Innovation in consulting firms: an area to explore

Services are the most representative sector in developed economies due to their contribution to GDP and employment. Consulting firms are classified as part of the Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and provide professional services to all types of organizations. Consulting firms usually innovate with their customers and suppliers in a nurturing environment for value co-creation. This environment is project-based, process-oriented and with intensive knowledge exchange among all stakeholders. Based on literature review, it has been found that despite the existence of frameworks for service innovation, none of them have specifically focused on consulting firms. Further implications on this issue are addressed for both academics and practitioners.

The Effectiveness of Firms' Strategic Orientations: Investigating Multiple Theoretical Perspectives

The strategic orientation of firms can take on many forms. Researchers most commonly distinguish between entrepreneurial, market, and learning orientations. In combination, strategic orientations represent a firm's value proposition in terms of the markets in which it operates, where it deploys its resources, and which behavioral patterns are established. This thesis provides insights into the effectiveness of strategic orientations by adopting multiple theoretical perspectives. The strategic orientations of entrepreneurial, market, learning, and innovation orientations are investigated in an isolated as well as interrelated manner. The first research article concentrates on entrepreneurial orientation as its conceptualization and operationalization is subject to several debates in the literature. This conceptual study shows how the challenges of the entrepreneurial orientation construct can be overcome in future research to arrive at a higher level of construct clarity. Thereby, the theoretical perspectives of entrepreneurial dominant logic and the theory of planned behavior are employed. The literature has predominantly focused on investigating the effectiveness of particular strategic orientations. Recently, scholars have stressed their synergetic impact on firm performance and, as such, the relevance of considering their combined role in creating superior value for firms. However, empirical research on their interrelatedness remains scant and dispersed, making it necessary to conduct further research on strategic orientations in an integrative manner. As such, the second research article demonstrates which interrelated roles are played by entrepreneurial, market, and learning orientations in their relationship to firm performance. The rich body of existing knowledge is synthesized by means of meta-analysis under the perspective of strategic coalignment as well as the resource-based view of the firm.

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Mode of access: Internet.

A community-based wildlife survey: the knowledge and attitudes of residents of suburban Brisbane, with a focus on bandicoots

Within the expanding city of Brisbane in south-east Queensland, numerous fragments of native and regrowth vegetation are scattered across the largely urbanised landscape. These fragments provide refuge to a great diversity of native wildlife, and, provide residents with the opportunity to experience nature on their doorstep. To assess the diversity and abundance of this wildlife, recent changes in these parameters, and the value of wildlife and bushland fragments to residents of Brisbane, a questionnaire survey was distributed to 300 households each located adjacent to one of 38 urban bushland fragments. A total of 172 surveys (57%) were returned, producing 768 records of 83 fauna species, dominated by birds and mammals; bandicoots were widely reported from the 38 fragments. Several historical records provided evidence of recent local extinctions within fragments, highlighting the continuing declines in various species of native wildlife within Brisbane. Several human-wildlife conflicts were identified, but overall residents were tolerant of such conflicts. Bandicoots were disliked by a small minority (3%) of residents owing to the holes they dig in lawns and gardens in search of food. and their potential as vectors of ticks. Most respondents expressed ail appreciation for the presence of native wildlife (96%) and bushland fragments (97%) in their local area, emphasising the importance of incorporating human dimension values into the management of this urban biodiversity.

AKTive Food:semantic web based knowledge conduits for the organic food industry

We present a vision and a proposal for using Semantic Web technologies in the organic food industry. This is a very knowledge intensive industry at every step from the producer, to the caterer or restauranteur, through to the consumer. There is a crucial need for a concept of environmental audit which would allow the various stake holders to know the full environmental impact of their economic choices. This is a di?erent and parallel form of knowledge to that of price. Semantic Web technologies can be used e?ectively for the calculation and transfer of this type of knowledge (together with other forms of multimedia data) which could contribute considerably to the commercial and educational impact of the organic food industry. We outline how this could be achieved as our essential ob jective is to show how advanced technologies could be used to both reduce ecological impact and increase public awareness.

