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Organizational competences are essential sources of competitive advantage and thus are key drivers of competitive strategies for knowledge-intensive companies like automotive manufacturers. In order to cope with increasing market complexity and dynamism, reduced development times, and relentless cost pressures in a highly competitive environment, knowledge-driven companies need to understand how to be proactive in building and leveraging the competences they will need to be successful in the future, especially within their product development activities.

To help managers become proactive in identifying and building useful future competences, the dynamic and systemic perspectives of competence-based strategic management provide a framework for analysis that can help managers to look beyond their organization’s current competences and identify organizational competences that will be needed in the future. Competence theory emphasizes that an organization’s competences are dynamic and constantly need to be updated and reconfigured to adjust to the competitive dynamics of an industry. Any methodology for identifying future competence needs must begin with some means for identifying strategic gaps between the competences a firm has now and the competences it will need in the future. This paper describes a technology and market roadmap-based methodology for forecasting a firm’s future competence needs – the competences a firm will need to start developing now in order to meet expected market demands in the future. The methodology proposed here is applied and, we believe, validated through application to a competence planning process in a German luxury car manufacturer.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.

Despite the remarkable expansion of microfinance over the past several decades, the industry remains in a developmental period of experimentation and rapid growth, exploring which approaches work best under different circumstances. Widespread diffusion and local adaptation of techniques and innovations from pioneering organizations such as ACCION International, Grameen Bank, FINCA, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, BancoSol, and many others fostered the emergence of a global industry that by most counts now serves more than 100 million clients. Yet along many dimensions of the industry – for example, client methodologies, information technologies and infrastructures, transparency and performance monitoring, product and service portfolios, funding structures, human resource management, health and environmental amelioration, and regulations – significant barriers remain to achieving the broad vision of microfinance as a major contributor in fighting global poverty.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are arguably one of the CEOs greatest challenges, and there is a critical need to get these decisions right. It is clear that no single theory is adequate to describe or inform how M&A are evaluated in uncertain conditions, but there are several that offer partial explanations or at least contribute toward our understanding of how managers can deal with the uncertain environment and assess the likely risks associated with M&A. The literature suggests how relevant theories might be aggregated to make sense of strategic investment decision and investment appraisal techniques in an organizational context and considers the implications for further research in this important area of M&A. This chapter focuses on strategic investment appraisal, and draws together a variety of theoretical perspectives, especially from the field of psychology, which may be unfamiliar to both scholars in and practitioners.

This study investigates how education, scientific output, and the internet complement mobile phone penetration to affect technology commodity exports in sub-Saharan Africa for the period 2000–2012. The empirical evidence is based on a generalized method of moments. The following main findings are established. The internet complements the mobile phone to boost technology goods exports and technology service exports. In addition, positive marginal effects are apparent in the roles of educational quality and scientific output on technology goods exports and technology service exports, respectively, while negative marginal impacts are apparent in the roles of scientific output and educational quality on technology goods exports and technology service exports, respectively. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Purpose – The UK road freight sector is an example of an economically important sector that can be viewed from two different perspectives with regards to climate change: firstly, as a significant contributor to the problem in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and secondly as a likely recipient of significant impacts (both positive and negative) of any resulting change in climate, especially any increase in extreme weather. It is this relatively neglected second perspective, freight as a vulnerable sector, which is explored.

Methodology/approach – The way in which the freight sector develops in the future will be explored both in terms of the future type of freight operations and potential changes in vehicle technology.

Findings – There is a need to understand how the overlying socio-economic scenario influences the development of the freight sector.

Originality/value – The examination of the impact of climate change on the freight sector is a particularly original aspect of this chapter.

The purpose of this study is to examine the key challenges currently prevalent in the Machinery and Equipment (M&E) sector of Malaysia and to offer an integrative Industry 4.0 strategic roadmap. The Environmental Scan 2016 and 2018 provides a basis for the identification of the challenges in the M&E sector of Malaysia. The study further investigates the challenges by analyzing the responses of four major stakeholders in a Focus Group Discussion. The findings reveal that the M&E sector suffers from very low automation adoption. This study is among the first few to analyze the challenges in the M&E sector and lay out a strategic roadmap encompassing the role of each stakeholder at every phase of the transition toward Industry 4.0. The proposed method of transitioning through targeted incentive schemes will help academics and practitioners in developing concrete and workable action plans to conduct the transition process.

Technology moves fast. If you do ot iterate and plan with agility, a new approach will come along, and you will miss it. This premise from Ferris Bueller. Cheesy or not, it does not make it any less factual. The author learned many new concepts in doing the research for this chapter. There were several “aha!” moments that warrant sharing. The research here garnered an opinion that relates to the concept of balance. The moment an organism or organization is closest to “balanced” is when it has optimal performance. Modern IT projects require Agile methodologies. Many organizations do not necessitate the same agility in the departments that the IT organization supports. It is the author’s opinion that this imbalance can cause problems with IT or company projects before they start.

As far as technologies the only thing that anyone can say definitively is that technology will change and that those changes will accelerate. Given that information, the best that any practitioner can do is write programming logic that uses robust, clean baseline technology that follows an existing pattern or standard, and then hope that the next piece of sliced bread builds on the premise of the previous loaf. The way people interface with technology is shifting with the advent of smartphones and tablets. The engineers of the future must understand and apply very sound logic in setting up new systems. The systems of the future are likely continuously deployed and a large portion of the programming logic will auto-generated based on the inputs coming into the system.