Suchergebnisse

Universities have become important components of the national innovation systems in innovation driven economies. To strengthen the university related flow of mainly technological knowledge into commercialized products many European countries have followed the American example and changed from an inventor-ownership system to a university-owned system (Genua & Rossi, 2011). Today most European countries have adopted a university-ownership system but with varying characteristics (Genua & Rossi, 2011). One of the strongest effects of changing to a university-owned system is a strengthening of the university support structures especially the founding or expansion of a Technology-Transfer organization (TTO). Most research indicates an increased output of patent applications, university-owned patents and license deals from the European universities (Genua & Rossi, 2011; Siegel et al, 2007). Will the university owned system give privilege to patents and license deals instead of trying to capture a higher value from university ownership in a university spinout as Kenney & Patton's (2009; 2011) research indicate? The Scandinavian countries have since a decade changed university laws, policies and allocated specific resources in order to stimulate commercialization of university research. While Denmark and Norway changed intellectual property laws in favor of university ownership and pushed for commercialization early in the 2000's, Sweden retained the professor's privilege system or university inventor system. The paper reports on a survey of Scandinavian universities' technology-transfer offices regarding their patenting, licensing and university-spin-off activities in the years from 2000 to 2012. Results show an increase in commercialization activities in Denmark and Norway confirming earlier results by Genua and Rossi (2011). The Danish development shows a clear increase of patenting and licensing activity but a stagnation of university spin-outs. The Norwegian development is less clear but also here a pattern of more licensing and stagnation of spinouts is visible. In contrast Swedish universities' TTO-systems are organized for spinouts and produce mostly university spinouts. Patenting is done also in Sweden but primarily in conjunction with the spinout process. Moreover, pure licensing deals are rare in the Swedish system. The study provides some support for Kenney and Patton's (2009; 2011) results that university owned systems favour the business model of patenting and licensing while university inventor systems favour the business model of spinoffs. This study does however note the effect of other factors than the university intellectual property regime as important in the development. These are government initiatives and resource allocations for university commercialization, the capabilities of the TTO and the universities' choice of commercialization support structure.

There are many explanations for the so-called rigor-relevance gap in academic research on strategic management. This Element reviews the existing literature on the matter and argues that it must go beyond the typical explanations of knowledge and language differences and look at more fundamental, societal, and cultural explanations. The empirical focus of this Element is the history and possible particularities of strategic management research in Sweden where the authors show how almost 300 years of relevance-centered research have undergone significant changes over the last 30 years, and that the historical development is based very much on societal pressure, academic culture and shifting perspectives on the role of academic research. The authors conclude by offering a couple of examples of how Swedish research, close to its traditional approaches, still can contribute to relevance and thus help balance the rigor-relevance divide.

A taxonomy of corporate governance structures based on equity and debt financial interest is offered as an alternative to the conventional emphasis on ownership concentration. Hypotheses on the association between the proposed governance structures and the strategic variable of diversification are formulated and tested on a sample of 73 large Swedish corporations. The theory explains significantly a tiny bit of the variance in diversification, something the conventional theory limited to ownership structure considerations was unable to do.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to use the relative power and total interdependence concepts as an intervening theoretical lens to explain why and how sustainable supply management (SSM) initiatives by manufacturing firms differ across the Kraljic matrix according to purchasing capability.


Design/methodology/approach
– Tested hypotheses by subjecting survey data from 338 manufacturers on buyer-supplier relationships in Europe and North America to regression analysis.


Findings
– Shows three situations where relative power and total interdependence determine the effectiveness of purchasing capabilities. First, sustainability programs impact supplier compliance in all Kraljic categories but bottleneck items. Second, there are significant trade-offs between lower cost and higher social and environmental supplier compliance for noncritical components. Third, strategic alignment of sustainability objectives between corporate and supply function levels only leads to improved financial performance for strategic components.


Research limitations/implications
– Further research could take power and dependence into account to explain when and how purchasing capabilities focussed on sustainability can be achieved.


Practical implications
– Shows how supply strategists could devise-tailored approaches for different purchasing categories with respect to power and dependence when pursuing economic, social and environmental objectives in combination – the triple bottom line – along their supply chains.


Originality/value
– Illustrates and provides a theoretical explanation for why SSM is a purchasing capability that must vary across purchasing categories defined by different situations of power and dependence.

