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

Models that depict innovation as a smooth, well-behaved linear process badly misspecify the nature and direction of the causal factors at work. Innovation is complex, uncertain, somewhat disorderly, and subject to changes of many sorts. Innovation is also difficult to measure and demands close coordination of adequate technical knowledge and excellent market judgment in order to satisfy economic, technological, and other types of constraints—all simultaneously. The process of innovation must be viewed as a series of changes in a complete system not only of hardware, but also of market environment, production facilities and knowledge, and the social contexts of the innovation organization.

An Overview of Innovation

Everybody knows that digital technology has revolutionized our economy and our lifestyles. But how many of us really understand the drivers behind the technology – the significance of going digital; the miniaturization of electronic devices; the role of venture capital in financing the revolution; the importance of research and development? How many of us understand what it takes to make money from innovative technologies? Should we worry about manufacturing going offshore? What is the role of India and China in the digital economy? Drawing on a lifetime’s experience in the industry, as an engineer, a senior manager, and as a partner in a global venture capital firm, Henry Kressel offers an expert personalized answer to all these questions. He explains how the technology works, why it matters, how it is financed, and what the key lessons are for public policy.

Competing for the Future

Historically, management theory has ignored the constraints imposed by the biophysical (natural) environment. Building upon resource-based theory, this article attempts to fill this void by proposing a natural-resource-based view of the firm—a theory of competitive advantage based upon the firm's relationship to the natural environment. It is composed of three interconnected strategies: pollution prevention, product stewardship, and sustainable development. Propositions are advanced for each of these strategies regarding key resource requirements and their contributions to sustained competitive advantage.

A natural resource-based view of the firm

An intertwined supply network (ISN) is an entirety of interconnected supply chains (SC) which, in their integrity secure the provision of society and markets with goods and services. The ISNs are o...

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02568319/document

Viability of intertwined supply networks: extending the supply chain resilience angles towards survivability. A position paper motivated by COVID-19 outbreak

Strategic capacity management: meeting technological demands and performance criteria

Research to date for decision-making on outsourcing has almost exclusively focussed on strategic and operational levels. Consequently, we know relatively little about decision-making on outsourcing during design and engineering, i.e. the tactical level; that also means that the characteristics of design and engineering – incomplete and inaccurate information and progressive availability of data – are not incorporated in existing frameworks and methods at that level. To fill this gap, a first-of-its-kind framework, based on an extensive appraisal of the literature, is validated; to that purpose, a Delphi survey was undertaken gauging the opinions of two homogeneous groups of academic and industry experts. The analysis of the survey affirms the assumptions made about the role of the progressive availability of data during decision-making on outsourcing. The results from this study should not only inform further research into decision-making during design and engineering but potentially the framework might a...

Outsourcing: decision-making methods and criteria during design and engineering

Expanding bottleneck management from manufacturing to product design and engineering processes

Outsourcing and/or offshoring is one of the important and key strategic approaches in complex, dynamic and competitive global supply chains. It is one of the sustained trends of business undertaken...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00207543.2019.1603698

Outsourcing and offshoring decision making

The question whether the often-radical approach of Business Process Re-engineering constitutes a viable option for restructuring is at the heart of this study. It appraises the case of Business Process Re-engineering and its kin—process innovation and the Delft School Approach—from an evolutionary perspective based on an analogy between organisms and organizations. The research introduces a reference model that originates in evolutionary biological theories and models. The study undertaken—archival research for Business Process Re-engineering and process innovation, and six case studies for the Delft School Approach—confirms that organizations evolve slower than expected, that Business Process Re-engineering as a radical approach is hardly viable, that it and its kin seem to be directed at optimization and that the initiatives hardly connect to external opportunities. The primary yield of this research is the reference model that makes it possible to describe these (often slower) evolutionary processes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Rob Dekkers

Papers

Strategic capacity management: meeting technological demands and performance criteria

Outsourcing: decision-making methods and criteria during design and engineering

Expanding bottleneck management from manufacturing to product design and engineering processes

Outsourcing and offshoring decision making

Adapting organizations: the instance of business process re‐engineering