The world of business is in the throes of a new revolution. It is, paradoxically, both the best and worst of times. Opportunity abounds, but the economic, societal, and technological foundations of the Machine Age are crumbling. Confounded by chaos and heavily pressured for results, most Western managers have no better ideas for how to compete than to endlessly copy each other, cut costs, and buy up rivals. Downsizing is epidemic and decline common.Clearly, the world is going though a major transition. When this transformation is completed, it will look very different. This upheaval will...

Price and quality alone are no longer sufficient to gain competitive advantage. It is high quality knowledge which provides the opportunities for adding exclusive value to products and services. At the same time, the development of knowledge is gaining momentum. Knowledge is becoming obsolete more quickly and becomes more complex. The danger of this development is that organizations will continue to play the same competitive game and are often unaware that they are lagging behind.This book provides organizations with a way to shift the knowledge ambition and realize it in practice. For this...

This book deals with the systems of cost reduction that originated in Japan. These are mostly new systems that did not exist in western practices before they were utilized in Japan. The book also presents the Japanese ways of carrying out the globally popular cost reduction practices.(1) It describes the strategic cost management conducted by top management through alliances between companies and/or between government and industry.(2) It shows the functional cost reduction systems along the various phases of the product life cycle, as follows: R&D → Product development →...

Latest Edition: From Knowledge Management to Strategic Competence: Assessing Technological, Market and Organisational Innovation (3rd Edition)The business and academic communities pay much interest to the concept of knowledge management and strategic competencies or core capabilities; that is, how organizations define and differentiate themselves. This book attempts to establish the links between strategic competencies, knowledge management, organizational learning and innovation management — specifically, how an organization identifies, assesses and exploits its competencies, and...

This book provides a detailed, multi-disciplinary analysis of innovation networks in a variety of organisational settings. All the contributors are employed at Aston Business School, which is one of the UK's foremost institutions in terms of both teaching and research. The book illustrates the way in which innovation networks are formed and sustained in a variety of organisational settings: the public sector, public-private collaboration, national policy level, inter-organisational credit links, as well as the more traditional focus on manufacturing firms. The strength of the network approach...

This book deals with key issues and trade-offs in R&D strategy and organisation, paying attention especially to dynamic competitive contexts where technology plays a key role. These topics are treated from the perspective of the decision taker, i.e. the manager who makes decisions in terms of R&D strategy and organisation. The book addresses typical problems of large firms having structured R&D and operating businesses where R&D is a source of competitive advantages. Although it focuses strongly on R&D, it sees R&D as a part (a key part) of the process of technological innovation, and...

In the most advanced service economies, services create up to three-quarters of the wealth and 85% of employment, and yet we know relatively little about managing innovation in this sector. The critical role of services, in the broadest sense, has long been recognized, but is still not well understood. Most research and management prescriptions have been based on the experience of manufacturing and high technology sectors. There is a clear need to distinguish which, if any, of what we know about managing innovation in manufacturing is applicable to services, what must be adapted, and what is...

Latest Edition: From Knowledge Management to Strategic Competence: Assessing Technological, Market and Organisational Innovation (3rd Edition)The business and academic communities continue to have an interest in the concepts of knowledge management and strategic competencies or core capabilities. This book attempts to establish the links between strategic competencies, knowledge management, organisational learning and innovation — specifically, how an organisation identifies, assesses and exploits its competencies, and translates these into new processes, products and services.The...

In recent years, the way open source software is developed has taken hold as a valid alternative to commercial proprietary methods, as have the products themselves, e.g., the Linux operating system, Apache web-server software, and Mozilla Firefox browser. But what is open source software? How is the open source community organized? What makes this new model successful? What effects has it had and might it have on the future of the IT industry, companies and government policies? These and many other questions are answered in this book.The first chapter gives a brief history of the open source...

With the development of information technology in recent years, there is a growing need to merge different technologies and services, to develop products, services and business models that span different industries. Corporations must have processes through which they can access share, and integrate diverse knowledge. In this book, the author proposes a dynamic yet practical method for project leaders to integrate diverse knowledge distributed on projects network to develop new products, services and business models. Case studies on companies such as Vodafone, Mitsubishi Electric, Canon, Sony,...