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This paper deals with the organizing of interactive product development. Developing products in interaction between firms may provide benefits in terms of specialization, increased innovation, and possibilities to perform development activities in parallel. However, the differentiation of product development among a number of firms also implies that various dependencies need to be dealt with across firm boundaries. How dependencies may be dealt with across firms is related to how product development is organized. The purpose of the paper is to explore dependencies and how interactive product development may be organized with regard to these dependencies.

The analytical framework is based on the industrial network approach, and deals with the development of products in terms of adaptation and combination of heterogeneous resources. There are dependencies between resources, that is, they are embedded, implying that no resource can be developed in isolation. The characteristics of and dependencies related to four main categories of resources (products, production facilities, business units and business relationships) provide a basis for analyzing the organizing of interactive product development.

Three in-depth case studies are used to explore the organizing of interactive product development with regard to dependencies. The first two cases are based on the development of the electrical system and the seats for Volvo’s large car platform (P2), performed in interaction with Delphi and Lear respectively. The third case is based on the interaction between Scania and Dayco/DFC Tech for the development of various pipes and hoses for a new truck model.

The analysis is focused on what different dependencies the firms considered and dealt with, and how product development was organized with regard to these dependencies. It is concluded that there is a complex and dynamic pattern of dependencies that reaches far beyond the developed product as well as beyond individual business units. To deal with these dependencies, development may be organized in teams where several business units are represented. This enables interaction between different business units’ resource collections, which is important for resource adaptation as well as for innovation. The delimiting and relating functions of the team boundary are elaborated upon and it is argued that also teams may be regarded as actors. It is also concluded that a modular product structure may entail a modular organization with regard to the teams, though, interaction between business units and teams is needed. A strong connection between the technical structure and the organizational structure is identified and it is concluded that policies regarding the technical structure (e.g. concerning “carry-over”) cannot be separated from the management of the organizational structure (e.g. the supplier structure). The organizing of product development is in itself a complex and dynamic task that needs to be subject to interaction between business units.

The importance of the European Union (EU) to international business cannot be stressed too greatly. Recently it has expanded to 25 country markets. Its total population has reached 455 million people, which is the world's largest economic organisation. Previous international marketing standardisation (IMS) studies focused on the EU are mainly descriptive in nature and they have not specifically examined issues related to firms’ operations in two or more EU country markets at one time. The purpose of this study is to examine issues related to the crossmarket standardisation strategy, i.e. whether a standardised marketing programme and process can be used across the country markets in the EU.

Using the pair‐wise comparison method originally developed by Sorenson and Wiechmann this study examines the marketing standardisation strategies selection process of 66 New Zealand firms which were concurrently operating in two or more EU markets. In total these firms were operating in 13 different EU country markets.

The outcomes of this study suggest that, although a complete similarity in the marketing environment is not likely to occur in the EU, it is possible for firms to locate a group of country markets which have shared similar marketing characteristics in the EU region. For instance, country pairs such as UK‐France, UK‐Germany, UK‐Ireland, Germany‐France, Germany‐Italy and Germany‐Sweden could offer some extent of similarity which allows firms to adopt a standardised marketing strategy across these countries.

This study generates a research framework for future studies and firms intending to operate in the EU region. The findings generated contribute to research in the areas of international marketing standardisation and international segmentation.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

When a supply chain initiative is taken up by a firm a number of issues come up during implementation. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the major issues related to such implementation and draw out practices from literature to serve as remedies for these issues.

The paper starts by suggesting a broad framework for implementing supply chain management (SCM) in a firm. This consists of strategy formulation, identification of areas for improving material flow, identifying issues in these areas, and finally performance evaluation in order to determine how well the supply chain initiative has been implemented. Subsequently, the paper follows this framework step by step and in the process identifies the issues likely to arise in the process of SCM implementation. By reviewing current literature it suggests how these issues can be handled effectively.

The major issues related to SCM implementation are in the areas of logistics, outsourcing/partnerships, and environment. Apart from these issues the prerequisite for implementation is formulation of strategy while the final step in the exercise is performance evaluation. These two activities need to be handled carefully also.

The paper has important implications for the industry since it tries to bring out practices which would help in successful implementation of SCM in a firm. This is more so for the process industry which has lagged behind its counterparts in other industries with respect to implementation of SCM.

The value of this paper which is based on extensive literature review lies in: suggesting a framework to implement SCM, identifying likely issues, and suggesting ways to handle them. The summary diagrams would definitely facilitate understanding. This can be of interest to SCM personnel in the industry. Major contributions by researchers relevant to handling the issues have been tabulated at the end which can be useful for academicians.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the growing literature on integrated thinking and reporting by exploring the challenges of measuring integrated thinking in academic research. It provides a review of previous studies, presents a proxy measure to quantify the level of integrated thinking and investigates companies’ approach towards integrated thinking in practice.

Firstly, this study proposes a measure to quantify the level of integrating thinking. Secondly, this study implements factor analysis to identify a parsimonious representation and explore the relevance of each variable in explaining the proposed measure of integrated thinking. Thirdly, this study implements cluster analysis to determine the natural grouping of firms with a certain level of integrated thinking and to identify the existence of distinctive companies’ approaches.

The findings suggest that the proposed measure of integrated thinking could be reduced into two main principal components that explain the current practices and the future direction. Firms’ integrated thinking practices can be clustered into groups denoting various practices among firms, and exhibit routine over time. Across clusters, firms reveal significantly different characteristics highlighting the existence of systematic demographic differences.

