The questions addressed in this volume are motivated by the recognition that engineers play an important role in generating innovation and economic growth. In this chapter, we seek to offer some description of engineering work by looking in detail at a specific manufacturing industry—firms...

This paper applies contract-theory to explain why nonprofits exist and how they compete with for profits. Existing theories about nonprofits either assume that nonprofit organizations engage in "unprofitable" businesses and therefore rely on philanthropy and altruism, or that nonprofits can...

Innovation is an important driver of economic growth and competitive advantage. A diverse literature in economics and management addresses a variety of questions about how to manage associated technological change. This paper explores the "opposite" question: Namely, what explains the absence of...

Open source software is emerging as a potentially important competitive force in the software industry, capturing the attention of venture capitalists and computing industry executives. Yet very little is known about how open source software, which is created collectively by individual...

Over the last few decades, innovation has doubled automobile performance at a time when outsourcing has increased. But outsourcing is subject to well-known contracting hazards that would also afflict outsourcing for innovation. In this paper, we examine how supplier firms generate innovation in...

This paper takes a detailed look at the automotive supply chain to gain insight into how engineers generate innovation. Using survey data and observations from dozens of site visits to manufacturers, we characterize the incremental improvements in processes and product quality that accumulate to...

While the theoretical literature hypothesizes that nonprofit hospitals are less efficient than for-profits, empirical cost comparisons have been confounded by difficult to measure controls like quality. We bypass this problem by comparing hospital market values measured by sales prices. We ask...

Digital platforms are organized by some of the world’s largest firms to serve multiple inter-connected markets. Facebook is a giant firm that organizes a marketplace, and we use it as an example to illustrate why information privacy should be analyzed as a major dimension of platform...

Nonprofit organizations provide an array of important social goods and services including arts, education and health care. Consequently, the nonprofit sector is a growing area of interest for management and strategy scholars. Existing theories of nonprofit organizations posit a menu of...