Based on a case study approach, the authors examine the question: are there some aspects of a company's core business which can and should be outsourced? This question challenges traditional models of strategy which maintain that outsourcing of core activities is risky. Four circumstances are...

How does the chief executive of a large complex organization maintain strategic momentum? This represents a great challenge when there are no obvious external threats, and no obvious reasons for having a concerted action. Floris Maljers, Charles Baden-Fuller and Frans van den Bosch explore the...

The relational antecedents of project-based enterprises have not yet received systematic investigation. These ventures are typically created by individual freelancers who are usually embedded in networks of collaborative relationships that convey the information and resources required to carry...

Drawing on institutional theory, the global production of business research is analysed by examining the system of written outputs using one of the largest databases of journal papers ever assembled, covering over 65,000 articles produced by more than 54,000 authors from over 8,000 different...

We explore how an incumbent firm's internal knowledge and organization structure influences its strategic alliance formation. We propose that the firm's knowledge breadth and the centrality of its R&D organization structure positively influence its absorptive capacity, and consequently, its...

This study investigates how an incumbent company's internal characteristics influence its propensity to form learning alliances. A firm may be reluctant to enter a research alliance when it has deep knowledge in a certain technological field due to concerns about knowledge leakage and the low...

This article explores how the UK's biotech firms have evolved in response to their financial environment. As investors' expectations about the potential of biotech have changed, funding options have opened up and closed down, leading firms to develop new business models and routes of technology...

The current literature on business models lies mainly in the literature on strategy and competitive advantage and focuses on their role as descriptors of actual phenomenon, often by reference to taxonomic categories. In this essay we explore how business models can be seen as a set of cognitive...