This paper presents the findings of a recently completed research project. It sheds light upon the appropriate governance of inter-firm relationships, in order to achieve competitive success for the whole partnership and its individual members. An exploratory study in the German automotive...

Purpose – The purpose of the work discussed in this paper is to understand, analyse and benchmark the “Packing and Filling” processes within BASF. A benchmarking project is described in detail which aimed to cover sites in different countries that supplied many different variants of...

This paper reports on the theoretical foundations and the practical reasons for the increasing popularity of the enterprise management perspective. Theoretical foundations are given that discuss vertically integrated, virtual and extended enterprises in terms of endogenous and exogenous factors,...

Purpose – Qualitative theory building approaches, such as grounded theory method (GTM), are still not very widespread and rigorously applied in operations management (OM) research. Yet it is agreed that more systematic observation of current industrial phenomena is necessary to help managers...

Purpose ? The purpose of this paper is to investigate how research and development (R&D) collaboration takes place for complex new products in the automotive sector. The research aims to give guidelines to increase the effectiveness of such collaborations. Design/methodology/approach ? The...

This paper reports on the theoretical foundations and the practical reasons for the increasing popularity of enterprise management. The research has specifically aimed to investigate the dependency between the prevailing type of core competence and the emergent enterprise structure. Empirical...

This research reports on the appropriate governance, i.e. design and management, of inter-firm R&D relationships in order to achieve sustainable competitive success for the whole partnership as well as its individual members. An exploratory study in the German automotive industry using inductive...