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A new grouping of the eight schools of thought on business management is introduced. Their advancement is initially assessed with the help of a frame of reference, which is based on the principles inherent in Beer’s viable system model. It is proposed that a high degree of systemic advancement is one of the necessary attributes of any business-management concept that will be proven to be highly applicable to managing a firm’s dynamic business in practice. The first assessment reveals that the systemic advancement of the representative concepts varies a lot as follows. Porter’s chained frameworks (representing 1st Porterian school), Barney’s VRIO framework (2nd resource-based school), Sanchez and Heene’s concepts (3rd competence-based school), von Krogh et al.’s concept (4th knowledge-based school), and Hedlund’s heterarchy (5th organization-based school) are fairly systemic, respectively. Martin’s cascade (6th process-based school) is less systemic. Instead, Hamel’s revolutionary concept (7th dynamism-based school) and Brown and Eisenhardt’s competing on edge strategy (8th evolutionary school) are highly systemic. Thus, some promising ways to advance, in particular, the competence-based school of thought on business management are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for the construction of business concepts.

The proposed framework is developed through a discussion which is based on a review of existing literature and prevailing views as regards the concept of the business concept. The key premises of the study are tested through an explorative case research.

Customer value is the core of the proposed framework. Customer interface, product offering and differentiation form the key value creating platform in the management of business concepts. All three components of the platform are tightly linked and dependent of each others, implying that in order to find a good harmony firms must think holistically and be prepaid for adjustments. A new business configuration becomes necessary each time when the terms of the value creation are changed to deal with the competition. Configuration of existing business activities may offer a solution through differentiation but is subject to the building of new competences. As a whole innovation and competence building form the two most decisive critical factors behind the construction of successful new business concepts.

The suggested framework indicates upon which key issues business managers should focus when they aim to identify and develop new business concepts.

The concept of business concept is highly undeveloped as to its conceptual clarity and relation to strategic thinking. Also the existing literature of this topic is very scarce. The suggested framework improves this situation in attempting to develop a concrete tool for the understanding of what a business concept is.

The purposes of this paper are: (1) to identify what types of business process operation controllers are discussed in literature and how can they be classified in order to establish the available body of knowledge in the literature, and then, (2) to identify which concepts are relevant for business process operation control and how are these concepts related in order to offer a reference model for assessing how well are control layers enforced in the dynamic stable nature of an enterprise' business processes operation.

One cycle of the circular framework for literature review as proposed by Vom Brocke et al. (2009) is followed. Five stages are comprised: (1) definition of review scope (Section 1 and 2), (2) conceptualization of topic (Section 3), (3) literature search (Section 4), (4) literature analysis and synthesis (Section 5), and (5) definition of a research agenda (Section 6 that also concludes the paper). Vom Brocke, J., Simons, A., Niehaves, B., Niehaves, B., Reimer, K., Plattfaut, R., and Cleven, A. (2009), “Reconstructing the giant: on the importance of rigour in documenting the literature search process”, ECIS 2009 Proceedings, Vol. 161.

Results indicate that (1) many studies exist in the literature, but no integrated knowledge is proposed, hindering the advance of knowledge in this field, (2) a knowledge gap exists between the implemented solutions and the conceptualization needed to generalize the solution to other contexts. Also, the ontology proposed provides a reference model for assessing the maturity of the business process control operation.

The contents contained in the paper needs to be further deepened to include the concepts of “business process management” and “business process mining”, as well as a semantic equivalence study between concepts can integrate better this conceptual framework and identify similarities. Then, the relationship between industries and dynamically stable business processes operation concepts have not yet been fully investigated. Thirdly, the atypical curve of interest that business processes operational control has been receiving in literature is not fully understood.

Some example applications that could benefit from this ontology are (1) security policy for business processes fine grained access control; (2) business processes enforced with decentralized policies, e.g. blockchain; (3) business process compliance and change; or (4) intelligent enterprise decision-making process, e.g. using AI trained neural network to support the human decision to choose if a control actuation is positive or negative instead of relying only on human-based decisions.

