Brand theory has its origins in the consumer product market and is normally considered in relation to big business. An established brand enables customers to save time by guaranteeing the level of quality, reducing purchasing risk and simplifying customer choices. Little research, however, has...

This five-page essay responds to Henry Smith's article, quot;Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information.quot;A virtual cottage industry of intellectual property (IP) models has sprung up in recent years. To the mix, Professor Smith adds modularity, in which there...

When firms (conglomerates) are competing, not only for the present, with a given population of customers and a fixed set of commodities or service, but also for the future, in which products are constantly evolving, what will be their competitive strategies and what will be the emerging ecology...

This paper argues that design innovation constitutes an important means for multinational corporations (MNCs) to manage the standardization–adaptation dilemma in product development for international markets. Through design innovation MNCs can accommodate the heterogeneity of different...

Buyers often procure products and services from suppliers in low cost countries like India and China. Such overseas procurement, or offshoring, offers significant direct cost savings vis-à-vis in-house production. Historically, offshoring was primarily confined to manufactured goods. However,...

This paper studies the impact of task complexity and decomposability on the degree of organizational divisionalization and hierarchy within firms. Drawing upon the team theory and modularity literature, it argues that the degree of divisionalization is not only predicated on the extent of...

This paper is motivated by examples of outsourcing that are not readily explained by widely established economic theories. We extend recent literature that develops the idea that outsourcing can help firms avoid overinvestment by specifying more precisely the conditions under which this thesis...

By leveraging information technologies, organizations now have the ability to design their communication networks and crowdsourcing platforms to pursue various performance goals, but existing research on network design does not account for the specific features of social networks, such as the...

Limitations of existing schemes are detected and on the basis of it the conclusion about their inapplicability in practice of designing of radio-electronic means is drawn. On the basis of the analysis of possible schemes of synthesis and decomposition the approach to the decision of a problem of...