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Although widely used, the concept of business competence is not well defined. Proposes a hierarchical model which integrates the different types of competence which have appeared in the operations and general management literature in recent years. Proposes two new types of competence to complete the model, with illustrative examples from the Management Today/ Cranfield Best Factory Awards database.

Which courses of action and levers are used by companies in the quest for renewal? Do renewal initiatives create value for the company? Can successful renewal initiatives provide models for managers committed to change, enabling them to identify certain levers that can be exploited in their own drives for renewal? This paper aims at providing answers to these questions by describing different aspects (implementation and corporate value creation perspectives) of the renewal experience conducted in 1993 by a large French electrical engineering company, Spie-Trindel. In this company, a competence building process was identified and analyzed as a driving force behind renewal. Thanks to an analysis of different performance measures (return on investment, return on equity and stock market prices) of Spie-Trindel, the competence building process was studied as a transformational leverage and its impact on the resulting value creation of the company was put into light. Moreover, this paper provides a concrete and detailed description of a specific competence building process which led the company to both alter the hierarchy of competences (see “reordering mechanisms”) and institutionalize new competences (see “institutionalization and routinization mechanisms”) within its core competence portfolio.

In this paper we discuss the relationship between the competence-based perspective and market positioning. We argue that a product, which as the ultimate expression of a firm's competence reflects a firm's distinctive competences, should have the potential to achieve a superior market position. We suggest how a specific capability of central importance in product creation – modular design capability – may help firms to achieve advantageous market positioning. In particular, we develop a framework for assessing the potential impact of modular design capability on customers’ perception of competing products in the market for mobile phone handsets.

The paper's aim is to present a critical review of the current European process of co‐operation in VET with a special view to the European Qualification Framework and its competence orientation.

The approach reviews the official documentation and the consultation process and a contrastive analysis of the state of the art of research and developments in VET.

In order to make European VET a direct contribution to the revised Lisbon agenda, a more concise shared vision with regard to the processes and structures of vocational education might be needed.

It does not seem possible logically and pragmatically to fully abstract from the processes in which competence is acquired and in which it is going to be used.

Research and development activities in the European Union should be integrated towards an agenda that covers structures, conditions and processes of learning for the world of work.

Apart from a few other contributions, critical accounts of current policies and its implications for research and practice are scarce.

The reform of vocational qualifications is now under way. Britain's workforce is seriously underqualified and the need for competence, properly assessed and accredited, and personal qualities, such as attitudes and adaptability, must be met. The National Council for Vocational Qualifications is developing three major thrusts: towards competence, framework (the National Vocational Qualification), and accessibility and progression, giving a wide and more flexible range of learning opportunities.

This paper aims to produce a justified, generic, pictorial architecture of the relationships between resources and competences within firms. It begins by providing definitions of the nature, scope and relationships between resources, capabilities and competences from the resource and competence literatures. In so doing, theory is refined and a linked resource and competence architecture is developed. The architecture distinguishes between high‐level competences that customers recognize, for example fast product delivery, and competences that support high‐level competences but are less visible customers, like competences in rapid knowledge acquisition and deployment. An empirical example is then used to illustrate how the architecture enables the construction of structured pictures of connected competences and co‐ordinated resources within a manufacturing business. Finally, the architecture is critiqued and its value for managers in structuring competence performance improvement activities is discussed.

The authors reviews the leadership responsibilities involved in managing an organization that practices Agile management.

Outlines the best practices of major corporations that have adopted Agile processes both for teams and C-suite leadership.

Agile leaders spend less time reviewing the work of subordinates. They add value by adapting corporate strategies, leading critical agile teams, spending time with customers, mentoring individuals and coaching teams.

It is the C-suite leadership’s responsibility to establish and maintain a hierarchy of competence rather than a bureaucratic hierarchy of authority.

Describes how top management at some of the world’s largest and most successful corporations are adopting Agile practices to spur innovation and promote continuously adding customer vale.

The competence-based perspective shares with the resource-based view the notion of the fundamental importance of an organization's resources in its competitive outcomes.¹ In his paper “Probing into the nature of resources: Sustainable advantages and appropriable rents in the U.S. motion picture industry,” Jamal Shamsie investigates the sustainability of the competitive advantages that strategically important resources can bring to a firm, as well as the appropriability of the economic profits (rents) that can be derived from the uses of resources. To this end, the paper develops a classification of resource types based on the nature of a resource's ownership and control. Shamsie studies the U.S. motion picture industry to assess the degree of sustainable advantages and appropriable rents that can be generated by three types of resources: contracted resources, owned resources, and embedded resources. His findings suggest that in the subject industry both sustainability and appropriability are likely to be low for contracted resources such as top-rated stars and directors, while the greatest potential for sustainability and appropriability attach to embedded resources that accumulate firm-specific knowledge and learning in the development and marketing of various film genres.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a framework for enhancing organizational productivity and capacity building at the national, industry-wide level that is based on an active collaboration between elements of the industry that the authors will refer to as the organization and the educational system that trains/educates the human resources that play a vital role in enabling the organization to acquire and then maintain the competitive advantage needed to be successful.

This framework is based on the concept of competencies of the human resource and a competence-based model for recruiting and developing these human resources. This framework has been successfully applied by the Kemt Enterprise Training Partnership (ETP)/Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET-Egypt) project in the Egyptian papermaking industry to solidify an understanding of the required competencies in this sector. For the purposes, the term competency will be defined as a set of skills, knowledge and behavior that allows employees to do their jobs effectively and efficiently without interfering with either other tasks or tasks they will encounter in the future.

Organizational productivity will be assumed to be related to having a workforce that is both competent and of the appropriate size, and can be determined using an organizational function map coupled to the development of a set of related occupational standards.

The paper proposed a national framework competence-based model which collaborates all the national efforts to enhance the national competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to collect methodological strategies used in the training of future teachers to develop competences in sustainability and social responsibility (SSR). The proposal in this paper is to show how students learn and develop competences by performing practical activities and through a collaborative experience, conducted in a real-life context in the university campus.

This paper collects together a selection of competences and sub-competences in SSR, together with the methodological scenarios that allowed their implementation. The results in the acquisition of competences, as well as the efficiency of the methodological strategies employed, were obtained from the qualitative analysis of student questionnaires and of their final academic results.

Changing the teaching methods to include collaborative methodological strategies facilitates the acquisition of SSR competences.

A methodological limitation of this study is the fact that it has taken place in one academic year. The authors realize that to provide evidence of a profound behavioural change (which goes beyond the improvement of a habit), there is a need to carry out a longer study, which is complex when working with final year students. The authors are suggesting that the University carry out prolonged studies on the implementation and assessment of competences in SSR in the University and afterwards in the work place.

At the start of the course year, a problem was identified, namely, that future teachers lacked sustainable habit patterns. This was turned into a learning opportunity that led to a collaborative SSR programme on the campus.

Creating varied practical methodological scenarios has contributed to the development of SSR competences by the pupils. Students have questioned their lifestyles and have modified their consumption habits. Additionally, doing a transdisciplinary collaborative programme in our own campus has played a part in changing our organization for the better and has facilitated combining research and teaching.

This paper helps clarify how SSR competences can be developed in a local, real-life context.