Diego Campagnolo

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.

What Really Drives the Adoption of Modular Organizational Forms? An Institutional Perspective from Italian Industry-Level Data

While the rise of modular organizational forms is a global phenomenon, explicit causal models are currently available only for the US case. To date, no study has been conducted outside the USA about what drives firms to use modular organizational forms, and why would firms in some industries generally rely on more modular organizational forms than firms in other industries. Building on Schilling and Steensmas work of 2001, we apply general systems modularity theory to the Italian case and explain why in some industries there is a greater use of modular organizational forms using data from 68 manufacturing industries. The results of our regression analysis diverge significantly from the US case showing that, in the Italian case, organizational modularity is driven by labor intensity, industry specificities and nation-specific factors.

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.

Ownership and location in the small domestic appliances industry: the De’Longhi case

Abstract Ownership and location decisions are at the core of the development of multinational enterprises (MNEs) as they deeply impact the creation and appropriation of value in global value chains. Such decisions have been treated by extant literature mostly as oppositions characterized by trade-off alternatives, such as internalization versus externalization and domestic versus offshoring. In this chapter, we discuss the development of a multinational company, that is, De’Longhi, as it has adjusted both ownership and location choices several times over the last 15 years. The case shows that in growing firms, such as De’Longhi, ownership and location decisions are interrelated among each other and with several factors including: interdependences between value chain activities, corporate strategy, organizational culture and the time horizon of the above choices.

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.