Knowledge acquisition in international strategic alliances among Malaysian manufacturing firms

This thesis examines the process of knowledge acquisition by Malaysian manufacturing firms through their involvement in international strategic alliances. The strategic alliances can be with or without equity involvement. Firms involved with a foreign partner with equity involvement are joint venture firms while non-equity involvement are firms that engaged in contractual agreements. Using empirical evidence from 65 international alliances gathered through a survey conducted in high-technology manufacturing sectors, several factors that influence the process of knowledge acquisition are examined. The factors are: learning capacity, experience, goals, active involvement and accessibility to the foreign knowledge. Censored regression analysis and ordered probit analysis are used to analyse the effects of these factors on knowledge acquisition and its determinant parts, and the effects of knowledge acquisition and its determinants on the performance of the alliances. A second questionnaire gathered evidence relating to the factors, which encouraged tacit knowledge transfer between the foreign and Malaysian partners in international alliances. The key findings of the study are: knowledge acquisition in international strategic alliances is influenced by five determining factors; learning capacity, experience, articulated goals, active involvement and accessibility; new technology knowledge, product development knowledge and manufacturing process knowledge are influenced differently by the determining factors; knowledge acquisition and its determinant factors have a significant impact on the firm’s performance; cultural differences tend to moderate the effect on the firm’s performance; acquiring tacit knowledge is not only influenced by the five determinant factors but also by other factors, such as dependency, accessibility, trust, manufacturing control, learning methods and organisational systems; Malaysian firms involved in joint ventures tend to acquire more knowledge than those involved in contractual agreements, but joint ventures also exhibit higher degrees of dependency than contractual agreements; and the presence of R&D activity in the Malaysian partner encourages knowledge acquisition, but the amount of R&D expenditure has no effect on knowledge acquisition.

Alliance behaviour, absorptive capacity and competitive advantage: a comparative study of biopharmaceutical firms in Europe and the US

In this thesis, we explore the relationship between absorptive capacity and alliances, and their influence on firms’ competitive advantage in the US and European biopharmaceutical sectors. The study undertaken in this thesis is based on data from a large-scale international survey of over 2,500 biopharmaceutical firms in the US, the UK, Germany, France and Ireland. The thesis advanced a conceptual framework, which integrated the multi-dimensions of absorptive capacity, exploration-exploitation alliances, and competitive advantage, into a biopharmaceutical firm’s new product development process. The proposed framework is then tested in the empirical analysis, using truncated models to estimate firms’ sales growth, with zero-inflated negative binominal models capturing the number of alliances in which firms engage, and aspects of realised absorptive capacity analysed by ordinal probit models. The empirical results suggest that both skill-based and exploitation-based absorptive capacity play crucial roles in shaping firms’ competitive advantage, while neither exploratory nor exploitation alliances contribute to the improvement in firms’ competitive position. In terms of the interaction between firms’ absorptive capacity and alliance behaviour, the results suggest that engagement with exploratory alliances depends more strongly on firms’ assimilation capability (skills levels and continuity of R&D activities), while participation in exploitation alliances is more conditional on firms’ relevant knowledge monitoring capability. The results highlight the major differences between the determinants of firms’ alliance behaviour, and competitive advantage in the US and Europe – in the US firms’ skill levels prove more significant in determining firms’ engagement with exploratory alliances, whereas in Europe continuity of R&D proves more important. Correspondingly, while US firms’ engagement with exploitation alliances depends on market monitoring capability, that in Europe is more strongly linked to exploitation-based absorptive capacity. In respect of the determinants of firms’ competitive advantage – in Europe, market monitoring capability, engagement with exploitation alliances, and continuous R&D activities, prove more important, while in the US, it is firms’ market characteristics that matter most.

The emergence of knowledge exchange:an agent-based model of a software market

We investigate knowledge exchange among commercial organizations, the rationale behind it, and its effects on the market. Knowledge exchange is known to be beneficial for industry, but in order to explain it, authors have used high-level concepts like network effects, reputation, and trust. We attempt to formalize a plausible and elegant explanation of how and why companies adopt information exchange and why it benefits the market as a whole when this happens. This explanation is based on a multiagent model that simulates a market of software providers. Even though the model does not include any high-level concepts, information exchange naturally emerges during simulations as a successful profitable behavior. The conclusions reached by this agent-based analysis are twofold: 1) a straightforward set of assumptions is enough to give rise to exchange in a software market, and 2) knowledge exchange is shown to increase the efficiency of the market.

Openness, knowledge, innovation and growth in UK business services

We explore the causal links between service firms' knowledge investments, their innovation outputs and business growth based on a bespoke survey of around 1100 UK service businesses. We combine the activity based approach of the innovation value chain with firms' external links at each stage of the innovation process. This introduces the concept of 'encoding' relationships through which learning improves the effectiveness of firms' innovation processes. Our econometric results emphasise the importance of external openness in the initial, exploratory phase of the innovation process and the significance of internal openness (e.g. team working) in later stages of the process. In-house design capacity is strongly linked to a firm's ability to absorb external knowledge for innovation. Links to customers are important in the exploratory stage of the innovation process, but encoding linkages with private and public research organisations are more important in developing innovation outputs. Business growth is related directly to both the extent of firms' service innovation as well as the diversity of innovation, reflecting marketing, strategic and business process change.