This study analyzes the processes whereby organizations develop radical innovations in response to environmental transformations. It explores the changes in organizational structures, practices and business strategies entailed by the implementation of such innovations. From the literature on...

This paper discusses the issue of modularity from a problem-solving perspective. Modularity is in fact a decomposition heuristic, through which a complex problem is decomposed into independent or quasi-independent sub-problems. By means of a model of problem decomposition, this paper studies the...

Empirical studies on coordination of economic activities focused on the two polar cases of governance mode, namely vertical integration and market exchanges. Whether firms should be vertically integrated or lever market exchanges in the face of change is, however, debated. Two positions have...

Based on an in-depth case study of Pilkington Plc, this study illustrates that received perspectives in organization theory and theory of the firm fall short of explaining organizational evolution. The framework of organizational evolution developed in this paper is combinatorial in two ways....

The aim of this paper is to document the role that career engineers played in the investment strategies and eventual survival of an organization producing large high technology capital goods. Using the theory of innovative enterprise developed by Lazonick and O'Sullivan (2000), we analyze the...

This paper brings together data from 14 OECD countries on scientific publications, patents and production specialisation to explore the relationship between economic and production specialisation for 17 manufacturing sectors. Since Marx, there has been a fundamental debate in economics about the...