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The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of how companies can implement rapid manufacturing (RM) (i.e. the use of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies for final part production) for mass customisation (MC), drawing upon the experiences of firms in the dental sector (one of the major users of AM technologies).

A framework for implementation of RM for MC was developed from the literature to guide the data gathering. Data from six case companies in the dental sector implementing RM for MC, supplemented with insights from their respective AM machine providers and software companies, were used to analyse how companies implement RM for MC and what considerations and challenges they face in the process.

The study shows how implementation of RM for MC entails different considerations depending on the stage of implementation and maturity of involved technologies. In total, 26 challenges have been identified that seem to play a crucial role in implementation. The paper suggests that RM can enable MC in manufacturing by achieving both a high number of units produced and as well as a high level of customisation of each product.

Based on the review of the literature, no case studies exist that investigate companies implementing RM for MC despite literature having suggested RM as an enabler for MC in manufacturing for many years.

Advancements in responsive manufacturing have been supporting companies over the last few decades. However, manufacturers now operate in a context of continuous uncertainty. This research paper explores a mechanism where companies can “elastically” provision and deprovision their production capacity, to enable them in coping with repeated disruptions. Such a mechanism is facilitated by the imitability and substitutability of production resources.

An inductive study was conducted using Gioia methodology for this theory generation research. Respondents from 20 UK manufacturing companies across multiple industrial sectors reflected on their experience during COVID-19. Resource-based view and resource dependence theory were employed to analyse the manufacturers' use of internal and external production resources.

The study identifies elastic responses at four operational levels: production-line, factory, company and supply chain. Elastic responses that imposed variable-costs were particularly well-suited for coping with unforeseen disruptions. Further, the imitability and substitutability of manufacturers helped others produce alternate goods during the crisis.

While uniqueness of production capability helps manufacturers sustain competitive advantage against competitors during stable operations, imitability and substitutability are beneficial during a crisis. Successful manufacturing companies need to combine these two approaches to respond effectively to repeated disruptions in a context of ongoing uncertainties. The theoretical contribution is in characterising responsive manufacturing in terms of resource heterogeneity and resource homogeneity, with elastic resourcing as the underlying mechanism.

COVID-19 highlighted the potential value of improving knowledge sharing (KS) processes among hospital estates and facilities management (HEFM) departments. Organisational trust (OT) is a recognised predictor of KS interactions, but the interplay of impersonal and interpersonal OT components is yet to be investigated fully. In response to recent calls, this study aims to explore the effect of organisational features on personal trust and OT components required for KS episodes, in the context of the English National Health Service (NHS).

A qualitative, exploratory grounded theory approach was selected, using primary data from 22 semi-structured interviews and secondary data from grey literature. A model of trust for KS among employees from geographically distributed units with pooled interdependence was synthesised from a review of the literature and used to connect the organisational features to different trust mechanisms.

This study identifies four organisational features with a compound barrier-effect on impersonal-based OT, interpersonal-based OT and personal trust for KS interactions: lack of professional development, inappropriate reward and incentive systems, reorganisations/organisational change and benchmarking.

This study sought to generate theory about the interplay of organisational barriers and trust components required for KS, not to describe HEFM KS across the entire NHS. Future studies with more comprehensive data collections can build on this exploratory study by quantitatively testing the compound barrier effect of the organisational features.

Practitioners can benefit from the insights into the barriers inhibiting trust mechanisms required for effective KS processes. These can inform policymakers in English and potentially other health-care systems in designing enhanced collaborative arrangements, which are required as future crises, e.g. pandemics and climate change hazards, will require increasingly complex solutions.

This study addresses the interplay between personal trust, impersonal OT and interpersonal OT for KS by identifying the compound barrier effects of underlying organisational barriers common to personal trust and OT.

In 2003, there was a concern among policymakers that spin-outs were being given undue prominence in consideration of the research commercialisation performance of UK Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) (Lambert, 2003). The aim of this research was to investigate what issues lay behind the data reported on spin-out activity by UK HEIs in the period 1998–2002.

Innovation is an increasingly distributed process, involving networks of geographically dispersed players with a variety of possible, and dynamic, value chain configurations (Fraser, Minshall, & Probert, 2005). ‘Open innovation’ is one term that has emerged to describe ‘[…] the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively’ (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006). This is contrasted with the ‘closed’ model of innovation where firms typically generate their own ideas which they then develop, produce, market, distribute and support.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the development of the final outputs of a research project looking at partnerships between technology‐based start‐ups and large firms (“asymmetric” partnerships). It presents the stage of the research aimed at understanding how best to design outputs to assist firms in managing such partnerships.

