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

This paper investigates the case of market entry strategies following the introduction of a disruptive innovation. Recognizing that market entry strategies have been envisioned in the literature as a discrete phenomenon, we develop an empirical framework that portrays these strategies as a capability building process. Three organizational modes are integrated into our model: acquisition, alliance and market transaction. We compare the first two with the third and test the model in the setting of the online brokerage industry by using a sample of 897 moves made by 98 firms between 1994 and 2000. We suggest that firms' entry modes can be differentiated along factors specific to market timing as well as the degree of specificity of targeted capabilities. Our findings show that acquisitions are used to access specific capabilities. This means that external sources can be used when firms face a make‐or‐buy decision in the aftermath of technological change. Alliances appear to play a limited role while market t...

Innovation, New Market and Governance Choices of Entry: The Internet Brokerage Market Case

As recent studies on the evolution of a technology indicate, the role of a standard, or dominant design, is highly significant in a number of contemporary industries such as computer, telecommunications and consumer electronics. Following Katz' and Shapiro's pioneering works (1985), our paper rationally evaluates the concepts and results developed over the past ten years in this field. It is grounded on a typology of two types of models: the first is based on users' anticipatory behaviour, and the second, on the collaborative behaviour of existing firms. The article initially discusses the specificity of network technologies, then analyses market standardisation models, and finally, studies the different actors models. Our conclusion builds upon existing works in network technologies. We next propose a research agenda

Standardization of Network Technologies: Market Processes or the Result of Inter‐Firm Co‐operation?

Inter-organizational communities of practice (IOCoPs) are today an emergent research topic and studies in this area are still in an exploratory phase. Theoretical mechanisms are vaguely specified and empirical studies are incipient. For this reason, this paper firstly aims at presenting the specificities and stakes of such organizational forms, establishing reference points for further research in this field. We will introduce the main features of IOCoPs and explain why they do not represent a mere subcategory of CoPs, but a unit of analysis per se. In this paper, we will follow a thematic approach to indicate IOCoPs' specificities and stakes. We will thus look at the IOCoPs' actors (in part I), IOCoPs as original organizational forms (part II), then IOCoPs' life cycle (part III). Finally, we will synthesize IOCoPs' distinctive features and conclude with a discussion on key interests of IOCoPs for both practitioners and academics.

Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice: Specificities and Stakes

This paper describes the way firms participating in R&D consortia can benefit from the outcome of common R&D. More specifically, it is suggested that R&D consortia, which are part of the European EUREKA initiative, provide appropriate organizational structures for the creation of new knowledge and competencies. This qualitative research shows that both the function provided to the consortium and in-house capabilities help partners to create resources thanks to co-operative R&D. The links between R&D co-operative outcomes and both the organizational design of the consortium and the internal capabilities of member firms are of general interest for all companies involved in comparable types of consortia and, more generally, in technological partnerships

Creating New Resources through European R&D Partnerships

While organizational boundaries have attracted an increasing amount of theoretical and empirical attention in recent years, little is known about service outsourcing strategies. In this paper, we use a modified version of the Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) approach to empirically examine service outsourcing contracts. We test the link between contractual hazards (i.e., asset specificity, internal uncertainty and external uncertainty), the contractual aspects of outsourcing (i.e., contract duration and contractual density) and the level of ex post transaction costs. While TCE proponents generally link contractual hazards to governance forms, we propose a modified TCE framework linking contractual hazards, governance forms and transaction costs. The results of the three-tier model reveal that contractual hazards have both a direct and indirect effect on ex post transaction costs. It also shows that contract duration, an often-neglected dimension in TCE literature, is positively related to contractual density. Finally, outsourcing is a bilateral governance with an intermediate level of specificity which requires contractual safeguards.

Bertrand Quelin

Papers

Innovation, New Market and Governance Choices of Entry: The Internet Brokerage Market Case

Standardization of Network Technologies: Market Processes or the Result of Inter‐Firm Co‐operation?

Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice: Specificities and Stakes

Creating New Resources through European R&D Partnerships

Contractual agreements and outsourcing: a modified transaction-cost analysis