Christian Berggren

Michael Hobday

Jonas Söderlund

Anna Bergek

Lars Bengtsson

Technology-based firms continue to compete primarily on innovation, and one continuously required to present new solutions to an exacting market. As technological complexity and specialization intensifies, firms increasingly need to integrate and co-ordinate knowledge by means of project groups, diversified organizations, inter-organizational partnerships, and strategic alliances. Innovation processes have progressively become interdisciplinary, collaborative, inter-organizational, and international, and a firm's ability to synthesize knowledge across disciplines, organizations, and geographical locations has a major influence on its viability and success. This book demonstrates how knowledge integration is crucial in facilitating innovation within modern firms. This book provides original, detailed empirical studies of prerequisites, mechanisms, and outcomes of knowledge integration processes on several organizational levels, from key individuals, projects, and internal organizations, to collaboration between firms. It stresses the need to understand knowledge integration as a multi-level phenomenon, which requires a broad repertoire of organizational and technical means. It further clarifies the need for strong internal capabilities for exploiting external knowledge, reveals how costs of knowledge integration affect outcomes and strategic decisions, and discusses the managerial implications of fostering knowledge integration, providing practical guidance and support for managers of knowledge integration in high technology enterprises.

Critical Challenges Facing International Technology-Based Firms

Knowledge Integration and Innovation

Andrew Van de Ven

Knowledge integration - the purposeful combination of specialized and complementary knowledge to achieve specific tasks - is becoming increasingly important for organizations facing rapidly changing institutional environments, globalized markets, and fast-paced technological developments. The need for knowledge integration is driven by knowledge specialization and its geographic and organizational distribution in the global economy. The increasing complexity and relevance of the knowledge integration problem is apparent in emerging new fields of research, such as open innovation, or the merging of existing ones, e.g. organizational learning and strategy. In global competition, the successful management of knowledge integration underpins firms' ability to innovate, generate profit, grow and, ultimately, survive. This book provides conceptual contributions as well as empirical studies that examine knowledge integration essentially as a 'boundary' problem. Knowledge integration becomes a problem when boundaries between knowledge fields, and the institutions that preside over those fields, are not clear, or become fluid and contestable. This fluidity, and the competitive pressures this fluidity generates, are persistent and permanent features of the world we live in. This book put forward a consistent set of ideas, methods and tools useful to interpret, analyze and act upon the processes of knowledge integration across boundaries.

Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries

Jacques Bélanger

Torsten Björkman

Christoph Kähler

Fortune called Asea Brown Boveri, the giant multinational corporation created in 1987, "the most successful cross-border merger since Royal Dutch linked up with Britain's Shell in 1907." The coming together of two longtime national champions in the electrotechnical industry, Sweden's ASEA and Switzerland's Brown Boveri, marked the birth of a company with truly global aspirations, one whose apparent genius for combining strong central planning with local autonomy for its plants has made it a trendsetter. An international team of researchers assesses the dynamic interplay of the forces of convergence and diversity present in ABB. Together they examine the actual workings of this multinational—in order to learn to what degree the corporate strategies are achieved in its plants. Based on a multilevel organizational study, their book compares seven plants in six countries on three continents.

ABB and the Challenge of Global Management

Being Local Worldwide

Christian Berggren

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