Science studies: a guide for strategic management

The paper describes and discusses the current state of science studies research and its linkages to other fields, such as applied policy and management. It is argued that science studies is differentiated into science and technology studies, and science and technology policy research; and that these are twin interdisciplinary area of research in which a whole range of social scientists, as well as historians and philosophers are involved. The high degree of interdisciplinarity makes the field peculiarly difficult to categorize simply. Nevertheless, it is suufficiently mature and focused to be an established academic field in its own right; it possesses its own journal structure, specialized institutions, national and international professional associations, and teaching programmes. Research in science studies is potentially applicable-especially in the longer term-for policy-makers in the public and private sectors, as well as for public interest groups. However, the need to bridge a perched gap between acadmic studies and the needs of policy-makers is highlighted. Finally, a listing of emerging issues in the field is provided.     

Innovations and strategic management: a case study of Hitachi Ltd

Innovation has becomes the basis for creating and sustaining competitiveness. While planning strategy, it is necessary to have an excellant fit between globalization, alliances, diversification and innovation in a firm. Only such a process can help the firm to obtain synergy. The case study of Hitachi Ltd illustrates the strategic management process through which Hitachi Ltd has been able to generate and commercially exploit innovation.     

Effective strategic management the prospective approach

La prospective recognizes that the future is the raison d'être of the present, that it is multiple and uncertain, and that it is a way for everyone to take control of their own future. This article looks at the role of such qualitative prospective analysis in the business planning and forecasting context, and, from the experience of application of this analysis over a decade or more, draws ten golden rules for effective strategic management.     

Theoretical perspectives on strategic environmental management

Strategic Environmental Management (SEM) incorporates into firms' core strategies the transformation of products and processes that they believe an environmentally concerned society will increasingly demand. Significant threads have to do with the discovery of cost savings and market opportunities from reducing environmental impacts. SEM, like the environmental regulation hypothesis associated with Michael Porter, implies that society's efforts to reduce external environmental costs often lead to identification of hitherto-ignored or undeveloped profit possibilities. This would be surprising from the standpoint of neoclassical economic theory, to the extent that SEM utilizes available information about the potential costs and benefits of projects. Within the framework of evolutionary, capabilities-based theories of the firm, however, this discovery and its exploitation in SEM make perfect sense. Capabilities theory would imply that firms' intrinsic path dependence may previously have obscured such opportunities. This paper examines the theory of SEM, its implications for neoclassical and capabilities theories of the firm, and survey results drawn from the author's work with member companies in a regional pollution prevention roundtable. RID="*" IDI have enjoyed the able and insightful research assistance of Justin Vernon. Cooperation from the companies that participated in the survey, and financial support from Allegheny College and its Center for Economic and Environmental Development, are gratefully acknowledged. Reviewers for this journal provided numerous, valuable suggestions. Responsibility for the material herein remains mine alone.     

Impact management,worst scenatrio: possible technological strategic options

Analysis of the present situation and future predictions leaves no doubt of the inevitability of progressive degradation of the ecosytem. A worst scenatio is an option which has to be considered in any strategic planning. Mistaken assessment, focussing on modern technology as teh cause rather than the agent porducing the current devastation, has called for its drastic curtailment. This would not help matters—in fact, technology may yet save the situation: by building refuges, in attempting to reverse the processes which undermine it, and in helping adaptations to present conditions, not only throuht mechanical devices but also through bioengineering. concurrently the main reasons for the plight of the planet—over-population, overkill and waste—have to be tackled. This can only be accomplished by a complete change in ethical standards—the taming of the ’genetic ethics‘ of growth and dominance and the institution of a new mnorality.     

Impact management, worst scenatrio: possible technological strategic options

Analysis of the present situation and future predictions leaves no doubt of the inevitability of progressive degradation of the ecosytem. A worst scenatio is an option which has to be considered in any strategic planning. Mistaken assessment, focussing on modern technology as teh cause rather than the agent porducing the current devastation, has called for its drastic curtailment. This would not help matters—in fact, technology may yet save the situation: by building refuges, in attempting to reverse the processes which undermine it, and in helping adaptations to present conditions, not only throuht mechanical devices but also through bioengineering. concurrently the main reasons for the plight of the planet—over-population, overkill and waste—have to be tackled. This can only be accomplished by a complete change in ethical standards—the taming of the 'genetic ethics' of growth and dominance and the institution of a new mnorality.     

Strategic planning, strategic management, strategic foresight: The seminal work of H. Igor Ansoff

H. Igor Ansoff was the prominent reference in the corporate strategy field, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. His bestseller, Corporate Strategy, was the first to give a conceptual framework and a tool box to top managers, consultants and scholars. Recognized as the real pioneer of the field, he was seen by Henry Mintzberg as also the leader of the strategic planning school. The aim of this short article is to show that he was also the father of strategic management and a leader who gave an impressive set of concepts and ideas to promote an integrative and flexible view of strategic planning, strategic foresight, organizational structures and processes.     

Different approaches of pattern management and strategic intelligence

The world around us contains endless amounts of information. That information is mostly loose in our minds. Very often, it does not at first contact fit in with our conventional understanding, experience or any context we are used to. Hence, we may say that we are overwhelmed with constantly changing raw data, and strategic actors especially tend to be short of more rapid, up-to-date, valid and in-depth understanding of the transforming business landscape and social environment. Strategic intelligence is an emerging field of business consulting, which aims to undertake the task of revealing large, complex or complicated issues of transformation in a more understandable form. Pattern management, however, can be seen as one field or one approach of strategic intelligence. It is an approach that may, on one hand, be based more on empiric data and formal structures than other forms of strategic intelligence, but, on the other hand, it is a very heuristic approach to integrate quantitative data, reasoning and narratives. The main attempts of this article are, first, to show, what are in general the most commonly used ways of managing, finding, drawing, reasoning or anticipating patterns from our environment, and second, to locate how the concept of pattern can be understood in different ways. From the gathered knowledge, this article presents three main categories of reasoning patterns: empirical calculation (EC) is common especially in enterprise consulting. Theory proving with observations (TPO) is common especially in natural sciences, and real combining (RC) is common especially in qualitative research and in narrative.     