A combination of company case studies, company workshops, an end‐user survey and pilot dissemination programme were used to identify an appropriate form for the packaging and delivery of the research findings (i.e. what problems can be encountered in such partnerships, and what approaches companies have implemented to overcome these problems).

A range of approaches for overcoming the problems of managing partnerships between firms whose age and size are markedly different were catalogued. The research presented in this paper revealed that companies felt best able to learn from the experiences of others through a combination of direct support, multi‐company workshops, and online access to selected materials.

The generalisability of the findings may be limited by the fact that the majority of the organisations collaborating in this research either were located in the high‐technology business cluster in and around the city of Cambridge, UK or had formed partnerships with companies in this geographic region.

Partnerships between technology‐based start‐ups and technology‐intensive large firms can provide an effective means of accessing and integrating the complementary assets required to bring a novel technology to market. This research will help firms overcome the numerous challenges involved in setting up and managing such partnerships by providing stakeholders with easier access to academic research findings. It will assist researchers who are considering how to disseminate research outputs to industry.

There is a strong body of work on improving the performance of partnerships in general, but less on overcoming the practical challenges of managing partnerships between firms of markedly different age and scale. In addition, the selection of the optimum process for ensuring that the findings of such research are used to support implementation remains a topic of debate. This work helps to address both gaps.

Literature shows that university spin‐offs (USOs) have idiosyncratic strengths in comparison to other new firms; however, evidence also shows that Chinese USOs have a low survival rate, and only a small percent of them can grow into sustainable businesses. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical study to inquire about the variable growth barriers to Chinese USOs, in order to address two major research questions of this paper: what are the major growth barriers, and how significant they are; and what supports should university and government provide to eliminate those barriers?

In the first place, this paper attempts to explore the research questions through literature review and pilot interviews, based on which, a questionnaire for a survey was developed. Then, this study then attempts to address the research questions through a nation‐wide survey in 2009 across 69 national university science parks.

This paper finds that corporate governance issues, managerial concerns, and lack of infrastructure support are three major categories of barriers that thwart the growth of USOs in China. In addition, this paper also identified the support that is expected from universities and government agencies in order to cope with the barriers.

This paper contributes to theory in three ways. First, it tests and validates some existing conceptual frameworks concerned with the growth barriers to USOs. Second, it sheds light on the specific growth concerns of Chinese USOs and identifies three kinds of barriers. Further, this study provides evidence for future policy making regarding USOs and university technology transfer activities in China. This research will be of interest to policy makers, academic entrepreneurs, and university administrators.

The buyers' perspective of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) has been heavily researched, yet it has produced surprisingly few prescriptive findings. Given the limited amount of prior research from the sellers' perspective, inductive methods appear to be the most appropriate to research this phenomenon (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003; Miles & Huberman, 1994). Using the model outlined by Carlile and Christensen (2005), the overall goal of the project reported here is to build a theoretical framework based on empirical observations. This will eventually facilitate the examination of this phenomenon and enhance knowledge as well as theory building for further research.

A key element in the development of a technology, a company or an industry is the availability of finance. While much effort has been directed at understanding the roles of venture capital, angel investment and public investment, there does not appear to be much analysis of the industry-level effects as a new industry is emerging. In this chapter, we investigate the patterns of public and private investments and the role of government in support of financing the emergence of science and technology industries. We also examine the criteria used by venture capitalists in their assessment of investment opportunities regarding new technology-based ventures. We focus on the analysis of investment at stage between prototyping and commercialisation of a new technology. This stage has been labelled as the ‘valley of death’ from an investor perspective, which reflects greater risks for investors due to the high level of both technology and market uncertainty.

In the UK as more and more traditional manufacturing is being outsourced to lower-cost countries, the development of manufacturing start-up companies is increasingly perceived as important in sustaining a competitive UK manufacturing base. However, start-up companies are often associated with a high failure rate, particularly during the early stages of operation. As they have yet to build up the strength and resources to sustain them through internal and external crises, start-ups operate under conditions that constantly challenge their survival. Developing the most appropriate manufacturing strategy is probably more critical in start-up companies than in established organisations, yet little research has addressed this area.

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study involving six UK manufacturing start-up companies. A novel manufacturing strategy content framework is proposed. The chapter also examines the business orientation (technology-push or market-pull) adopted by the case companies, and investigates how business orientations influenced their manufacturing strategies. This leads to two business orientation mobility models. This chapter concludes by discussing the use of the frameworks and suggesting how they might be put into practice to provide assistance to operational managers in start-up companies.