Dynamic Capabilities And Relationships

Building on the seminal work of David Teece, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Jeffrey Martin, and others, this volume applies the concept of dynamic capabilities to help readers understand how organizations can be successful in highly dynamic environments. The contributions, written by researchers who participated in the research program "Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships" and international researchers who participated in the program’s international conference (both funded by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation), highlight state-of-the-art research on dynamic capabilities and relationships. They also put forward an integrated management approach for the purpose of understanding, analyzing, and managing the successful creation and adaptation of capabilities and relationships.

Creating, adapting to, and exploiting change is inherently entrepreneurial. To survive and prosper under conditions of change, firms must develop the “dynamic capabilities” to create, extend, and modify the ways in which they operate. The capacity of an organization to create, extend, or modify its resource base is vital. Since the concept of dynamic capabilities was first introduced, much research has elaborated the initial idea. This important book by Constance Helfat and her team of leading scholars provides a timely focus on in-depth examples of corporate dynamic capabilities. Examining these in the different contexts of alliances, acquisitions, and management, the book gives students and researchers a succinct, up-to-date definition of dynamic capabilities and the strategic management theories around them.

Logistics Social Responsibility (LSR) emerged as a concept to integrate sustainability throughout logistics-oriented processes in the supply chain. Hence, logistics services are linked to sustainability requirements. To meet these requirements, logistics service providers can respond to their responsibility by reducing the ecological and social impact in the supply chain. Moreover, it has been recognized that consumers also need to adapt to sustainability requirements: e.g., by supporting sustainable logistics strategies with their monetary “votes” or by changing their own consumption behavior. This “shared responsibility” requires mutual support and cooperation. Therefore, the core of this dissertation is that logistics service providers can further support sustainable development by facilitating more sustainable consumer choices. To enhance LSR activities, the link to the dynamic capabilities theory is investigated. Here, several capabilities have been identified through which managers can pool their knowledge and skills to generate new knowledge, solutions or resource configurations. Using these capabilities in a strategic manner, logistics service providers can purposefully change their business environment by forming new partnerships or changing existing relationships to gain from developing new business practices stressing sustainable purposes.

Exploring the theoretical concept of collaborative dynamic capabilities, this book illustrates how service innovation can be achieved in an era of technological convergence. Focusing on e-healthcare systems within hospitals and private businesses, the author provides detailed case studies and answers topical questions about generating service innovation across different industries. Making a new and thought-provoking contribution to research on innovation and technology management, this useful book engages with theory and provides applicable solutions for practitioners to implement in the future.

This book provides a knowledge-based view to the dynamic capabilities in an organization. The author integrates two existing views on gaining competitive advantage: the Knowledge View which suggests that the capability of organizations to learn faster than competitors is the only source of competitiveness; and the Dynamic Capability View which speculates that a firm’s competitive advantage rests on dynamic capabilities which enable a firm to constantly renew the stock of ordinary organizational capabilities in accordance with the changes in the business environment. Using the IT sector in India as a case study, this book provides and tests a new framework--Knowledge-Based Dynamic Capabilities—in the prediction of competitive advantage in organizations.

Trust in Market Relationships illustrates that the importance of trust in a commercial arena has intensified as markets have become more complex. As business relationships become ever critical for a firm s economic results in highly competitive markets, and trust represents the basic platform for the development of successful long-term collaborations. Sandro Castaldo attempts to order the analytical complexity and myriad perspectives that characterise research on trust. He aims not to simplify this complexity, but to present guidelines for an interpretative model of trust, and to define fundamental concepts for trust management strategies. Issues explored include: the nature of trust, the relevance of trust to firms intangible assets and value creation; dimensions of trust in marketing studies; psychological, sociological and organizational studies and the transactional cost theory; trust determinants, consequences and evolutionary processes and cycles. With its wide literature review and complete field overview, this multi-disciplinary approach to the complex facets of trust in market relationships will strongly appeal to those with an interest in marketing, trust management and organizational studies.

Changes in technology and demand require firms to learn how to continuously reshape unique and non-imitable resources and competences. A firm’s capacity to achieve this is captured by the concept of dynamic capabilities. This book offers an analysis of how firms manage to reconfigure their pool of idiosyncratic resources, skills and competencies to deal with the highly turbulent environments in which they are embedded, thus tackling the issue of how dynamic capabilities must be defined and conceptualized. This book brings together several contributions aimed at showing how firms’ differential exploitation of their dynamic capabilities comes to be highly dependent on the role of socio-territorial entities and on the institutional set up. Thus, different formal and informal types of organization are observed at different levels of analysis. In so doing, the book aims at conveying a transversal perspective to the analysis of firms’ dynamics, calling for a multidisciplinary and multilayer approach.