Patient satisfaction has become an important indicator of process quality inside hospitals. Even so, the improvement of patient satisfaction cannot simply follow from the implementation of new incentives schemes and organisational arrangements; it also depends on hospitals' cultures and...

The salience of the international purchasing office (IPO) in the management of international sourcing activities of multinational corporations (MNCs) has steadily increased, in developed and emerging economies, since the first adoption of this supply chain strategy in the 1980s. The aim of this...

Setting up an international purchasing office (IPO) is one of the key steps for firms doing global sourcing. This paper aims to explore the relationship between strategy and structure in a contemporary global purchasing context. We build a theory of IPOs, employing a case study method to address...

Firms devoted to research and development and innovative activities intensively use teams to carry out knowledge intensive work and increasingly ask their employees to be engaged in multiple teams (e.g., R&D project teams) simultaneously. The literature has extensively investigated the...

This paper aims to critically analyse the idea of global market space [1] and the generally accepted idea that internet and electronic transactions [2] can provide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and bigger companies with the same access to global markets. This analysis is conducted in...

This paper aims at analysing the main features of R&D activities carried out by the Italian biotech companies. The proposed contribution can be ascribed to the massive stream of research related to the reconfiguration of the value chain activities at the international level. Such a topic has...

This paper aims at analysing the main features of the activities carried out by the Italian biotech industry. This topic is so wide and various that particularly we decided to focus on the value added activities of the so-called “pharma-biotech”, i.e. pharmaceutical firms that have...

The nature of competition imposes a fundamental re-examination of strategies, both at the corporate and business level. Observation of a large number of firms reveals changes aimed at creating more permeable boundaries for breaking down costs, while increasing efficiency in product innovation...