How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies

Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards. Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives

Greater Space Means More Service: Leveraging the innovative power of architecture and design

Organizational structures certainly are of great importance in order to determine employees’ behaviour and performance. On the other hand, physical structures also significantly influence the way staff and customers view any company and interact with it. In service based activity, such as in retailing, banking, hospitality, and so, firms and institutions are competing thanks to innovations in products/services, delivery processes, and management styles. Innovative approaches may also materialize into the design of facilities. Service providers are in a position to significantly improve convenience, productivity, and attractiveness by designing space and defining appropriate layout carefully. This pattern also has to include identification of the meanings, characterization of size and qualification of the process by which any service facility delivers messages. In the last session of the paper, we address a particular type of service facilities, namely the buildings of institutions for higher education in management. The objective is then to analyze how facilities have evolved in order to cope with the change affecting business education.Service; innovation; architecture; working place; corporate symbols

SOA and BPM, a Partnership for Successful Organizations

In order to stay effective and competitive, companies have to be able to adapt themselves to permanent market requirements, to improve constantly their business process, to act as flexible and proactive economic agents. To achieve these goals, the IT systems within the organization have to be standardized and integrated, in order to provide fast and reliable data access to users both inside and outside the company. A proper system architecture for integrating company’s IT assets is a service oriented one. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that allows integration of the company’s business as linked, repeatable tasks called services. A subject closely related to SOA is Business Process Management (BPM), an approach that aims to improve business processes. The paper also presents some aspects of this topic, as well as the relationship between SOA and BPM. They complement each other and help companies improve their business performance.Information Systems, SOA, Web Services, BPM

Standard Selection Modes in Dynamic, Complex Industries: Creating Hybrids between Market Selection and Negotiated Selection of Standards

Several sectors within Information and Communication Technology demonstrate a shift from purely market-based selection of standards or purely negotiated selection of standards to hybrid selection processes, where both market competition and negotiation play a role. Negotiated standard setting processes (such as those organised by the ITU) assure interoperability of technical components and services. Private firms, however, increasingly tend to undercut these collective actions. Their innovations jump-start new developments, but also create incompatibilities, lock-in effects, and pockets of market power. Internet telephony is an example, where firms, standard setting alliances, and political institutions create a hybrid market-based / negotiated standard setting environment. The paper explores the development of this hybrid networking environment. It posits propositions which are illustrated by means of case studies of the DVD and Internet telephony.industrial organization ;

Mirroring or misting: On the role of product architecture, product complexity, and the rate of product component change

This paper contributes to the literature on the within-firm and across-firm mirroring hypothesis – the assumed architectural mapping between firms’ strategic choices of product architecture and firm architecture, and between firms’ architectural choices and the industry structures that emerge. Empirical evidence is both limited and mixed and there is evidently a need for a more nuanced theory that embeds not only whether the mirroring hypothesis holds, but under what product architecture and component-level conditions it may or may not hold. We invoke an industrial economics perspective to develop a stylised product architecture typology and hypothesise how the combined effects of product architecture type, product complexity and the rate of product component change may be associated with phases of mirroring or misting. Our framework helps to reconcile much existing mixed evidence and provides the foundation for further empirical research

Platform Rules: Multi-Sided Platforms as Regulators

This paper provides a basic conceptual framework for interpreting non-price instruments used by multi-sided platforms (MSPs) by analogizing MSPs as "private regulators" who regulate access to and interactions around the platform. We present evidence on Facebook, TopCoder, Roppongi Hills and Harvard Business School to document the "regulatory" role played by MSPs. We find MSPs use nuanced combinations of legal, technological, informational and other instruments (including price-setting) to implement desired outcomes. Non-price instruments were very much at the core of MSP strategies.Platforms, regulation, network effects, distributed innovation

U.S. Foreign Trade in Services: Trends and U.S. Policy Challenges

[Excerpt] This report provides background information and analysis on U.S. foreign trade in services. The focus of the report is an analysis of the policy challenges that the United States confronts, especially the challenge of negotiating a set of international disciplines on trade in services and dealing with the complexity of measuring trade in services. The report also focuses on emerging issues and current negotiations, especially those pertaining to the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement

Singapore as an innovative city in East Asia : an explorative study of the perspectives of innovative industries

The city-state of Singapore has achieved rapid economic development in the past by its positioning as an efficient business hub in Asia. To remain competitive in the global knowledge economy, however, Singapore needs to move beyond efficiency by developing a strong"innovative"edge as well. This paper examines the challenges that Singapore faces in seeking to do so through an explorative survey of 40 firms from three innovative sectors: high-tech manufacturing industries, knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and creative content industries. Overall, while the survey confirms Singapore's continuing competitive strength in efficiency infrastructure, it also finds a favorable perception of Singapore as an innovative city. Indeed, many of the industry actors indicated that an efficient business infrastructure is a prerequisite for locating their innovative activities in Singapore, suggesting that the relationship between innovation and efficiency is complementary, rather than substitutional. While the study found that intellectual property and its protection are widely recognized by actors in all three sectors, interesting differences exist. In particular, intellectual property protection appears to be of greater concern to the high-tech research and development-intensive manufacturing sector and the creative contents sector than to the KIBS sector. Another interesting difference is that while competition in high-tech innovation tends to be global, competition in creative content tends to have a stronger local or regional dimension. Public policy in East Asia has traditionally emphasized the development of technological innovation capabilities in the manufacturing sector. In light of the findings, public policymakers may need to be more sensitive to the nuanced differences in policies needed to promote the new creative content industries and the associated supporting KIBS.ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies

Community Self Help

This paper advocates controlling crime through a greater emphasis on precautions taken not by individuals, but by communities. The dominant battles in the literature today posit two central competing models of crime control. In one, the standard policing model, the government is responsible for the variety of acts that are necessary to deter and prosecute criminal acts. In the other, private self-help, public law enforcement is largely supplanted by providing incentives to individuals to self-protect against crime. There are any number of nuances and complications in each of these competing stories, but the literature buys into this binary matrix