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Offshore renewable energy technologies provide many new opportunities for coastal regions around the world, and although the energy policy literature has documented the success stories of many “first mover” regions, there is little guidance for “second mover” or “follower” regions. This paper aims to investigate the strategic challenges faced by coastal regions in the Channel area that are not first movers.

The authors use a multiple case study approach to analyse the behaviour of regional stakeholders when planning and assessing their participation in the renewable energy sector.

The paper reveals the tendency of regional planners to idealise investments in renewable energy. The negative consequences of idealisation are inadequate strategic visions.

The findings are only relevant in the context of the regions that are part of the case study.

The paper illustrates how idealisation of technology or strategy is created and how it impacts strategic decision-making. It also discusses how to address idealisation.

Although much of the energy policy literature discusses the challenge of social acceptance, this paper documents an opposite phenomenon, idealisation. There is a need in the energy sector to find a middle ground between these two extremes.

The paper provides evidence and a theoretical analysis of a decision-making bias, idealisation, which is not discussed in the literature.

The results of a research project dealing with knowledge management in project environments and the capability to transfer knowledge across projects teams are presented. A key distinction is made between generic project knowledge (kernel knowledge) and specific project knowledge (ephemeral knowledge). For each type of knowledge, knowledge management benchmarks are described and discussed. The empirical data used in this paper was collected from companies of various sizes operating in the manufacturing, construction and service sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the robustness of the emerging body of knowledge about collaborative supply chains in the context of Engineered-to-Order (ETO) manufacturing engineering project systems.

This paper uses an evolutionary classification technique to build an evolutionary history for an industry case study: the French ETO machine design industry.

The evolutionary history shows that collaborative forms of governance have been used in this industry after an era of failed transactional market-based governance. The industry, however, has abandoned collaborative forms of governance to return to its historical roots towards more vertical integration.

Findings are only relevant in the context of the investigated industry.

In certain industrial settings managers should consider the promise of collaboration and trust with cautious.

The data set supports Williamson’s (1993) rejection of trust as a mode of governance and calls for a more careful delineation of the conditions of recourse to trust in managerial situations.

The lack of contextual sensitivity of best practices thinking can be a deterrent to innovation in small and medium‐size enterprises if owners and managers feel that the specificity of their companies are not taken into account. Presents cladistics, an evolutionary classification technique, as a tool to be used to craft and validate manufacturing strategies. Cladistics provides a compromise between over‐prescriptive generic business solutions and cost inefficient, high‐risk idiosyncratic solutions. The contribution of cladistics as a qualitative methodology in operations strategy research is illustrated by an evolutionary classification of the hand tool industry and recommendations for innovation in this industry.

This second part of the paper presents in more detail the phylogenetic model of automotive assembly factories used in the first part of the paper. The key organizational species and their mutual relationships are described with an emphasis on the speciation points. This paper is purely descriptive.

This paper is an introduction to cladistics, a qualitative evolutionary classification technique, as a method for historiography. An example of classification is provided, and used to present briefly the cladistic methodology. The benefits and applications of cladistics to business research are discussed. The three main benefits of cladistics are to: provide a method for historiography; combine effectively tasks of analysis and synthesis; and be an ideal support for collective modeling.