This research does not endeavour to overcome all the measurement issues related to integrated thinking. It attempts to measure the level and companies’ approaches towards integrated thinking that can inspire further empirical studies in this field.

This study answers the call for an empirical investigation of the internal aspects of integration. This paper provides academics, companies, and policymakers with a proxy measure of integrated thinking that can inspire empirical studies and advance the understanding of integrated thinking practices.

To report a recently completed study on enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation in Korean manufacturing firms.Design/methodology/approach – An online survey was conducted (with e‐mail invitation and telephone call reminder) to collect data from 306 Korean manufacturing firms.Findings – This study presents the issues related to ERP implementation in Korean manufacturing firms, including pre‐implementation activities, implementation experiences, ERP system configuration, benefits, and future direction. Additionally, the results are compared to those results from previous studies on US and Swedish manufacturing firms.Research limitations/implications – The study focused on one industry in one Asian country which perhaps limits the application of its generalized results to other industries or other Asian countries.Practical implications – The results of this study present and discuss both similarities and differences in ERP implementation issues among Korean, US, and Swedish manufacturing firms.Originality/value – This research is the first empirical study on the issues related to ERP implementation in manufacturing firms in the Asia/Pacific region. It is also the first study providing comparison results regarding ERP implementation in manufacturing firms in Asian, North American, and European countries.

The purpose of this paper is to study the pattern of long-run performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) initial public offerings (IPOs) and examine the firm- and issue-related determinants of long-run performance of SME IPOs in India.

The 3 6, 9 and 12 months share returns of Indian SME IPOs is studied using event time methodologies, i.e. buy and hold returns, cumulative abnormal returns and wealth relatives on a sample of 375 SME IPOs issued during February 2012 to May 2018. Additionally, ordinary least square regression has been used to investigate the determinants of long-run performance of SME IPOs on a reduced sample of 104 because of non-availability of price observations.

The findings reveal that Indian SME IPOs exhibit long-run overperformance contradicting the international evidences of underperformance, and this overperformance is significantly evident using buy and hold abnormal return (BHAR). Furthermore, based on the divergence of opinion hypothesis, fads theory and windows of opportunity hypothesis, the results reveal that on one hand, issue size and oversubscription negatively affect BHAR, while on the other hand, auditor reputation, underwriter reputation, hot market, underpricing, inverse of issue price, profits prior to listing positively affect long-run performance. However, firm age, firm size, debt equity ratio, volatility and long-run performance computed through BHAR lacks significant relationship.

The study relied on event time methodology of measuring aftermarket performance of one year because of the limited availability of price offerings. Hence, the study could be extended to analyze aftermarket returns over a period of three to five years to enable reaching the vivid conclusions. Calendar time methodology may also be used to compute abnormal returns.

The results based on the study provides an implication to the investors by providing them an opportunity to bank higher long-run returns by engaging in active and timely trading strategies. Nevertheless, the results also show that investors should be cautioned while taking investment decisions.

The study contributes to rising body of international literature by analyzing the larger and recent sample of IPOs issued from 2012 to 2018 listed on SME exchange.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to analyze to what extent innovation output of R & D collaborations, proxied by co-patenting activities in terms of quantity, characteristics and value, differs depending on whether the engaged R & D partners have a certain type of relationship (allies, suppliers and subsidiaries); to identify possible automakers co-patenting patterns taking into account the differences in the innovation output with their R & D partners.

To reach the aims, the authors matched two types of data: co-assigned patent portfolio of four automakers and relationship type between automakers and their co-assignees. Matching the company names of the two data sources allowed the authors to obtain the final data set used to carry out extensive descriptive and regression analysis, both on a firm- and patent-level.

Results show differences in the characteristics and the technological value of patented inventions in relation with the type of collaboration partner; they also support the authors in the identification of four co-patenting patterns (contingent, purposive, watchful and advanced) according to the co-patenting propensity and the presence of a preferred relationship type.

The paper contributes to the literature by investigating the presence of differences across the patenting activities of a selection of automakers and their supplier, allied and subsidiary firms. The issue related to patent value represents an emerging area of interest in the field of collaborations for innovation. The methodology constitutes a novelty by matching two different sources and standardizing the company names (“name game”) through an automated algorithm and a double manual check, by searching company web sites and corporate trees.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relation between the size of the legal penalty for fraud and CEO turnover.

Using a sample of 93 securities lawsuits that were filed in the US between 1997 and 2005, logit regression is used in the analysis of the relation between probability of CEO turnover and size of the litigation monetary penalty and ordinal logit regression is used to examine the relation between timing of CEO turnover and size of the litigation monetary penalty.

A positive association is documented between the size of the monetary penalty and the probability of CEO turnover. A larger monetary penalty is associated with earlier CEO turnover. Equity issue related securities lawsuit is associated with a higher probability of CEO turnover and an earlier CEO turnover.

The results imply that the greater the legal penalty levied on the sued firm, the more likely the CEO is considered as being complicit in the alleged fraud. A limitation of this study is that in constructing the sample, some meritorious lawsuits that may have resulted in legal penalty but were dismissed for procedural reasons were excluded. Further, the CEO turnover data did not provide sufficient information about the reason for the termination of the CEOs.

This is one of the first empirical studies to examine the relation between the legal penalty for fraud and CEO turnover in the period after the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. This study adds to the existing literature on the consequences of financial misreporting on managers by documenting an association between the legal penalty for fraud and CEO turnover.