Layoffs may be a firm's way of optimally responding to demand shifts, to changes in its industry position, or to unwelcome financial stress. But, within the current economic environment, and along with individuals' changing attitudes, the notion of layoffs has taken on a new dimension, which...

We inductively develop a model of the commercialization process for new products or services user entrepreneurs undertake when entering an industry while drawing on proprietary technology developed in another industry. Extending the growing field of user entrepreneurship, we identify a two-phase...

Incentives to innovate are a central element of innovation theory. In the private-investment model, innovators privately fund innovation and then use intellectual property protection mechanisms to appropriate returns from these investments. In the collective-action model, public subsidy funds...

By reference to a case study of the `Consumer Goods Corporation' and a number of other corporate transformations, Magne Orgland and Georg Von Krogh conclude that initiating, managing and sustaining successful corporate transformation requires serious attention to three principles which can be...

Companies communicate internally through their own phrases and concepts -- their own language. The local meaning of that language is very difficult to transpose into another company's language and culture. Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos point out that many businesses are careless in their use of...

Johan Roos and Georg von Krogh go beyond contemporary theories of firms' competitive advantages to point out that most firms compete on competencies, and therefore possession of competence is the key to success. Competence itself is simply the synthesis of a firm's particular task and knowledge...

Autopoeisis is a new theory which explains the evolution of living organisms. Essentially it argues that organisms' development takes place through a closed system of relations. It is the result of careful and methodical change and adaptation. Applied to human thinking, autopoeitic theory claims...

Most business models are based on traditional ways of strategy formulation and implementation, leading to incremental and not disruptive change in the nature of business and industry practices. The 'red queen effect' refers to the red queen's advice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass...

Ikujiro Nonaka, Georg von Krogh and Kazuo Ichijo introduce the knowledge activist as a knowledge enabler. A knowledge activist is someone, some group or department that takes on particular responsibility for energizing and coordinating knowledge creation efforts throughout the corporation....

Georg von Krogh and Johan Roos believe that the future of the area of managing knowledge and intellectual capital will be more rewarding if the concept of knowledge is rethought in companies. Specifically, winning companies and their managers should be in the process of figuring out what...