Developments in technology and globalisation have led to an upsurge in inter-organizational relations. This book surveys the current field, connects differing perspectives and answers questions about who should collaborate, why, and how.

In her pioneering book Platform Leadership (with Michael Cusumano), Gawer gave us the strategy of building coalitions of customers, suppliers, and complementors. Now, she brings together a number of the leading researchers in the area of platform strategy to give us a book that will be a key reference for both practitioners and academics. Adam Brandenburger, New York University, US Annabelle Gawer s collected volume of research shows that a vibrant community of scholars has arisen around platforms and innovation. Each of the chapters is first rate, with top researchers offering some of their latest work. This will be an indispensable book for students of innovation and technology management everywhere. Henry Chesbrough, University of California, Berkeley, US Annabelle Gawer s Platforms, Markets and Innovation is the first serious exploration of the critical but subtle role that platforms play in business, society and our personal lives. As digital technologies penetrate every nook and cranny of the world around us, we rely on platforms to both help us use the new technologies, as well as to organize new markets of innovation that add applications on top of the platforms and make them far more valuable. Dr Gawer s excellent book is designed to help us understand the mysterious nature of platforms. It brings together the insights of twenty-four experts around the world who contributed to the fourteen chapters of the book. Dr Gawer s book is invaluable to anyone trying to understand the nuanced nature of platforms, and their implications for the evolution of innovation in the 21st century. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM Academy of Technology, US The emergence of platforms is a novel phenomenon impacting most industries, from products to services. Industry platforms such as Microsoft Windows or Google, embedded within industrial ecosystems, have redesigned our industrial landscapes, upset the balance of power between firms, fostered innovation and raised new questions on competition and innovation. Annabelle Gawer presents cutting-edge contributions from 24 top international scholars from 19 universities across Europe, the USA and Asia, from the disciplines of strategy, economics, innovation, organization studies and knowledge management. The novel insights assembled in this volume constitute a fundamental step towards an empirically based, nuanced understanding of the nature of platforms and the implications they hold for the evolution of industrial innovation. The book provides an overview of platforms and discusses governance, management, design and knowledge issues. With a multidisciplinary approach, this book will strongly appeal to academics and advanced students in management, innovation, strategy, economics and design. It will also prove an enlightening read for business managers in IT industries.

Comprehensive in scope, Real Options reviews current techniques of capital budgeting and details an approach (based on the pricing of options) that provides a means of quantifying the elusive elements of managerial flexibility in the face of unexpected changes in the market. In the 1970s and the 1980s, developments in the valuation of capital-investment opportunities based on options pricing revolutionized capital budgeting. Managerial flexibility to adapt and revise future decisions in order to capitalize on favorable future opportunities or to limit losses has proven vital to long-term corporate success in an uncertain and changing marketplace. In this book Lenos Trigeorgis, who has helped shape the field of real options, brings together a wealth of previously scattered knowledge and research on the new flexibility in corporate resource allocation and in the evaluation of investment alternatives brought about by the shift from static cash-flow approaches to the more dynamic paradigm of real options—an approach that incorporates decisions on whether to defer, expand, contract, abandon, switch use, or otherwise alter a capital investment. Comprehensive in scope, Real Options reviews current techniques of capital budgeting and details an approach (based on the pricing of options) that provides a means of quantifying the elusive elements of managerial flexibility in the face of unexpected changes in the market. Also discussed are the strategic value of new technology, project interdependence, and competitive interaction. The ability to value real options has so dramatically altered the way in which corporate resources are allocated that future textbooks on capital budgeting will bear little resemblance to those of even the recent past. Real Options is a pioneer in this area, coupling a coherent picture of how option theory is used with practical insights in into real-world applications.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management has been written by an international team of leading academics, practitioners and rising stars and contains almost 550 individually commissioned entries. It is the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field and covers both the theoretical and more empirically/practitioner oriented side of the discipline.

This volume explores the changing nature of community in modern corporations. Community within and between firms--the fabric of trust so essential to contemporary business--has long been based on loyalty. This loyalty has been largely destroyed by three decades of economic turbulence, downsizing and restructuring. Yet community is more important than ever in an increasingly complex, knowledge-intensive economy. The thesis of this volume is that a new form of community is slowly emerging--one that is more flexible and wider in scope than the community of loyalty, and that transcends the limitations of both traditional Gemeinschaft and modern Gesellschaft. We call this form 'collaborative community'. The trend towards collaborative community is difficult to detect amidst the ferocious forces of market and bureaucratic rationalization. But close analysis of some of America's most successful corporations reveals three dimensions of the emerging form: · A shared ethic of interdependent contribution: distinct from the uneasy mix of loyalty and individualism that prevailed for so long; · A formalized set of norms of interdependent process management that include iterative co-design, metaphoric search, and systematic mutual understanding: distinct from both rigid authority hierarchies and informal log-rolling; · An interdependent social identity that supports these organizational features: distinct from both dependent, traditionalistic identities and the independence of the autonomous self that is often associated with Western culture. This volume is a collaborative effort of leading scholars in organization studies to delineate the new form of community and the forces encouraging and constraining it's growth. The contributors combine sociology and psychology theory with detailed analysis of business cases at the firm and inter-firm level.

To survive and thrive in the competition, firms have strived to achieve greater supply chain collaboration to leverage the resources and knowledge of suppliers and customers. Internet based technologies, particularly interorganizational systems, further extend the firms’ opportunities to strengthen their supply chain partnerships and share real-time information to optimize their operations. Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture explores the nature and characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of supply chain collaboration from multiple theoretical perspectives. Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture conceptualizes supply chain collaboration as seven interconnecting elements including information sharing, incentive alignment, goal congruence, decision synchronization, resource sharing, as well as communication and joint knowledge creation. These seven components define the occurrence of collaborative efforts and allow us to explain supply chain collaboration more precisely. Collaborative advantages are also divided into five components to capture the joint competitive advantages and benefits among supply chain partners. The definitions and measures developed here examine some central issue surrounding supply chain development but this is also followed up with real-life managerial practicalities. This balance of theory and practical application makes Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture a strong resource for industry practitioners and researchers alike.

In Great Minds In Management Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt have brought together some of the most influential and original thinkers in management. Their contributions to this volume not only outline their landmark contributions to management theory, but also reflect on the process of theory development, presenting their own personal accounts of the gestation of these theories.The result is not only an ambitious and original panorama of the key ideas in management theory presented by their originators, but also a unique collection of reflections on the process of theory development, an area which to date little has been written about by those who have actually had experience of building theory.In their concluding chapter, Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt draw together some common themes about the development of management theory over the last half a century, and suggest some of the conclusions to be drawn about how theory comes into being.