We understand that business process operation is a dynamically stable system, where steady motion is achieved with the continuous imposition of actor's actions. Therefore, all the work that contribute to the development of knowledge regarding the actor's actions in their execution environment offer the ability to optimize, and/or reengineering, business processes delivering more social value or better social conditions.

In the best of our knowledge this work is unique in the sense that integrates a set of concepts that is rarely, or never, combined. Table 3 corroborates this result.

This chapter is based on a four-year literature review process that focused on conceptual business management research. A new platform for advancing business management in competence-related ways is compiled using 66 references that contain a population of 84 competence-related business management concepts published in English between the years 1990 and 2002. For the purposes of this study, the home bases of focal firms are limited to the OECD countries. Ex ante, various research traditions were regrouped into eight schools of thought on business management based on resources, competences, knowledge, organizations, processes, business dynamism, evolution, and Porter's frameworks. The eligible concepts were identified via an analysis of 50 journals and books of 18 publishers. The findings reveal that 99 authors have assigned primary or secondary roles to a firm's competences within their 84 concepts across the eight schools of thought. The two schools with primary emphasis on a firm's competences, the dynamism-based school (18 concepts) and the competence-based school (16 concepts), have produced 34 (41%) concepts. The six other schools have generated 50 (60%) concepts: 14 knowledge-based, ten resource-based, ten evolutionary, seven Porterian, seven organization-based, and two process-based concepts. The platform developed in this chapter may help researchers to focus on the most promising areas and ways to produce highly applicable concepts for managing a firm's dynamic business. Some suggestions to this end are put forth: (i) increase future collaboration between scholars, business managers, and business consultants, (ii) advance competence-based concepts primarily along the international business dimension, and (iii) conduct future competence-related literature reviews. The rigorous conduct of future reviews involves the replicable ways of searching, browsing, including or excluding, retrieving, inferring, coding, and presenting the conceptual data.

This paper proposes a semi-Beerian frame of reference for designing a business organization as a system with four subsystems and eight modes of thinking and interacting in both offering and resource markets. A systemic organizational competence includes an ability to connect a business unit with its markets. It possesses absorption, attenuation, and amplifier capacities. It guides and re-specifies all technology, embedded knowledge, capabilities, and other resources that together enable a business unit to act in the predefined, emerging, or innovative ways needed for goal attainment. Ex ante, various research traditions were regrouped into eight schools of thought on business management based on Porter's frameworks, resources, competences, knowledge, organizations, processes, business dynamism, and evolution. The findings reveal that various core, distinct, organizational, higher, and lower competences and capabilities play both primary and secondary roles, across the eight schools of thought, within a population of 84 competence-related business-management concepts published between years 1990 and 2002. Most authors do not deal with competitiveness boundary setting and modeling. A new frame of reference points to some viable avenues of producing highly applicable competence-based concepts as four semi-Beerian subsystems (boundaries, models, designs, and actions). Managing a business unit successfully involves eight kinds of explicit and tacit knowledge, situational information, reflections, decisions, models, designs, and interactions. It is proposed that a high degree of systemic advancement is one of the necessary attributes of any competence-based concept that will be proven to be highly applicable in managing a real dynamic business. Thus, competence-based scholars are encouraged to adopt the suggested assumptions, redesign their concepts as one or several semi-Beerian subsystems, and thus advance their school of thought markedly in the future.

Purpose: The purpose of the work is to specify the concept of business system, which allows overcoming the multitude of its treatments and contradiction of scientific research, devoted to its research and allows building the conclusions into the economic theory.

Methodology: A generalized notion of business as a clearly organized corporate economic subject that conducts entrepreneurial activities for the purpose of obtaining income (profit) is offered. For studying it, the methodology of the systemic approach is used.

Conclusions: The specified concept of business system allowed unifying within the common scientific category the existing concepts of economic subject (organizations, companies, corporations, and business structures).

