The biotechnology industry is shifting its value creation emphasis from R&D to manufacturing and market. Business models need to keep pace with this evolution. This paper reports on a single-case study of a new biotechnology firm, EpiTan Limited, and the life cycle stages it has progressed...

Component commonality - the use of the same version of a component across multiple products - is being increasingly considered as a promising way to offer high external variety while retaining low internal variety in operations. However, increasing commonality has both positive and negative cost...

The dissertation addresses optimization problems related to the management of product variety with inventory considerations. The objective is to provide insights and tools to help companies determine the optimal level of product variety they should produce/stock and maximize revenues by...

Two key factors that have so far allowed fast growing economies of central and eastern Europe to cope with their external constraint have been I) the presence of relatively low unit labour costs and ii)the initial undervaluation of the exchange rate. The accession to the EU will inevitably...

Despite considerable research relating to product variety, few studies have analyzed the impact of product variety on distributors. Furthermore, compared to research on product variety, service variety has been overlooked in the literature. This dissertation consists of three essays: Essay One...