Business and Management

This book demonstrates the importance of the role of knowledge in firms and economies. The authors clarify the theoretical debates on the production and use of knowledge in organizations, and examine the challenges that face those managing knowledge at different levels of the organization. They develop the notion of ‘community’ within the context of the firm and explore the ways in which these communities learn and produce new knowledge, positing from this emphasis a challenging model of distributed governance of knowledge within and beyond firms. Using insights from academic disciplines including economics, science and technology studies, cognitive sciences, economic geography, and management science, the authors use analytical argument and empirical cases to develop a new theorization of knowledge formation and management, and in turn a new conception of the firm.

After twenty-five years of preparation, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is finally running its intensive scientific experiments into high-energy particle physics. These experiments, which have so captured the public's imagination, take the world of physics to a new energy level — the terascale — at which elementary particles are accelerated to one millionth of a percent of the speed of light and made to smash into each other with a combined energy of around fourteen trillion electron-volts. What new world opens up at the terascale? No one really knows, but the confident expectation is that radically new phenomena will come into view. The kind of Big Science being pursued at CERN, however, is becoming ever more uncertain and costly. Do the anticipated benefits justify the efforts and the costs? This book aims to give a broad organizational and strategic understanding of the nature of Big Science by analyzing one of the major experiments that uses the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS Collaboration. It examines such issues as: the flow of ‘interlaced’ knowledge between specialist teams; the intra- and inter-organizational dynamics of Big Science; the new knowledge capital being created for the workings of the experiment by individual researchers, suppliers, and e-science and ICTs; the leadership implications of a collaboration of nearly three thousand members; and the benefits for the wider societal setting. This book aims to examine how, in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk, ambitious scientific aims can be achieved by complex organizational networks characterized by cultural diversity, informality, and trust — and where Big Science can head next.

It has long been an interest of researchers in economics, sociology, organization studies, and economic geography to understand how firms innovate. Most recently, this interest has begun to examine the micro-processes of work and organization that sustain social creativity, emphasizing the learning and knowing through action when social actors and technologies come together in ‘communities of practice’; everyday interactions of common purpose and mutual obligation. These communities are said to spark both incremental and radical innovation. This book examines the concept of communities of practice and its applications in different spatial, organizational, and creative settings. Chapters examine the development of the concept, the link between situated practice and different types of creative outcome, the interface between spatial and relational proximity, and the organizational demands of learning and knowing through communities of practice. More widely, the chapters examine the compatibility between markets, knowledge capitalism, and community; seemingly in conflict with each other, but discursively not.

This book shows how firms can generate and nurture ideas. Weaving together lessons from such international leaders as Siemens, Unilever, Skandia, and Sony, along with their own first-hand consulting experiences, the authors introduce knowledge enabling — the overall set of organizational activities that promote knowledge creation — and demonstrate its power to transform an organization's knowledge into value-creating actions. They describe the five key “knowledge enablers” and outline what it takes to instill a knowledge vision, manage conversations, mobilize knowledge activists, create the right context for knowledge creation, and globalize local knowledge. The authors stress that knowledge creation must be more than the exclusive purview of one individual — or designated “knowledge” officer. Indeed, it demands new roles and responsibilities for everyone in the organization — from the elite in the executive suite to the frontline workers on the shop floor. Whether an activist, a caring expert, or a corporate epistemologist who focuses on the theory of knowledge itself, everyone in an organization has a vital role to play in making “care” an integral part of the everyday experience; in supporting, nurturing, and encouraging microcommunities of innovation and fun; and in creating a shared space where knowledge is created, exchanged, and used for sustained, competitive advantage. This book puts practical tools into the hands of managers and executives who are struggling to unleash the power of knowledge in their organization.

