Search results

Complexity, turbulence, and unpredictability have driven the emergence of a new firm's model, namely the extended enterprise (EE). The EE is an emerging business framework, addressing the current challenges related to innovation and competition in complex scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to provide a clear and unambiguous description of the EE, and how it differentiates from the network firm. Moreover the paper discusses also how the EE is evolving and what are the key strategies enabling the EE to attain his goals.

The paper reviews different literature, such as supply‐chain, manufacturing, marketing, innovation, and management with the aim to provide a clear definition of the EE.

This article identifies the key characteristics of the EE, such as opening the innovation process to external innovators, acquiring and redistributing knowledge with different stakeholders, network coevolution, trust, and technologies. Increasingly, it discusses the importance of fostering tacit and explicit knowledge sharing and of aligning values to achieve the goals of the EE.

There are very few papers discussing the characteristics of the EE and they are all outdated. This is one of the first papers that attempts also to identify the governance mechanisms that managers can adopt to achieve the goals of the EE.

This paper aims to address the gap that, to date, no systematic review has been carried out on the role that structural social capital (SC) plays for knowledge transfer and innovation at the interpersonal, inter-unit and inter-firm levels. Individuals and organisations are becoming increasingly involved in collaboration networks to share knowledge and generate innovation. SC theory has been adopted in several areas of study to explain how individuals, groups and organisations manage relationships to generate innovation.

This review covers studies of SC in organisational behaviour, strategy and management over a period of 20 years.

The literature review shows that knowledge types and knowledge transfer processes are the missing links in the relationship between structural SC and innovation. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that seemingly opposite configurations of SC are complementary to each other (structural holes vs dense networks; strong vs weak ties) and that contextual factors should be considered when discussing the effects of SC on knowledge transfer and innovation. In addition, it is the balance of different configurations of SC which enables an individual or a company to explore, access, assimilate and combine different knowledge types, which will lead to improved innovation outcomes.

This review facilitates understanding of the role of SC for knowledge transfer processes and the mediating role of knowledge transfer processes and knowledge types in the relationship between structural SC and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the literature on social capital and its contribution to innovation performance.

Through an intensive review of the literature, the paper first analyzes the origin of the concept of social capital. It then explains the contribution of social capital within the organization and management studies. Further, social capital is considered the facilitator of knowledge search and knowledge sharing activities, which are considered of capital importance to innovation outcomes. Further, the paper clarifies the implications of social capital to two types of innovation: radical vs incremental innovation. Finally, the paper analyzes the structural dimension of social capital by focusing on the contribution of two different configurations and their effect on innovation: sparse vs cohesive networks.

The paper contributes to the literature by uncovering the positive, but also the negative, drawbacks of social capital. Moreover, the paper focuses on the structural dimension of social capital and it discusses the controversial results of two different configurations of social capital (sparse vs cohesive networks) to the innovation performance.

This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on both the positive and negative effects of social capital on innovation performance. The paper links social capital to the new innovation model, emphasizing the importance of social capital to knowledge search and sharing activities, and then to the innovation process. The authors suggest investigating the contribution of social capital according to firms' innovation scopes.