Anna Cabigiosu

Modularity in KIBS: The Case of Third-Party Logistics Service Providers

This paper investigates service modularity and inter-organizational coupling in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). While KIBS literature traditionally emphasizes tight client–provider interactions with service customization, modularity literature emphasizes inter-organizational decoupling with service standardization. We disentangle this tension by exploring how KIBS firms utilize service modularity and shape their client–provider relationships in terms of information and knowledge sharing. Conducting two in-depth case studies of third-party logistics (TPLs), we show that TPLs extensively rely on service modularity with standard procedures as their constitutive element. We also demonstrate that service modularity and inter-organizational decoupling are aligned for knowledge sharing but not for information sharing, which remains high regardless of the service architecture. Overall, we suggest that modularity in KIBS differs in many aspects from modularity in products and that these differences significantly impact the organizational design consequences of service modularity. Theoretical and managerial implications are drawn.

Measuring Modularity: Engineering and Management Effects of Different Approaches

While a variety of “product” modularity measures have been proposed and empirically used, little comparative research has been conducted on the characteristics and efficacy of such measures. This study explores how the use of diverse modularity measures affects the analysis of the “mirroring” hypothesis. Particularly, this study analyzes the relationship between “product” modularity measures and the degree of: 1) buyer–supplier integration in new product development; 2) supply chain configuration. The empirical results suggest which of the analyzed measures of modularity are preferable, question the overall utility of such measures to really understand the organizational implications of complex technological systems, and point to alternative measurement approaches.

Innovation, Service Types, and Performance in Knowledge Intensive Business Services

Knowledge Intensive Business Services or KIBS are defined as customized and innovative business services. In this chapter, we argue that not only innovation and customization are complementary in KIBS, but also that replication via standard and modular services determines a KIBS firm’s performance. Using fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) on a sample of 319 KIBS firms, we explored the best-performing configurations resulting from a combination of different service innovations with different service types. In doing so, we separately considered product and process innovations and four different types of services (customized, standard, standard with minor customizations, and modular). Our results emphasize the complementarity between process innovations and service standardization on a firm’s profitability, while highlighting the complementarity between process innovations, service customization, and modularity of a firm’s growth. The work described in this chapter contributes to the KIBS literature and provides deeper insights into the interaction between innovation and service types.

Knowledge dynamics in third-party logistics: balancing exploitation and exploration through service architectures

A third-party logistics provider (TPL) is an external provider who manages, controls, and delivers logistics activities on behalf of a shipper (Hertz and Alfredsson, 2003). The scholars’ recent interest in TPLs relates to the rising tendency to outsource logistics in a variety of industrial sectors that has been generating a growing demand for advanced logistics services (Selviaridis and Spring, 2007).

Innovation and growth in KIBS: the role of clients’ collaboration and service customisation

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyse KIBS firms and posit that two core attributes of KIBS, namely collaborative relationships with clients and product customisation, foster the ability to develop successful, new product innovations. We disentangle the role of customisation and collaboration choices by looking at how they jointly affect the impact of innovation over firms’ performance, asking to what extent and how firms should collaborate with clients and customise their services. We test our hypotheses on a sample of Italian KIBS firms. Our results show that product innovations that are new to the industry are relevant and, counter intuitively, show that most growing KIBS firms do not have the highest service customisation and collaboration breadth with their clients. Most growing firms develop mass customisation strategies and they leverage on focused collaboration strategies with clients.

The Economic Performance of Innovations in a Collaborative Setting: The Case of KIBS Firms

Collaborative innovation literature shows that collaborating with clients enhances the innovation performance of firms particularly as regard the development of highly new products. In this setting, are highly new products the innovation category that drives the most firm’s performance? This is a relevant research question in the innovation literature since it warns about the risks and limits of highly new products but has not considered the firm’s performance implications of different categories of innovations developed by collaborating with clients. In this paper we consider different categories of innovation, product and process innovations new to the industry and new to the firm respectively, and develop original hypotheses about their implications over firm’s performance. We develop and test our hypotheses on a sample of 99 Italian KIBS firms. We focus on KIBS firms since they are used to customize their services and collaborate with clients during the development of new services. Results support the idea that highly innovative product innovations are more strongly associated with a KIBS firm’s growth, while weakly innovative process innovations are more strongly associated with a KIBS firm’s productivity, but only in small firms. Theoretical and managerial implications for collaborative innovations settings are drawn.

Il distretto della giostra del Polesine: caratteristiche e traiettorie di sviluppo

Questo articolo, utilizzando fonti primarie e secondarie, mira a fornire un’analisi delle principali caratteristiche del distretto della giostra del Polesine, parte del piu ampio distretto veneto della giostra, e a descriverne e comprenderne le principali traiettorie di cambiamento che lo caratterizzano, quali le sfide poste dai recenti trend economico-demografici, dall’internazionalizzazione, dalla necessita di innovare per competere. Sintetizzando il quadro emerso dalla ricerca, l’articolo presenta alcune brevi considerazioni circa le possibili implicazioni di policy.

DOES MODULARITY AFFECT SUPPLIER INTEGRATION? THE ROLE OF COMPONENT TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE.

We investigate how component modularity and component technological change both separately and jointly affect buyer-supplier information sharing. Studying a sample of 100 supplier relations in the Italian air conditioning industry, we find that a high rate of component technological change inhibits the effects of component modularity on information sharing.