How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Transaction cost economics (TCE) is one of the leading perspectives in management and organizational studies, yet debate continues regarding its empirical support. In this paper, we take stock of the large body of extant research and provide a systematic assessment of empirical evidence. In all, 308 statistical tests from 63 articles, selected according to a set of clear criteria, were examined across various dimensions. We assess not only the level of empirical support for the theory, but also the degree of paradigm consensus present in the empirical literature. Our analysis shows that results are mixed: while we found support in some areas (e.g., with regard to asset specificity), we also found considerable disagreement on how to operationalize some of TCE's central constructs and propositions, and relatively low levels of empirical support in other core areas (e.g., surrounding uncertainty and performance). We conclude that a more thorough empirical grounding of the theory's foundation is crucial to its future development, and offer several strategies for doing this. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A systematic assessment of the empirical support for transaction cost economics

Partnerships between companies receive a great deal of attention from top managers and researchers at the time of their formation. This attention results largely from the common perception that the initial structuring of partnerships and establishment of common goals determines partnership outcomes and success. In Alliance Advantage, Doz and Hamel shift the focus away from deal making to the internal processes within the partnership and the unfolding interactions among partners that play an important and relatively unexplored role in shaping outcomes. Focusing on the underlying reasons why companies enter alliances and the processes by which they continually learn from their interactions and re-evaluate common--and individual--goals, the authors paint a sophisticated picture of alliance dynamics over time. The authors challenge organizations to define their objectives for alliance formulation and consider whether their own corporate culture provides an "alliance ready" atmosphere.

Alliance advantage : the art of creating value through partnering

In this article, we examine, through an analysis of characteristics specific to both the partner firm and the consortium, the process of creating new resources and competencies in research and development (RD we attempt here to fulfill the insufficiencies in empirical analysis. Since we are interested in how individual participating companies succeed in creating resources, our research is focused on the partner firm itself and not on the consortium as a whole. Our statistical analysis of 317 firms enables us to examine the different types of technological developments that can be achieved through EUREKA R&D consortia. We study the impact that partner characteristics and the choice of a consortium's organizational form can have on the types of resources created by a partner. Our findings, which detail the factors that affect the creation of competencies in R&D consortia, strongly support the resource-based theory of the firm

Resource creation and partnership in R&D consortia

Comment envisager l'évolution économique sans concevoir une firme évolutionniste ? Contributions de la théorie des ressources à une théorie évolutionniste de la firme

Linking Competencies, Sustainable Competitive Advantage, and Performance: An Empirical Investigation

Summary: In this article, outsourcing is defined as the transfer of all or part of the existing information and communication systems (ICS) of a firm to a third party. The argument is based on the central model of transaction cost theory. Traditionally, this model concerns the make-or-buy choice. A firm that decides to outsource its ICS has already made a substantial investment in the system over several years. The article therefore develops an original analysis to help answer the following question: on what terms can a firm transfer ownership rights in highly specific hardware and software, and establish a long-term relationship with the service provider? Finally, the article proposes a generalization and an in- depth reflection on the organizational choices and governance structures to adopt when outsourcing.

Outsourcing: A transaction cost theory approach

How can non-profit organizations improve their governance to increase their social impact? This study examines the effectiveness of a bundle of governance mechanisms (consisting of pro-social incentives and auditing) in the context of a randomized governance program conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo's healthcare sector. Within the program, a set of health centers were randomly assigned to a governance treatment while others were not. We find that the governance treatment leads to i) higher operating efficiency and ii) improvements in social performance (measured by a reduction in the occurrence of stillbirths and neonatal deaths). Furthermore, we find that funding is not a substitute for governance—health centers that only receive funding increase their scale, but do not show improvements in operating efficiency nor social performance. Overall, our results suggest that corporate governance plays an important role in achieving the non-profits' objectives and increasing the social impact of the funds invested.

Bertrand Quelin

Papers

Resource creation and partnership in R&D consortia

Comment envisager l'évolution économique sans concevoir une firme évolutionniste ? Contributions de la théorie des ressources à une théorie évolutionniste de la firme

Linking Competencies, Sustainable Competitive Advantage, and Performance: An Empirical Investigation

Outsourcing: A transaction cost theory approach

Corporate Governance and Social Impact of Non‐Profits: Evidence from a Randomized Program in Healthcare in the Democratic Republic of Congo