While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and...

Application software is one of the most important elements of any information system. The most recent trend in the field of the software is, undoubtedly, migration of classic applications from centralized computer architectures to network or distributed architectures. This migration as well as...

The paper proposes the measurement of managerial and functional capabilities of the organization, as the dimensions of managerial potential, based on the configurative theory and not on the reductionist one. The components of the managerial potential are fulfilled by the capability of building...

This study comes to grips with the industrial outranking problem, one of the major outstanding problems of current operations research and managerial decision-making. The problem, simply stated, is this: given a large but finite set of criteria, and a large but finite number of alternatives, how...

What happens when fire strikes the manufacturing plant of the sole supplier for the brake pressure valve used in every Toyota? When a hurricane shuts down production at a Unilever plant? When Dell and Apple chip manufacturers in Taiwan take weeks to recover from an earthquake? When the U.S....

This paper surveys recent contributions on the Internalisation issue, based on different theories of the firm, to show how the make-or-buy decision, at an international level, has been assessed through the opening up of the "black box" - traditionally explored by the theorists of the firm - and...

The traditional argument that shorter product cycles favor trade secret over patenting is reviewed. A game theoretic model provides an argument that shorter product cycles can induce firms to file more patent applications. The firms may be trapped in a prisoners' dilemma where all firms would...

This study examines whether staged project management is beneficial or harmful for making product innovations. Using a unique firm survey for Japan, we find that firms that employed staged project management had a higher likelihood of introducing new products to the market. Additional...

The main purpose of the present study is to provide a highly comprehensive methodological solution for carrying out products/services which fully comply with customers (i.e. end users) functional and performance requirements in Telemedicine field, and furthermore to satisfy multitude end users...