The increasing specialization in the automotive sector has fostered purchase strategies and logistics as key processes for the sustainability of competitive advantage. The paper describes the main traits of the so called “lean supply chain management”, examines its level of implementation in...

This paper assesses two decades of international generation of technology through EPO data: we quantify its volume, analyze its motives and identify several business traits that facilitate its implementation. Our database, which is composed of 65,000 firms and 465,000 patents, shows that most...