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ormer US Attorney‐General Ramsey Clark once said “turbulence is life force – it is opportunity”. And for today’s leading car manufacturers, dealing with this “life force” has fast become a way of life. Fortunes are mixed, demands are shifting and remaining in the driving seat is becoming increasingly difficult. Jaguar and Skoda are two auto brands that have historically operated a gulf apart – the only commonality in their backgrounds being their takeover by mass‐market manufacturers Ford and VW. But both have recently come to discover the harsh realities of business at both ends of the market, and the crucial importance of product and people in corporate strategy.

Know‐how transfer at Skoda‐Volkswagen, a Central European joint venture established in 1991, aims at the development of a company previously characterized by socialist structures into a competitive, learning organization. It requires a high speed of change, and is initiated by project work, coaching and Czech‐German tandem management – a method so far not used sytematically in the Volkswagen Group. Organizational and personal preconditions are required to secure its successful implementation. Tandem partners can be aware of the necessary framework, and still not able to avoid typical mistakes. Communication problems might lead to separation into “the Czechs and the Germans”. Tandem management allows the necessary range of skills to develop faster than “classic” training, and is an efficient means of know‐how transfer, provided everyone concerned is involved steadily. The speedy transformation and integration process, which thus began in 1991, will be continued, and further contribute to Skoda′s role as a model for economic development in the Czech Republic.

The literature identifies different sources of competitive advantages. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that an efficient articulation of a Voice behavioral model and an Exit behavioral model can result in a sustained competitive advantage for automobile manufacturers.

The paper builds on the analytical framework of the global value chain literature to analyze how the combination of hierarchy, relational linkages and market linkages creates additional assets. The case of Volkswagen‐Skoda in the Czech Republic is used to illustrate the combination of Voice and Exit relationships.

The paper suggests that the competitive advantage of automobile manufacturers crucially depends today on the combination, on the one hand, of the “relational rent” provided by the cooperation with global suppliers, and on the other hand, of the “switching rent” provided by the absence of implication in the relationship with lower‐tier suppliers.

The paper represents an original research initiative that considers the combination of three types of linkages as the source of competitive advantage. The paper uses a case study to exemplify the declination and articulation of the three types of linkages.

More than 50 engine variants can be produced in random sequence on the new Skoda assembly line. Jack Hollingum reports from Czechoslovakia.

Reviews new automotive assembly plants in Europe. Outlines the lean production techniques Daimler‐Benz is using for the new Mercedes A‐Class. Describes the flexible NedCar facility which makes Volvos and Mitsubishis on the same production line. Explains the benefits Skoda has obtained by integrating suppliers into its new assembly facility for the Octavia.

Semantic retrieval and discovery of datasets published as open data remains a challenging task. The datasets inherently originate in the globally distributed web jungle, lacking the luxury of centralized database administration, database schemes, shared attributes, vocabulary, structure and semantics. The existing dataset catalogs provide basic search functionality relying on keyword search in brief, incomplete or misleading textual metadata attached to the datasets. The search results are thus often insufficient. However, there exist many ways of improving the dataset discovery by employing content-based retrieval, machine learning tools, third-party (external) knowledge bases, countless feature extraction methods and description models and so forth.

In this paper, the authors propose a modular framework for rapid experimentation with methods for similarity-based dataset discovery. The framework consists of an extensible catalog of components prepared to form custom pipelines for dataset representation and discovery.

The study proposes several proof-of-concept pipelines including experimental evaluation, which showcase the usage of the framework.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, there is no similar formal framework for experimentation with various similarity methods in the context of dataset discovery. The framework has the ambition to establish a platform for reproducible and comparable research in the area of dataset discovery. The prototype implementation of the framework is available on GitHub.

Michael Kami, president of Corporate Planning Inc., recently said that “the success of an organization depends on the individual and collective knowledge of its people”. This is very true, and highlights the importance of staying ahead in your particular field. The difficulties lie in deciding how to stay ahead. What strategies should be used, where it should be done and how much it will cost, are just a few of the issues that need to be addressed before tackling the knowledge debate.

Merger and acquisition (M&A) is a way to survive and succeed in a competitive global environment as a consequence of new political, monetary and regulatory issues. The complex phenomenon that M&As represent has received consistent attention from the research community over the last 30 years.

M&As are a strategic choice to grow quicker, enter new markets and maximize companies' capabilities, which otherwise would not have been possible. Within the automotive industry, this phenomenon has been seen repeatedly with examples like Mitsubishi-Daimler, Jaguar-Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Seat-Volkswagen, Daewoo-General Motors and Land Rover-Ford. Although M&A activity has trended directionally consistent with automotive assembly volume, there are some failure cases within automotive industry M&As (e.g., Rover-BMW). In this chapter, the focus is on the intercultural issues of the M&A phenomenon. The underestimation of the cultural factors has significant impact on why M&A operations sometimes fail to achieve the predefined goals.

It is of vital importance for the automotive companies to understand and be aware of these intercultural issues in order to be successful in their merger or acquisition.

The phenomenon of M&A within the automotive industry needs further research and discussions due to the fact that some strategic alliances and M&A proved to be successful (e.g., Škoda-Volkswagen) and others not (e.g., Rover-BMW).

The paper seeks to examine empirically the potential dilution and enhancement of brands that share product platforms with other brands.

Study 1 uses two real platform‐sharing examples from the automobile and consumer electronics industries in an experimental setting. Study 2 uses conjoint analysis in the same two industries to study the impact of platform‐sharing on preference and willingness to pay for a unique brand.

Study 1 finds that sharing a platform with an upscale brand is preferable to sharing with a downscale brand, although results are mixed on whether a unique‐to‐brand platform is preferred to sharing with an upscale brand. Study 2 finds that unique‐to‐brand platforms are preferred to any type of platform sharing, and calculates that this preference is worth about 6‐10 per cent of the product's retail price.

Both studies use student samples, although all product classes and brands tested are popular with this demographic, which is a key target market for the tested industries.

Platform sharing is an increasingly popular product development strategy that offers great cost savings in product design, manufacturing and servicing. The findings suggest that managers also need to carefully consider the potential cost to a brand's equity when calculating the financial implications of platform sharing.

This paper brings together two areas that are usually not studied together, i.e. product development and brand equity management, and finds that choices made in the former can have important implications for the latter.