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The purpose of this paper is to address the management of supply chains within the construction industry. Supply chains in this sector evidence a marked tendency to waste and inefficiency. One approach to improving this situation, which is the subject of intense discussion by both scientists and practitioners, is the establishment of strategic partnerships integrated with the scientific observation of the processes involved. This paper aims to present a case study of such a strategic alliance among German building contractors whose goal it is to cover the entire life cycle of a building, from its planning to its ultimate facility management. The paper seeks to focus on the establishment and implementation of an aggregated strategic alliance and its success factors.

The research methodology is based on a case study of a German network of builders and trade contracting companies. Data collection tools included observation of workshops and meetings, semi‐structured interviews and access to key documentation, IT‐infrastructure and archives of the network.

Key factors of success in strategic alliances within the construction industry are: central coordination among the partners employing decentralised task management; application of an appropriate IT‐solution; and mutual trust among the cooperating partners.

While there is growing literature in the field of supply chain management within the construction industry there is less empirical evidence providing practical examples of managing supply chains in this area. Strategic alliances are a crucial requisite for the successful management and integration of services and production within the construction industry.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue about the construction industry and the management of its supply chains. It aims to discuss and point to some differences and possible similarities with traditional manufacturing and its supply chains.

The paper is mostly a literature review and contains official statistics.

The market of the construction company is mostly local and highly volatile. The long durability of the construction “product” contributes to the volatility. The product specification process before the customer order arrives shows different degrees of specifications: engineer to order, modify to order, configure to order, select a variant. (The common make‐to‐stock in traditional manufacturing does not exist.) A construction company only executes a small part of the project by its own personnel and capacity. This is a way of risk spreading and risk mitigation and to compensate for an unstable market. If a construction company wants to establish a new concept, from “engineer to order” to e.g. “configure to order”, it must be engaged earlier in the business process and with other than usual customers, which might complicate the process.

Experiences from Sweden and Swedish developments are the main source of information.

The paper introduces the articles that are a source of scientifically generated knowledge regarding various problems and opportunities associated with supply chain management in the project‐based construction industry.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain the advertising behavior seen as an activation strategy performed by Olympic sponsors in an emerging market context. It provides insights into the strategic goals related to sponsorship.

The longitudinal approach taken opens the possibility to explore the dynamics of the strategies of Chinese as well as foreign firms in China. Theories on how sponsorship works cannot assist in explaining outcomes of sponsor-linked marketing, and since the actors involved rarely divulge their genuine intentions or their reciprocal contractual arrangements with the sponsored property, a new methodology has to be developed. A means-objective framework of sponsoring consists of six factors, which were applied to analyze 739 advertisements, articles and press releases collected from Chinese newspapers and Chinese official web pages covering a period of eight years (2001-2008) prior to the Olympic Games in Beijing. Based on a qualitative content analysis and nine means-objectives combinations in sponsorship patterns the authors discovered four dominant advertising strategies.

Lead-time is a key concept when analyzing sponsor advertising strategies. The authors conclude from the longitudinal data that the time gap between signing the contract and the dates of the event influences the strategy of the sponsoring corporations. The authors also observe that the advertising content changes over time and the sponsors craft different “advertising strategies” in different periods. Within this context the authors categorized two different advertising strategies. The sponsors are assumed to conduct a “Short Advertising Strategy” different from the “Long Advertising Strategy.” Both are examples of activation strategies.

Advertising strategies and activation seems to be dependent on the lead-time to the Olympic Games and the level of internationalization of the sponsoring firm.

Knowledge integration is the process of building shared mental models. The integration of the diverse knowledge of the health professions in shared mental models is a precondition for effective teamwork and team performance. As it is known that different groups of health care professionals often tend to work in isolation, the authors compared the perceptions of knowledge integration. It can be expected that based on this isolation, knowledge integration is assessed differently. The purpose of this paper is to test these differences in the perception of knowledge integration between the professional groups and to identify to what extent knowledge integration predicts perceptions of teamwork and team performance and to determine if teamwork has a mediating effect.

The study is a multi-center cross-sectional study with a descriptive-explorative design. Data were collected by means of a staff questionnaire for all health care professionals working in the rehabilitation clinics.

The results showed that there are significant differences in knowledge integration within interprofessional health care teams. Furthermore, it could be shown that knowledge integration is significantly related to patient-centered teamwork as well as to team performance. Mediation analysis revealed partial mediation of the effect of knowledge integration on team performance through teamwork.

In practice, the results of the study provide a valuable starting point for team development interventions.

This is the first study that explored knowledge integration in medical rehabilitation teams and its relation to patient-centered teamwork and team performance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model exploring the link between open innovation, customer knowledge management and radical innovation. It seeks to answer these research questions: is there any difference among the effects of different types of open innovation activities on radical innovation? How does the organizational learning ability influence the impact of customer knowledge management on radical innovation?

The paper is based on the data collected from a sample of 165 modern service enterprises located in the Yangtze River Delta region. The authors conducted a structural equation modeling analysis using SPSS and MPLUS to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results showed that different kinds of open innovation activities had different impacts on the path to radical innovation. Inbound open innovation activities directly influenced radical innovation while the effect of outbound open innovation activities on radical innovation combined with the organizational exploitative learning ability is indirect. Similarly, the empirical results also proved that customer knowledge management had an indirect effect on radical innovation through the organizational learning ability, and the influence of the exploratory learning ability was more prominent.

Under the background of the national innovation driven by the development strategy, this paper studies the impact mechanism of radical innovation from the perspectives of open innovation and customer knowledge management. Therefore, it is suggested that the enterprise should adopt open innovation activities to foster innovation performance, formulate a customer-oriented innovation strategy and invest information and communication technologies to enhance the organizational learning ability of the enterprise.