Originality/value: Advantages of the offered concept of business system is systemic character (category “business system” could be used during research in the sphere of management, economics, and law), universal character (the offered concept allowed reflecting internal and external environment of the business system, which allows conducting microeconomic and macroeconomic research on its basis), and clarity (the offered concept reflects the essence of notions of business and illustrated them). The offered conceptual model of modern business system is to be a foundation for theoretical and empirical research, including interdisciplinary.

The purpose of this paper is to explore: student perceptions of threshold concepts and capabilities in postgraduate business education, and the potential impacts of intensive modes of teaching on student understanding of threshold concepts and development of threshold capabilities.

The student experience of learning was studied in two business units: strategic management, and accounting. The method involved two phases. In the first, students and unit coordinators identified and justified potential threshold concepts and capabilities. In the second, themes were rationalized.

Significantly more so in intensive mode, the opportunity to ask questions was reported by student participants to support their development of the nominated threshold capabilities. This and other factors reported by students to support their learning in intensive mode are consistent with supporting students to traverse the liminal space within the limited time available in intensive mode.

Respondents from future cohorts will address the small participant numbers. Studies in only two units are reported. Studies in other disciplines are presented elsewhere.

The findings will be important to educators using intensive mode teaching in business, and researchers working within the framework.

This is the first study to explore the potential impacts of intensive modes of teaching on student understanding of threshold concepts and development of threshold capabilities.

The perceptions of 497 consumers of the various philosophies involved in the evolution of marketing thought — product, selling, marketing and societal marketing concepts are examined. Results show that the sample fails to delineate the subtle distinctions between the product, marketing and societal marketing concepts, and support is lent to the view that if the marketing concept is to be more broadly implemented, product and social dimensions found within the definitional domain of the product and societal marketing concepts should be encompassed to establish a wider marketing‐oriented philosophy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the objectives, tenants, spaces and services of different business center concepts and test whether the existing classifications in literature and in the real estate market draw on significantly different concepts.

After a literature review, data on business centers were collected with a questionnaire among owners/mangers of 139 business centers in the Netherlands. The existing business center concepts are examined whether these concepts are significantly different, using bivariate analyses.

The findings of this study give insight into the business center market, the existing business center concepts and (dis)similarities between the concepts. Although many dissimilarities were found between the business center concepts, like offered services, social spaces and contractual agreements, findings show that the four business center concepts can be offered in similar objects.

New ideas about working and the work environment have caused the business center market to become more differentiated. Some studies have attempted to classify the business center market into several categories or analyzed in detail one specific business center concept. However, these studies did not describe in detail the differences between the concepts. Also there is hardly any empirical research on this sector. This paper addresses gaps in previous research on business centers and demonstrates that there are significant (dis)similarities between the existing business center concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential benefits of a business game on customers’ business in enhancing servitization. The concept is proposed to be helpful in the phases of defining the servitization initiative and gaining shared understanding about it at a manufacturer.

The paper is based on a longitudinal case study at a manufacturer (2003‐2008), with a focus on the business game concept on customers’ business. The researchers and approximately 140 company representatives contributed to both early and later phases of the development of the concept.

The business game concept appeared to serve the purpose of generating and sharing ideas about the customers’ business and the desired role of the OEM in it, as a potential outcome of servitization. The concept synthesizes the previously fragmented customer awareness across the business units and provides useful information for various stakeholders. The presence of personnel across the different business units and from a key customer company in the game events enabled new types of discussion related to the servitization initiative.

The concept presented in this paper represents a potential tool for enhancing a servitization initiative. Due to the limitations of the case, the findings are tentative and primarily transferrable to contexts where a manufacturer provides machinery for industrial production. Moreover, the ability of the concept to capture real‐life customer values is critical for success and thus should be carefully examined.

The case study enables an in‐depth view of the phenomena under examination. Moreover, due to the researchers’ interventions in developing and using the concept, they observed actual processes of overcoming the challenges of servitization.