper reports a study employing a typology of entrepreneurs based on their growth aspirations using an established dichotomous scale devised by Smith to differentiate between what he …

Employee Incentives To Make Firm Specific Investment: Implications For Resource-Based Theories Of Corporate Diversification, Heli Wang, Jay B. Barney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We argue that the risk associated with the value of a firm's core resources has an impact on employee decisions to make firm-specific investments, independent of the threat of opportunism that might exist in a particular exchange. We further explore mechanisms firms may adopt to mitigate the employee incentive problem stemming from the risk associated with core resource value. These arguments shed new light on resource-based theories of corporate diversification.

Do Suppliers Benefit From Collaborative Relationships With Large Retailers? An Empirical Investigation Of Efficient Consumer Response Adoption, Daniel Corsten, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Collaborative manufacturer-retailer relationships based on efficient consumer response (ECR) have become ubiquitous over the past decade. Yet academic studies of ECR adoption and its impact on marketing relationships are relatively scarce. Inspired by the relational view of competitive advantage, the authors empirically investigate whether the extent to which suppliers of a major retailer adopt ECR has a beneficial impact on their outcomes. The results demonstrate that whereas ECR adoption has a positive impact on supplier economic performance and capability development, it also generates greater perceptions of negative inequity on the part of the supplier. However, retailer capabilities and supplier trust …

Why Is Management A Cliché?, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article introduces the term demotics of management by asking why so much management literature reads like a cliché. Typically this question has been approached by seeing the cliché as strategic. This article instead views the cliché as symptomatic. It marks a growing problem—how can management track labor out of the workplace and into the realm of social reproduction, a realm that is increasingly, with the tendency of immaterial labor, directly productive. This problem has produced not only the explosion of popular management literature, particularly in the United States, in the last 20 years, but also what might be called …

Profits In The Pie Of The Beholder, Daniel Corsten, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the early 1990s, grocery suppliers and retailers joined forces to streamline operations - an initiative called "efficient consumer response." Today, suppliers feel like they're not getting their fair share of the profits from ECR. But they stand to lose more if they give up on it, the authors say.

Conducting Interorganizational Research Using Key Informants, Nirmalya Kumar, Louis W. Stern, James C. Anderson

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this article, we examine the use of the key informant methodology by researchers investigating interorganizational relationships. Authors have advocated the use of multiple informants to increase the reliability and validity of informant reports. However, interorganizational research still tends to rely on single informants. We investigated informant selection and obtaining perceptual agreement among multiple informants, two problems that may have inhibited widespread use of multiple informants. We suggest procedures for dealing with those problems and provide an illustrative application of our proposals.

Interpreting And Responding To Strategic Issues: The Impact Of National Culture, Susan C. Schneider, Arnoud De Meyer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Perceptions of environmental uncertainty and organizational control influence strategic behavior. As national culture influences these perceptions we expect to find cultural differences in interpretation and response to strategic issues. Given a case describing an issue concerning deregulation of the U.S. banking industry, managers completed questionnaires rating interpretations and responses to that issue. National culture was found to influence interpretation and responses. In particular, Latin European managers when compared with other managers were more likely to interpret the issue as a crisis and as a threat. Latin Europeans were also more likely to recommend proactive behavior. This study indicates that different …

Managing Expert Systems: A Framework And Case Study, Rob R. Weitz, Arnoud De Meyer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper addresses the problem of managing the development and implementation of a large expert system in an organization. A traditional systems analysis and design methodology is used as a framework to highlight similarities and differences in managing large scale traditional computer based projects and large expert systems. As a non-technical, prescriptive guide, this article focusses on defining at each stage in the project, the tasks to be accomplished, resources required, impact on the organization, likely benefits and potential problems. The case of a large expert system implemented by a multinational corporation across several European sites is used to clarify …