Showing papers by "David J. Teece published in 1994"

The Dynamic Capabilities of Firms: an Introduction

Abstract: An expanded paradigm is needed to explain how competitive advantage is gained and held. Firms resorting to 'resource-bas ed strategy' attempt to accumulate valuable technology assets and employ an aggressive intellectual property stance. However, winners in the global marketplace have been firms demonstrating timely responsiveness and rapid and flexible product innovation, along with the management capability to effectively coordinate and redeploy internal and external competences. This source of competitive advantage, 'dynamic capabilities', emphasizes two aspects. First, it refers to the shifting character of the environment; second, it emphasizes the key role of strategic management in appropriately adapting, integrating, and re-configuring internal and external organizational skills, resources, and functional competences toward changing environment.3 Only recently have researchers begun to focus on the specifics of developing firm-specific capabilities and the manner in which competences are renewed to respond to shifts in the business environment. The dynamic capabilities \ approach provides a coherent framework to integrate existing conceptual and empirical ^ knowledge, and facilitate prescription. This paper argues that the competitive advanis tage of firms stems from dynamic capabilities rooted in high performance routines z operating inside the firm, embedded in the firm's processes, and conditioned by its •*> history. It offers dynamic capabilities as an emerging paradigm of the modern business J firm that draws on multiple disciplines and advances, with the help of industry studies > in the USA and elsewhere.

Understanding corporate coherence: Theory and evidence

Abstract: Multiproduct firms are perceived to be coherent in their scope, yet there is no strong theoretical foundations to explain coherence in modern industrial organization theory. This paper shows that as U.S. manufacturing firms grow more diverse, they maintain a constant level of coherence between neighboring activities. This finding runs counter to the idea that firms with many activities are generally more ‘incoherent’. A framework is then presented which appeals to the nature of enterprise learning, path dependencies, and the nature of the selection environment to explain the ubiquity of coherent diversifiers.