The strategic management of R&D collaboration

For many firms collaborative R&D is an important component of their technology strategies. R&D collaboration can provide valuable supplementary technological knowledge for firms, building technological capacity. Due to the additional problems of managing R&D in collaboration, rather than entirely in-house, outcomes from it are often uncertain and benefits are hard-earned. This paper, based on a literature review, and on six case-studies of firms experienced in collaboration, examines some of these problems. Because of the high management costs of collaboration, the length of tme needed to build effective communications paths between different organisations, and the specific technological nature of these forms of inter-firm linkage R&D collaboration should be a strategic toncern. Partner selection should be made, and the collaboration conducted, on the basis of the expectation of a continuing relationship encouraging mutual learning and based on a high degree of trust.     

Communication via a strategic mediator

This paper investigates communication between an informed expert and an uninformed principal via a strategic mediator. We demonstrate that, for any bias in the parties' preferences, there exists a strategic mediator that provides the highest expected payoff to the principal, as if the players had communicated through an optimal non-strategic mediator.     

Frames of significance: technological agenda-forming for strategic advantage

Technological innovation is a source of competittive advantage and potential corporate rejuvenation. The problematic issues that managers frame, then devote attention and resurces to solving, constitute the strategic technological agenda of the firm. We propose and elaborate a perceptual frame model by which the agenda may be understood. We use the model to interpret three innovation episodes in divisions of large, multi-divisional corporations. The patterns of framing over time and the issues addressed are particular to each firm. We acknowledge the existence of partial perspectives associated with the vantage points of the various decision-makers and observers, and we suggest that greater owareness of this partiality could lead to a better appreciation of the complexity and implications of ambiguous issues. We suggest that agendas evolve in a broadly 'logical-incremental' way although we question whether sufficient priority is being accorded to extending the new capabilities to emerge from innovation to other areas of the parent coporations.     

The appliance of science? New public management and strategic change

Changes in the nature of science as a social practice were fundamentally organic and endogenous in nature prior to the 1970s. Since then changes in UK public science has been policy-led and the imperatives exogenous. This shift was the result of attempts to achieve strategic managed change in the sector using new public management (NPM) techniques. This paper explores the discourses that promoted the change effort and the NPM techniques and processes deployed to this end. It seeks to identify the aims and objectives of the intended strategic change and evaluates the extent to which they have been achieved. Our conclusion is that rather than a planned, strategic change process directed at improved economy, efficiency and effectiveness, what occurred was a poorly processed ideologically driven attempt to achieve political aims.     

The evolution and strategic management of new technology-based sectors: the case of computerized business systems

Accepted paradigms of strategic management can be expected to be adapted for new technology where inter alia, the pace of technological change is rapid, uncertainty intense, and product life cycles short. It is argued that there are generic drivers of the euolutzon of such new technology sectors, and that the early identification of anticipation of and adaptatzon to these general forces can in theory provide businesses with a strategic advantage. Businesses, however, are often possessed of considerable inertia whilst the managerial perception of such sector trends can be affected by inter alia earlier commit-ments and experiences. This paper analyses such issues of strategic management with reference to the computerized business systems sector i n which the authors have conducted extensive empirical research over a two-year period.     

Regime shifts to sustainability through processes of niche formation: The approach of strategic niche management

The unsustainability of the present trajctories of technical change in sectors such as transport and agriculture is widely recognized. It is far from clear, however, how a transition to more sustainable modes of development may be achieved. Sustainable technologies that fulful important user requirements in terms of performance and price are most often not available on the market. Ideas of what might be more sustainable technologies exist, but the long development times, uncertainty about market demand and social gains, and the need for change at different levels in organization, technology, infastructure and the wider social and institutional context-provide a great barrier. This raises the question of how the potential of more sustainable technologies and modes of development may be exploited. In this article we describe how technical change is locked into dominant technological regimes, and present a perspective, called strategic niche management, on how to expedite a transition into a new regime. The perspective consists of the creation and/or management of nichesfor promising technologies.     

From R&D management to knowledge management: An overview of studies of innovation management

This article is intended to establish links and seek connections between the contributions made to the study of innovatory phenomena. Specifically, it analyzes the evolution undergone by studies on the topic of the technological innovation (TI) process carried out by different disciplines from the point of view of the objectives they pursue and the suppositions on which they are based. Hence, it attempts to provide evidence for the relationships existing between research done at macro level (sociology, history, economics, and industrial economics) and that undertaken at micro level (management).     

Tit for tat: Foundations of preferences for reciprocity in strategic settings

This paper assumes that in addition to conventional preferences over outcomes, players in a strategic environment have preferences over strategies. It provides conditions under which a player's preferences over strategies can be represented as a weighted average of the utility from outcomes of the individual and his opponents. The weight one player places on an opponent's utility from outcomes depends on the players’ joint behavior. In this way, the framework is rich enough to describe the behavior of individuals who repay kindness with kindness and meanness with meanness. The paper identifies restrictions that the theory places on rational behavior.     

A test for strategic excess capacity

It is shown how, using data at the firm level, it may be possible to test for the existence of excess capacity as a strategic weapon to protect market share against competitors and potential entrants. If excess capacity has been found, it is also possible to test the extent of the threat, for example whether sufficient excess capacity is held to drive the firm's own profits to zero if all were employed. Yearly data for a brewery have been used as an example of the tests.