Susanne Åberg

Does CERN procurement result in innovation

Innovation is stated to be one of the most powerful engines for economic growth in firms, markets and nations today. It is therefore not surprising that policy-makers would like to see innovations as a benefit of publicly spent money; making innovations an additional aim of public procurement (public procurement for innovation). The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of a science organizations procurement practices on innovation. The intention is also to show how different and contradicting goals and expectations regarding public procurement are described and acted upon by the science organization and its suppliers, and to what extent the outcome of public procurement is innovation. Empirically, the study addresses how the European Organization for Nuclear Research, i.e. CERN, works with procurement; and how their procurement in turn affects CERNs suppliers. Based on a large case study in which more than 100 interviews were conducted over a time period of 8 years, the study contributes to the understanding of the limitations CERN’s procurement rules put on interaction and on innovation. The understanding of the implications of restricting interaction, but also the understanding of the reasons why these rules are put into place, and the dilemmas that follow, are all important contributions.

On particle accelerators and timber-houses. How network dependencies condition the transfer of technological knowledge

The paper deals with the transfer of technological knowledge within networks of business relationships. In particular, it refers to literature on business networks and resource embeddedness and faces the problems and the difficulties with this transfer. The basic question is: “What requirements have to be fulfilled in order for the knowledge transfer to result in improvements?” Based on two empirical studies, the issue of transfer of technological knowledge is discussed further in the article. A distinction is proposed, between the transfer of “low tech knowledge” from US to Sweden within the construction industry and the transfer of “high tech knowledge” from CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) to industry.

Beyond Project Closure: Why Some Business Relationships Recur in Subsequent Projects

While a project design provides several managerial advantages within the project life cycle, there are numerous challenges regarding its long-term effects. The aim of this article is to increase our knowledge on the continuity aspect of the project form of organizing, and especially the recurrence of project-based business relationships in subsequent projects. Focusing on the role of network relationships in leveraging between projects, we investigate the reasons for relationship recurrence. Based on a longitudinal case study of three construction projects, our results show that in addition to terminated and dormant relationships after project closure there are recurring relationships, which, unlike the others, do not need reactivation.

Big-science organizations as lead users: A case study of CERN:

This paper explores the role of big-science organizations in a lead-user context. Lead users are valuable for suppliers because they are active in co-developing products and foreshadowing market needs. Big-science organizations represent a special breed of co-developers, as their demands are not necessarily the avant-garde of a coming market. Yet, they may provide a valuable test bed for suppliers because they are pushing the boundaries of technological capacities and, thus, challenging suppliers’ talents. They are also prestigious collaboration partners that help producers to be acknowledged as being at the forefront of technology. They are often deeply engaged in their suppliers’ manufacturing and development activities, which is seen as a characteristic of the customer-active paradigm upon which the lead-user notion builds. This paper investigates whether and how interacting with the European Organization for Nuclear Research concerning their development needs may contribute to suppliers’ innovation. We ask the question: What characterizes interactions with big-science organizations as a type of lead user, and how do these characteristics impact the potential innovation benefits accruing to the suppliers?

Found in Translation? On the Transfer of Technological Knowledge from Science to Industry

In this chapter the business network view will be extended by the introduction of an actor with a purpose other than that of business orientation—the scientific organisation. The main purpose of a ...

The Cooperation-Competition Interplay in the ICT Industry

Purpose: Building on a business network perspective, the paper addresses the following question: Why do firms move between cooperation and competition in the context of high-tech industry? Hence, t ...

Creating New Opportunities from Old Resources through Contextually Determined Information Asymmetries

Last time you used a credit card, did you stop to think about all the necessary activities performed, resources used and actors involved in order for you to get your money? Probably not. There are many services that we use every day without giving them a moment’s thought, and using our credit cards, either to withdraw money from an ATM-machine or to pay for our purchases in a shop, is one of them. Every time you use your card it triggers a process involving a number of activities, resources and actors. A technological change that makes your daily performance easier in small and almost unnoticeable ways — for example the fact that the electronic payments are nowadays mostly on-line, meaning that the line behind you at the register does not add up due to your choice of paying by card — can have a substantial effect on things we, as consumers, do not notice. Some of the changes that arise in a technological area, for instance electronic payments, are based on change processes started to exploit opportunities that are found because of the way the resources controlled by involved actors are combined. The necessary resources (and often even the industrial actors) behind a service of this type are normally black-boxed (Latour, 1987; Rosenberg, 1994).