Alliances are volatile key components of many corporations' competitive strategies. They offer fast and flexible means of achieving market access, scale economies, and competence development. However, strategic alliances can encounter difficulties that often lead to disappointing performance. The authors suggest that the way partners manage the collective learning process plays a central role in the success and failure of strategic alliances. Present understanding of interorganizational learning primarily focuses on how the individual organization can be a "good partner" or try to win the internal "race to learn" among the partners. The interorganizational learning dilemma is that (1) being a good partner invites exploitation by partners attempting to maximize their individual appropriation of the joint learning, and (2) such opportunistic learning strategies undercut the collective knowledge development in the strategic alliance. The authors develop a framework for understanding the dilemma through consideration of trade-offs between how collective learning is developed in alliances and how the joint learning outcomes are divided among the partners. They create a typology of five different learning strategies based on how receptive as well as how transparent an organization is in relation to its partners. The strategies are: collaboration (highly receptive and highly transparent); competition (highly receptive and nontransparent); compromise (moderately receptive and transparent); accommodation (nonreceptive and highly transparent); and avoidance (neither receptive nor transparent). Interorganizational learning outcomes are proposed to be the interactive results of the respective partners' type of adopted learning strategy. By synthesizing strategic alliance, organizational learning, collective action, and game theories, the framework contributes to understanding the variety in alliance development, performance, and longevity. Interorganizational learning is likely to be hindered by lack of either motivation or ability to absorb and communicate knowledge between the partner organizations. The dynamics of power, opportunism, suspicion, and asymmetric learning strategies can constitute processual barriers to collective knowledge development. In contrast, prior related interaction between the partners, high learning stakes, trust, and long-term orientation are likely to empower the collective learning process. Comparison of previous case studies and surveys of interorganizational learning provides partial empirical support for the proposed framework. The comparison also indicates several omissions in previous research, such as failure to consider either how receptive or how transparent the partners are, the interaction between their learning strategies, and their dynamic processes over time. Because these omissions are due partly to the methodological limitations of traditional case studies and crosssectional surveys, the authors suggest a bridging case survey design for a more comprehensive test of their interactive, dynamic, and situational framework.

The rapid spread of Lean implementation within the health care sector has made it urgent to evaluate the effects of Lean on productivity, working conditions and health. Therefor an instrument is needed to measure Lean in primary care. The aim with this research is to find an instrument that captures the character of Lean. A literature search was conducted in Academic Search Elite, WileyOnlineLibrary, PubMed, Cinahl, PsycInfo, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, Emerald and Scopus. Keywords used were reflecting Lean and measurement and the search resulted in 7933 hits. Included were articles that presented an instrument that had the possibilities to distinguish between high or low Lean adoption. Malmbrandt and Åhlstöm´s (2014) instrument fulfilled criteria and was chosen. The original instrument was firstly translated to Swedish. A back translation was made by a bilingual authorized translator. The prototype will be tested among health care professions in Sweden using the think aloud method (TA) with the aim to explore how the participants perceive and interpret the Swedish version (Collins 2003). Immediately afterwards, they will be interviewed about how they interprets specific expressions in the questionnaire. After every round of 5-15 interviews the prototype will be adjusted and when saturation is reached the TA will terminate. After psychometric tests the finalized Swedish version of the instrument is to be used in a longitudinal study to describe status of Lean and how Lean correlate with the health of primary health care staff, there working conditions and productivity over time.

Purpose
– The interest in global purchasing has increased significantly in recent years, but the impact on product innovation is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyse the impact of global purchasing on product innovation sourced from suppliers, while taking into account how firms integrate their suppliers.


Design/methodology/approach
– The data used in this study are from the International Purchasing Survey, an international online survey on purchasing and supply management conducted in 2009. The data are analysed using factor and regression analyses.


Findings
– The paper shows that global purchasing has no direct impact on product innovation performance. However, supplier integration is more strongly associated with product innovation performance for firms purchasing globally compared to firms purchasing regionally.


Practical implications
– The implication is that when companies purchase globally, they must have a highly developed purchasing department in order to sustain a high level of innovation. For firms purchasing only regionally, the role of the purchasing department is diminished, at least in terms of contributing to innovation.


Originality/value
– This paper contributes to the discussion of potential advantages and disadvantages of global purchasing. First, the paper provides an explanation for the ambiguous results of previous research. Product innovation does not depend on whether firms are purchasing globally or not, it depends on how they purchase. This paper has showed that when purchasing globally, the role of the purchasing department becomes crucial for product innovation. The proficiency and activities of the purchasing department largely determine the success, in terms of supplier product innovation, of global purchasing.