Innovating organization and management : new sources of competitive advantage

The dominant thinking in strategic management stresses the importance of assets, such as reputation, intellectual property rights, and relations with suppliers and customers. Less attention has been dedicated to organizational design and new management processes. However, the above discussion highlights the fact that such designs and processes can serve as strategic resources for firms. In other words, if they are properly organized and deployed, such resources can contribute decisively to corporate success. Thus, they contribute to the value the company can create and the value it can appropriate. They also help to make sure that the focal firm's level of appropriated value is higher than that of the competition. As mentioned above, management academics have only recently begun to put their academic talents to use in the analysis of management innovation. Therefore, the ways in which management innovations and improvements in organization and management processes can contribute to competitive advantage are far from fully understood.