Building on the notion of general and specific human capital proposed by Becker (1962), the paper highlights the importance of employee training practices undertaken in firms as an important tool for human resource and knowledge management and focuses on the role of works councils as a specific...

In this paper, we are going to report on the results of an exploratory piece of research about the typical front-end-related activities in 28 innovation projects carried out by 14 German and 13 Japanese companies to reduce project uncertainty. In all cases we observed a range of activities to...

This paper presents results of an empirical large-scale study on uncertainty reduction of R&D projects and R&D project selection. The empirical field is the German automotive supplier industry. We explore R&D project selection practices in this specific industry and briefly contrast our findings...

It is a basic premise of accounting that supplying managers with "good", problem-adequate, reliable, valid, actual, and material information will increase the efficiency of their decisions. However, production of such information is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for better...

Der vorliegende Beitrag widmet sich einem in der Organisationstheorie stark vernachlässigten Problem: der Ablauforganisation von Entscheidungen. Am Beispiel von Bilanzanalysen wird empirisch geprüft, in welcher Weise eine Gliederung des Prozesses nach Verrichtungen oder Objekten die Qualität...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of knowledge management on the innovation success of firms in Germany. Using a matching procedure on data from the German Innovation Survey of 2003 (“Mannheim Innovation Panel”), we pair firms applying knowledge management with twin firms with...

In this paper we explore how knowledge brokers - specialised design and engineering companies offering services to clients in diverse industries - use analogies for product development. Our research is based on interviews with project leaders of 13 knowledge brokering companies. The interviews...

The wide-ranging economic developments of the previous decade, e.g. the integration of world economies, have made a significant impact towards increasing the mobility of the working populace and their families. At the same time, technological developments especially in the field of...