Christian Berggren

Manufacturing firms and integrated solutions: characteristics and implications

For an increasing number of firms in the capital goods industry, combinations of products and services, so called integrated solutions, are becoming part of their future growth strategies. By analysing three case studies, the article highlights the variety of such solutions and some important implications for the involved companies. The analysis suggests that companies need an extended set of competences to succeed in providing integrated solutions, amounting to a balance of technical and integration competence with market/business, consulting and partnering competences. This implies a move from product‐focus to customer‐centric orientation and focus on optimisation of user processes. From a research perspective the paper underlines the importance of integrating studies of product and service innovation, two fields that so far have been studied separately.

ARCHITECTURAL OR MODULAR INNOVATION? MANAGING DISCONTINUOUS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN RESPONSE TO CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE TARGETS

By adopting challenging targets on environmental performance, pro-active industrial firms may push themselves towards discontinuous product innovation. Such innovation can be understood as being either architectural, i.e. arranging components in new ways, or modular, i.e. introducing new technologies in specific components or subsystems. We argue that these two dimensions of discontinuous change call for some specific managerial responses. Architectural innovation challenges the whole engineering organisation, making it necessary to focus development efforts on technological interfaces, whereas modular innovation has a more isolated effect, making specialisation and co-ordination over organisational boundaries particularly important. Altogether, our analysis highlights the importance of adapting the project organisation to the development task and addressing part-whole relationships when managing innovation in established products and systems, something that becomes increasingly important in the strive towards sustainable development.

Environmental innovation in auto development ^ managing technological uncertainty within strict time limits

Manufacturing industry is facing increasingly stringent demands on environmental compliance and the auto industry is particularly exposed to pressure from public and authorities in this area. The p ...

Entering an era of ferment – radical vs incrementalist strategies in automotive power train development

Incremental improvement of a deeply embedded technology system has been a hallmark of the automotive industry for a very long time. Efforts to develop alternatives have repeatedly failed. This paper analyses how Toyota started to challenge this pattern in the late 1990s, by the architectural innovation embodied in Prius, the first mass-produced hybrid-electric car. This is followed by an account of how key competitors reacted by accelerating their incremental innovation efforts, in an era when concerns over fuel prices and greenhouse gas emissions increased demand for environmentally sound vehicles. The paper builds on records of patenting and performance of actually marketed models to analyse the unfolding technology competition. It also considers the most probable technologies on the market in a 10–12 year timeframe, and further explains how different technology strategies put competing firms in different positions in an era of ferment.

Managing Uncertain, Complex Product Development in High-Tech Firms: In Search of Controlled Flexibility

This paper investigates ways of managing complexity and uncertainty in R&D simultaneously. Previous research on the subject indicates that these dimensions require different approaches, but these studies tend to provide suggestions either on managing complexity in stable industries or on handling uncertainty in less complex projects. In this paper, the two dimensions are studied simultaneously in three commercial product development projects at a firm that may be viewed as an extreme case of complexity and with multiple dimensions of uncertainty. The paper illustrates that a critical issue in this kind of high-tech development is the search for and development of approaches that integrate and balance needs for formal organizational control with high levels of project flexibility. Four key elements of such integrated approaches are identified: hybrid formal systems, structured interaction in public arenas, transparent visual communication tools, and a system of participative reflection.

Management Education for Practicing Managers: Combining Academic Rigor With Personal Change and Organizational Action

For several decades, management educators have discussed the difficulty of accommodating the competing values of academic rigor and organizational relevance. Only a few articles, however, consider approaches for integrating theory and practice in educational programs for working managers. Building on 15 years of experience in executive education, this article presents an approach grounded in experiential and action learning, which combines personal learning and organizational action without compromising academic standards. The following educational practices are discussed and evaluated: reflection reports, personal learning contracts, roundtable examinations, live cases, action-oriented thesis work, and organizational knowledge theaters. Taken together, the approach constitutes a powerful program design to address multiple learning loci and combinations of reflection and action, albeit one with considerable challenges and difficulties, as the authors discuss.

