The salience of the international purchasing office (IPO) in the management of international sourcing activities of multinational corporations (MNCs) has steadily increased, in developed and emerging economies, since the first adoption of this supply chain strategy in the 1980s. The aim of this...

Research on the innovation process and its effective management has consistently highlighted a set of themes constituting "good practice". The limitation of such "good practice" is that it relates to what might be termed "steady state" innovation — essentially innovative activity in product...

One of the key issues in managing inter-organisational relationships is the need for exchanging sensitive information and knowledge between customer and supplier. Attempts to conduct this process in practice appear to have taken customer dominance as their basis; the negotiation techniques that...

This paper presents a model of how organisations might employ Value-Transparency (V-T) as a resource within supply relationships. The model refutes classical models of buyer-supplier relationships which assume a hierarchy wherein customers specify and demand suppliers to conform or acquiesce....

This paper presents a conceptual model for the creation and operation of supply networks. Existing conceptual research relating to interorganizational relationships and networks is reviewed in terms of its relevance to understanding supply networks; this research is drawn from the fields of...

Setting up an international purchasing office (IPO) is one of the key steps for firms doing global sourcing. This paper aims to explore the relationship between strategy and structure in a contemporary global purchasing context. We build a theory of IPOs, employing a case study method to address...