In this comprehensive original reference work, the editors have brought together an unrivalled group of distinguished scholars and practitioners to comment on the historical and contemporary role of industrial districts (IDs).

Industrial districts – and especially industrial districts in Italy – have been put forth as a model of economic development premised on the deep rooting of firms in a local socio-economic system that is both rich in skills and tied into international flows of goods and knowledge. But there...

The linear model of innovation has been superseded by a variety of theoretical models that view the innovation process as systemic, complex, multi-level, multi-temporal, involving a plurality of heterogeneous economic agents. Accordingly, the emphasis of the policy discourse has shifted over...

Much of the literature on the changing face of US manufacturing acknowledges that successful governance of decentralized production is vital to its future but questions whether in practice firms will engage in the collaborative relationships envisaged by optimistic theorists of a "new production...

American manufacturing is in obvious crisis: the sector lost three million jobs between 2000 and 2003 as the American trade deficit shot to record highs. Manufacturers have increasingly decentralized productive responsibilities to armies of supplier firms, both domestically and abroad. Many have...

This paper casts light on the role of initial code release for providing coordination of joint search processes, i.e., search processes that involve several agents who search together. We develop hypotheses about the role of initial code release for providing coordination, and for whether...

Organizational and sociological research dealing with network governance has mainly focused on network advantages rather than on their problems or dysfunctionalities. This left partially unexplored the field of network failure. Even if some early attempts at explicitly theorizing network...

This paper, building on R&D integration and improvisation literature, explores how firms organize to jointly develop common product platforms if their integration process is still in progress. In order to address our exploratory research question, we draw on a unique set of empirical data...

This book showcases advanced empirical research that applies the concept of organizational routines to understanding organizations and how they change and evolve.