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...

This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world's large industrial firms. The objective of the research is twofold. First, to emphasise the emerging differences among technologies when...

This paper builds upon on-going research into the organisational implications of 'modularity'. Advocates of modularity argue that the Invisible Hand of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the Visible Hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits...

Is gift-exchange inevitably to be crowded out by impersonal market exchange? The presence of a thick-market externality indicates that this is indeed likely to be the case. But reciprocity or gift-exchange induces social relations. The utility function is extended in order to take account of...

This paper generalizes Porter’s notion of the value chain for the analysis of service industries. The generalization entails that the flow and the physical transformation and assembly of goods that are characteristic of manufacturing are generalized into flows and transformation of data and...

Short-term performance of a production management system for make-to-stock factories may be quantified through the service rate per shift; long-term performance through the average monthly work in process (WIP). This may yield, for example, that WIP is minimized, while the probability of the...