Business schools inside the academy: What are the prospects for interdepartmental research collaboration?

Established literature about the role of business schools tends towards more parochial concerns, such as their need for a more pluralist and socially reflexive mode of knowledge production (Starkey and Tiratsoo 2007; Starkey et al 2009) or the failure of management’s professionalism project expressed through the business school movement (Khurana 2007). When casting their gaze otherwise, academic commentators examine business schools’ weakening links with management practice (Bennis and O’Toole 2005). Our theme makes a novel contribution to the business school literature through exploring prospects for research collaborations with other university departments. We draw upon the case of UK business schools, which are typically university-based (unlike some of their European counterparts), and provide illustrations relating to collaboration with medical schools to make our analytical points. We might expect that business schools and medical schools effectively collaborate given their similar vocational underpinnings, but at the same time, there are significant differences, such as differing paradigms of research and the extent to which the practice fields are professionalised. This means collaboration may prove challenging. In short, the case of collaboration between business schools and medical schools is likely to illuminate the challenges for business schools ‘reaching out’ to other university departments

Opportunity Creation in Innovation Networks: Interactive Revealing Practices

Innovating in networks with partners that have diverse knowledge is challenging. The challenges stem from the fact that the commonly used knowledge protection mechanisms often are neither available nor suitable in early stage exploratory collaborations. This article focuses on how company participants in heterogeneous industry networks share private knowledge while protecting firm-specific appropriation. We go beyond the prevailing strategic choice perspectives to discuss interactive revealing practices that sustain joint opportunity creation in the fragile phase of early network formation.Center for Business, Technology and La

A robust fuzzy possibilistic AHP approach for partner selection in international strategic alliance

The international strategic alliance is an inevitable solution for making competitive advantage and reducing the risk in today’s business environment. Partner selection is an important part in success of partnerships, and meanwhile it is a complicated decision because of various dimensions of the problem and inherent conflicts of stockholders. The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical approach to the problem of partner selection in international strategic alliances, which fulfills the gap between theories of inter-organizational relationships and quantitative models. Thus, a novel Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is proposed for combining the benefits of two complementary theories of inter-organizational relationships named, (1) Resource-based view, and (2) Transaction-cost theory and considering Fit theory as the perquisite of alliance success. The Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is a noveldevelopment of Interval-AHP technique employing robust formulation; aimed at handling the ambiguity of the problem and let the use of intervals as pairwise judgments. The proposed approach was compared with existing approaches, and the results show that it provides the best quality solutions in terms of minimum error degree. Moreover, the framework implemented in a case study and its applicability were discussed

The contribution of corporate ventures to radical innovation

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group, i.e. the independent ventures. In particular, corporate ventures are more successful at developing radical innovations. This effect, however, decreases with the ventures' degree of ownership concentration. We conclude that corporate ventures with a high ownership concentration are more likely to be controlled and monitored by their corporate sponsors, resulting in less favorable conditions for radical innovation. --corporate entrepreneurship,start-ups,radical innovation

Root Cause Analysis in Business Processes

Conceptual modeling is an important tool for understanding and revealing weaknesses of business processes. Yet, the current practice in reengineering projects often considers simply the as-is control flow and uses the respective model barely as a reference for brain-storming about improvement opportunities. This approach heavily relies on the intuition of the participants and misses a clear description of steps to identify root causes of problems. In contrast to that, this paper introduces a systematic methodology to detect and document the quality dimension of a business process. It builds on the definition of softgoals for each process activity, of correlations between softgoals, and metrics to measure the occurrence of quality issues. In this regard our contribution is a foundation of root-cause analysis in business process modeling, and a conceptual integration of goal-based and activity-based approaches to capturing processes