Among some scholars of management, organisation and also economists as well as policy makers it is argued that certain new forms of firm organisation such as flexible and learning organisations increasingly are becoming “best practice”, in an increasingly learning and global economy. On a...

This paper addresses two puzzles related to industrial dynamics and competition. The first of these puzzles is that a high degree of globalization may well go hand in hand with increasing concentration. I show that one of the most globalized sectors of the electronics industry, hard disk drives...

This paper addresses a puzzle related to firm size and competition. Since Stephen Hymer´s pioneering contribution (Hymer, 1960/1976), theories of the firm implicitly assume that only large, diversified multinational enterprises can compete in industries that combine high capital intensity, high...

Innovation may be seen as a process of knowledge creation and the speed and direction of knowledge creation reflects the organizational set-up of the firm as well as its investments in R&D and training. Establishing ‘a learning organization’ where horizontal interaction and communication...

This paper presents a lexical definition of firms' flexibility and its operationalization as used in the DISKO survey of 1900 Danish private firms. This operationalization is highlighted by data from a highly flexible firm which was visited in 1997 as part of a follow-up upon the questionnaire...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm’s distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

This paper draws upon a questionnaire survey, conducted 1996 in 1900 Danish Firms, on technical and organisational change. The topics in the survey were among others if firms been through significant organizational change, how the firm had developed its human resources, and what were the motives...

This paper argues that not only Edith Penrose, but also Harold Demsetz should be seen as a dominant source of inspiration for RBP scholars, that these two crucial influences hold different and even conflicting views of the economic process, and that they helped found different research areas and...

In this paper, we concentrate on how evolutionary economics contributes to a better understanding of the spatial evolution of newly emerging industries. Inspired by evolutionary thinking, four types of explanations are discussed and tested in an empirical analysis of the spatial pattern of the...