This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal study into manufacturing performance, lean production principles and buyer supplier relations in the Japanese, US and UK automotive industries. A total of 26 first tier component makers in the three countries were subject to detailed benchmarking...

This paper provides a rigorous analysis of the impact of training upon the employment growth characteristics of small and medium sized firms. Using appropriate statistical techniques to cope with sample selection biases and heterogenerous employment growth patterns it reveals that training is...

There is growing evidence of the importance of co-operation between managers and workers for improving industrial performance. One manifestation of this is the growing use of human resource management (HRM) strategies to increase the involvement of employees. The survey of small and medium sized...

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering...

This paper explores the impact of management characteristics and patterns of collaboration on a firmÕs innovation performance in transforming innovation resources into commercially successful outputs. These questions are investigated using a recent firm level survey database for 465 innovative...

In the context of increasingly globalized markets, ever more complex supply chains and international manufacturing networks, corporate decision-making processes involve more and more actors, variables and criteria. This is a challenge for corporate head quarters. Many have argued that the role...

This paper examines the knowledge bases of the world's largest pharmaceuticals groups by sales. It puts forward the concepts of knowledge breadth and depth as the relevant dimensions along which knowledge bases can be mapped. Breadth is studied by analysing the evolution of specialisation by...

Whilst knowledge is a growing feature of corporate competitiveness and growth, it will make firms increasingly dependent on outside resources (including public and foreign resources), and will be increasingly disruptive to their internal organisation. This is because knowledge is increasingly...

Innovative firms face two major kinds of risks in developing new technologies: competence destruction and appropriability. High levels of technical uncertainty and radical changes in knowledge in some fields generate high technical failure risks and make it difficult to plan research and...