Mergers, MNES and innovation—the need for new research approaches

A merger wave on an unprecedented scale has recently been sweeping through the Western world. Many studies have demonstrated the unimpressive economic outcome of most mergers. This article argues that an important reason for disappointing long-term performance is the underestimated difficulties of integrating idiosyncratic technologies in unified product platforms. Instead of focusing on new product development, engineers and designers are drawn into lengthy harmonisation issues. An expanded research agenda is proposed, including the role of special interests in driving merger proposals, the impact of mergers on engineering creativity and innovation, and the identification of industries in which firm trajectories of scale and size, ultimately ending in mergers can be compared with the alternative dynamics of de-mergers, knowledge-based networks and research-based start-ups.

Lagomizing, organic integration, and systems emergency wards: Innovative practices in managing complex systems development projects

In complex systems development, project management is a key factor for innovation, for bringing together system capabilities to actually working systems and taking them to the customer. The critical question then is: How can successful project management in this field be conceptualized, practiced, and understood? In the extant literature, there is a plethora of suggested tools for advanced planning and scheduling, for system decomposition and modularization, and for reducing interdependencies and avoiding errors. There is also a growing criticism of these “planning approaches,” suggesting various contingency and flexibility approaches, to reflect and adapt to complexity and change. This critique, however, tends to lack grounded suggestions for effective managerial practices and does not distinguish between general flexibility needs and specific project structures required to make complex systems development at all possible. This article centers on the development of large, complex systems with an empirical focus on the telecom industry. Key challenges here, it is argued, are to understand complexity, reduce complexity, and rapidly act on the consequences of complexity to ensure timely delivery of reliable and predictable systems to highly demanding customers. To cope with these challenges, a set of innovative practices has been developed within Ericsson, a world leader in mobile network systems. We focus on three such practices, which together represent examples of a “neo-realistic” approach to project management: (1) lagomizing, a top-down redefinition of project goals to reduce complexity and transform expectations; (2) organic integration, an articulation and visualization of a shared understanding of system capabilities; and (3) Systemakut, the Systems Emergency Ward, a real-time, high-visibility agora for managing integration, handling errors, and making swift decisions and in public. The study is based on a research methodology involving knowledge coproduction, where the team of authors represents both academic knowledge and practitioner experience of managing innovations in complex systems development projects.

Clients, Contractors, and Consultants: The Consequences of Organizational Fragmentation in Contemporary Project Environments

Deregulation, privatization, and outsourcing are changing the organizational environment for projects in infrastructure industries (e.g., power generation projects). An important trend is the increasing use of management and engineering consultants on behalf of clients but, sometimes, also acting as supplier representatives in situ. We argue that very little research has been devoted to these arrangements. The paper focuses on the effects of such organizational fragmentation for the execution of large-scale engineering projects. Three problems are identified: the problem of coordination, the problem of the absent customer, and the problem of learning. On a theoretical level, the paper points to important aspects of coordinating engineering work in nonrecurring project business. On a practical level, the paper highlights the need for clients to assess consultants from a broad perspective, including their abilities to build a cooperative project environment and establish problem-solving and conflict-resolution arrangements.

Misconduct, Marginality and Editorial Practices in Management, Business, and Economics Journals

Objectives The paper presents data on the two problems of misconduct and marginality in management, business and economics (MBE) journals and their practices to combat these problems. Design Data was collected in three phases. First, all publicly retracted papers in MBE journals were identified through keywords searches in 7 major databases (n = 1329 journals). Second, a focused survey was distributed to editors involved in such retractions (n = 64; response rate = 28%). Finally, a survey was administered to all active journals in the seven databases to collect data on editors’ perceptions and practices related to the two problems (n = 937, response rate = 31.8%). Frequency analyses, cross tabulations, and qualitative analyses of open answers were used to examine the data. Results 184 retracted papers in MBE journals were identified in 2005–2015 (no retraction was found before 2005). From 2005–2007 to 2012–2015, the number of retractions increased by a factor ten with an all-time high in 2015. The survey to journals with reported retractions illustrates how already a few cases of suspected misconduct put a strain on the editorial workload. The survey to all active journals revealed that 42% of the respondents had started to use software to screen all submitted papers, and that a majority recognized the problem of marginality, as indicated by salami-style submissions. According to some editors, reviewers easily spot such submissions whereas others argued that authors may submit thinly sliced papers in parallel to several journals, which means that this practice is only discovered post-publication. The survey question on ways to support creative contributions stimulated a rich response of ideas regarding editorial vision, engaged boards and developmental approaches. The study uses data from three specialized fields, but its findings may be highly relevant to many journals in the social sciences.