The influence of knowledge in the replication of routines

From a resource-based pespective, one of the most important levers of firm strategy are resources that are difficult to imitate. a crucial challenge for managers then is to replicate these resources wihin the firm, while at the same time protecting them from imitation by competitors. Organizational routines are often named as candidates for such resources. A good understanding of the replication of organizational routines is therefore of great strategic interest. This article focuses on one aspect that seems to play an important role in the replication of routines: knowledge. The objective of this article is to identify knowledge-related aspects that have an influence in the replication of routines. In this and by defining routines in their social and cognitive dimensions, it contributes to a better understanding of their duplication process.

Organising new product development Knowledge hollowing-out and knowledge integration

The paper analyses the organization of the new product development process at FIAT from a resource-based perspective. The focus is on organizational resources for integrating dispersed specialist knowledge required in the development of complex products. The analysis shows how the application of a resource-based perspective is able to uncover negative long-term effects of outsourcing on the knowledge base (hollowing out), despite beneficial short-term effects on cost.New product development, FIAT Auto, knowledge integration systems integration, modularity, knowledge hollowing-out, resource-based view

Beyond product architecture: Division of labour and competence accumulation in complex product development

This paper considers the trade-off between leveraging external sources of innovation by outsourcing design and engineering activities and the ability to develop internal product development competences. The trade-off arises because the division of labor within and across firms' boundaries has a crucial role in shaping competence development processes, especially because the division of labor also influences opportunities for learning by doing. In new product development projects, learning by doing appears to be both a key determinant of competence development and a difficult-to-substitute form of learning. While the division of development tasks is often considered as guided by product architecture, we show that by decoupling the decisions concerning the product architecture and the allocation of development tasks, firms can realize the benefits of outsourcing such tasks while developing new internal competences. Drawing on a longitudinal case study in the automotive industry, we also identify a new organizational lever for shaping competence development paths and for designing firm boundaries. This lever consists in alternating different task allocation schemes over time for different types of development projects. We show why this is a novel solution, what its underlying logic is, and how it enables alleviating the trade-off between the benefits of leveraging external sources of innovation and the opportunities for competence development provided by in-house design and engineering. We discuss implications for theories of organizational boundary design and innovation management.innovation management; organizational boundaries; outsourcing; product architecture; modularity; new product development; template process; automotive industry; Fiat

Education promoted secularization

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of advanced-school enrollment and Protestant church attendance in German cities between 1890 and 1930. Our cross-sectional estimates replicate a positive association. By contrast, in panel models where fixed effects account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, education – but not income or urbanization – is negatively related to church attendance. In panel models with lagged explanatory variables, educational expansion precedes reduced church attendance

Intra and Inter-Organizational Knowledge Transfer Processes Identifying the Missing Links

Inspired by the resource- and knowledge-based views, much attention has been focused on knowledge transfer as a process of strategic importance. Still, many open questions regarding knowledge transfer processes need to be addressed to complete our understanding. For instance, what are the barriers to knowledge transfer, and what are the facilitators? A review of the literature reveals that it is divided into two streams: articles on intra-firm knowledge flows and articles on inter-firm knowledge flows. Part of the incompleteness of our understanding of knowledge transfer processes, we argue, derives from the fact that it is unclear in which way intra- and inter-firm knowledge flows are different. The paper investigates three questions: first, how knowledge transfer is defined differently in intra- and inter-firm knowledge flows; second: how barriers to knowledge transfer processes differ; and thirdly: what we need to know to be able to formulate a management view of organizational knowledge flows, whether intra- or inter-organizational. The concluding section argues five research questions whose answers may enable research to formulate a management view of knowledge flows.Review; internal knowledge flows; external knowledge flows; definition; barriers to knowledge flows

Optimising Selective Sampling for Bootstrapping Named Entity Recognition

Training a statistical named entity recognition system in a new domain requires costly manual annotation of large quantities of in-domain data. Active learning promises to reduce the annotation cost by selecting only highly informative data points. This paper is concerned with a real active learning experiment to bootstrap a named entity recognition system for a new domain of radio astronomical abstracts. We evaluate several committee-based metrics for quantifying the disagreement between classifiers built using multiple views, and demonstrate that the choice of metric can be optimised in simulation experiments with existing annotated data from different domains. A final evaluation shows that we gained substantial savings compared to a randomly sampled baseline. 1

Intersubunit Cross-talk in the Betaine Permease BetP from Corynebacterium glutamicum

The secondary active glycine-betaine transporter BetP of the gram-positive soil bacterium Corynebacterium glutamicum has become a paradigm for osmo-regulated transport systems. BetP is the only transport protein regulated by osmolality for which the sensing domain is clearly established and for which structural information at the level of atomic resolution is available. Biochemical studies have shown that the transporter is activated by raising potassium concentrations both in vivo and in vitro which are sensed by the C-terminal, hydrophilic domain, located in the cytoplasm. The C-terminal sensor domain was shown to be involved in inter-protomer contacts in the homo-trimeric quarternary structure of the transporter. It was furthermore shown that mutations impairing the trimerisation of the transporter severely affect the regulatory function. Furthermore several structural studies reported conformational asymmetry of single protomers to occur in BetP. These findings suggested the occurrence of a regulatory relevant cross-talk between the protomers of the homo-trimeric BetP. The interaction of the C-terminal domain with the cytoplasmic loop2 of the adjacent protomer was speculated to be crucial for the osmosensing function. To test the relevance of conformational cross-talk between BetP protomers, artificial hetero-trimeric BetP was established in the current work. With this system it was possible to clearly exclude any functionally relevant cross-talk in the activation of BetP. The established hetero-trimers where shown to be a useful tool for the analysis of the molecular dynamics of the transporter via spectroscopic methods. Beside BetP only two different transport proteins have been prooven to be regulated by the external osmolality. Purification and reconstitution of the osmoregulated betaine transporter LcoP from C. glutamicum proved the osmosensing function of this carrier as well. For LcoP the osmosensing domains in this transporter could be identified in the C- and N-terminal hydrophilic domains. Furthermore it could be shown that this protein is a promising candidate for structural analysis. It may therefore be used as test system for conclusions that were drawn for the whole family of Betaine-Carnithine-Choline-Transporters based on data obtained from the the betaine permease BetP

Applying Organizational Routines in understanding organizational change

Organizational routines are considered basic components of organizational behavior and repositories of Organizational capabilities (Nelson and Winter, 1982). They do, therefore, hold one of the keys to understanding organizational change. We identify problems encountered in such research and present proposal for how to deal with them, in order to advance our knowledge of routines and our understanding or organizational change. Developing these themes, we also introduce the articles in the special section 'Towards an Operationalization of the Routines concept'.