Towards technological rules for designing innovation networks: a dynamic capabilities view.

Inter-organizational innovation networks provide opportunities to exploit complementary resources that reside beyond the boundary of the firm. The shifting locus of innovation and value creation away from the “sole firm as innovator” poses important questions about the nature of these resources and the capabilities needed to leverage them for competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to describe research into producing design-oriented knowledge, for configuring inter-organizational networks as a means of accessing such resources for innovation

Beyond enterprise resource planning projects: innovative strategies for competitive advantage

ABSTRACT A rapidly changing business environment and legacy IT problems has resulted in many organisations implementing standard package solutions. This 'common systems' approach establishes a common IT and business process infrastructure within organisations and its increasing dominance raises several important strategic issues. These are to what extent do common systems impose common business processes and management systems on competing firms, and what is the source of competitive advantage if the majority of firms employ almost identical information systems and business processes? A theoretical framework based on research into legacy systems and earlier IT strategy literature is used to analyse three case studies in the manufacturing, chemical and IT industries. It is shown that the organisations are treating common systems as the core of their organisations' abilities to manage business transactions. To achieve competitive advantage they are clothing these common systems with information systems designed to capture information about competitors, customers and suppliers, and to provide a basis for sharing knowledge within the organisation and ultimately with economic partners. The importance of these approaches to other organisations and industries is analysed and an attempt is made at outlining the strategic options open to firms beyond the implementation of common business systems

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Boundary Spanning in Business Process Management: Theoretical Framing and Case Study

Based on dynamic capability and boundary spanning theory, this study develops a theoretical framework for collaborative BPM in inter-organizational networks. The framework presents collaborative BPM as an organizational capability that serves for connecting business processes through the purposeful employment of boundary objects (e.g., information systems) and boundary spanners (people) at the interfaces between different network partners. Collaborative BPM itself is also considered to rely on boundary spanners and boundary objects as they are needed to facilitate the cross-organizational sensing, seizing, and implementation of business process changes. The framework is applied in a multiple case study in which the collaborative BPM efforts of three exemplary organizations, which all participate in inter-organizational networks, are analyzed. As for practice, the framework provides a systematic blueprint that organizations can use to reflect on their capabilities for collaborative BPM. As for research, the study provides a theoretical framing from which future studies can depart to explore phenomena related to collaborative BPM