This book examines the initial commercial uses of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is one of the most modern, controversial and dynamic of the science-based technologies. It is not an object, but a set of techniques or way of doing things. The development of these technologies from the 1970s onwards illustrates the changing relationships between universities and firms, and between basic science and research oriented towards commercial uses. The main focus of the book is on two firms — DS Genentech in the United States and Kabi in Sweden — and their activities and ‘knowledge-seeking’ behaviour in the development of human growth hormone and how those ran in parallel with university science. This book was awarded the Schumpeter Society book prize in 1996. This paperback edition includes a new introduction in which the author reflects upon the most recent developments in biotechnology. The book will interest those who wish to understand the complexities of innovation processes in the ‘knowledge society’, for example, management and organisation researchers, economists, policy advisors, and managers and strategists responsible for turning knowledge into product and profit.

Humankind has always lived in a knowledge society. Yet, although we have been discussing the problem of valid knowledge since Plato and probably before, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that such knowledge came to be seen as an economic resource in its own right rather than as a support for the exploitation of other, more physical economic resources such as land, labour power, energy, etc. In recent years, a new specialization, knowledge management, has evolved to address some of the issues associated with the production and distribution of knowledge. It builds on the idea that organizations do not make good use of their knowledge resources and waste much of these. Knowledge management, however, still lacks a founding theory focused on the nature of knowledge and knowledge flows. The problem is that we cannot have a credible theory of how to manage knowledge in the firm without first developing a knowledge-based theory of the firm. The purpose of this book is to provide some theoretical perspective on the nature of organizationally relevant knowledge and to indicate the kind of research that might generate empirically testable hypotheses and further the development of a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Our theorizing builds on a conceptual framework — the Information-Space or I-Space — by means of which we explore how knowledge first emerges, and then gets articulated, diffused, and absorbed by a population of agents.

Every company can point to a growth strategy. Far fewer, however, systematically implement them; instead, they spend their time on incremental innovations, or rely on acquisitions. Organic, internal growth, accomplished through product line renewal and new service development, is essential to the long-term vitality of corporations across all industries. This book takes on the challenge large corporations have in generating internal innovation—developing new product lines that address new market applications and provide the corporation with new streams of revenue. It integrates the key disciplines—new product strategy, user research, concept development and prototyping, market testing, and business modeling—needed for enterprise growth. The book illustrates its framework with in-depth examples of companies that have leveraged their core technologies to new markets and new types of uses in order to generate impressive results, including IBM, Honda, and Mars. Many of these examples contain templates that readers can use in their own projects. The book ends by addressing the human side of new market applications, providing advice on what executives and innovation team leaders must do to execute the steps of the book's framework for new market applications development.

People and organizations continually strive to achieve effective action. But they do not have to do so in isolation. Available to them, especially on non-routine issues of great importance, is a broad array of advice from executives, change consultants, and academics. This is especially true on topics having to do with organizational learning, transformational change, and employee commitment. Much of this advice is appealing; much of it compelling, and providing it has become big business in its own right. The only problem is, most of it does not work — that is, most of it is not actionable. It is simply too full of abstract claims, inconsistencies, and logical gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for concrete actions in concrete settings. This book examines why and how most professional advice on non-routine issues continues to fail. It looks with great care at a limited number of representative examples, drawn from the author's review of more than one hundred books and countless articles. It then places all this material in the context of a different theory of effective action — one that leads not to skilled incompetence, but to specific predictions that can be tested in real life.

The Marxist prediction that capitalist bureaucracy must inevitably neutralize individualistic leadership in industry, has been disproved over and over by the careers of industrial “superstars” from Andrew Carnegie to Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, Estee Lauder, and David Rockefeller–all of whom could be described as having made their own personal stamp on their respective businesses. How a business replaces its chief executive often determines that firm's future. If a business does not effectively manage the transfer of power, utter turmoil can result, with profound implications not only for the CEO, but also for the other employees, the shareholders, and the community at large. Filled with inside stories from corporate boardrooms and fresh conceptual perspectives, this book describes the factors that affect executive succession. It examines how the management succession process involving chief executive officers of major corporations is affected by the heroic view that CEOs have of themselves. Arguing that personality can also affect the departure styles of retiring CEOs, the book defines four principle types: Monarchs, Generals, Ambassadors, and Governors. The personality of each type is outlined in interviews with real-life business leaders and illustrated with numerous pithy anecdotes.