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Our understanding of Japanese supply relationships comes primarily from studying the automobile industry. This paper identifies three elements of the automobile industry that, although generally assumed to be widespread, are largely absent in the notebook computer industry, leading to a different pattern of supply relationships: a sizable pool of external suppliers; the feasibility of shukko and cross-shareholding to strengthen supply relationships; and the adequacy of these means to manage external supply relationships. This finding debunks the myth of a monolithic model of “Japanese-style” supply relationships and illustrates the importance of idiosyncratic elements of an industry’s environment on its supply relationships.

We discuss recent methodological advances in the NK modeling in the Strategy literature and analyze issues related to its current use including different implementation algorithms, relative versus absolute performance, establishing significance of simulation results and long- versus short-term performance measurements. To facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, we point to advances and extensions of the model developed in other fields that could be effectively utilized to answer Strategy-related questions. These include modeling the strength of interaction, varying the importance of decision elements, utilizing alternative functional forms, incorporating endogeneity in N and K parameters and embedding the NK model in a broader dynamic framework.