Innovation, Time, and Territory: Space and the Business Organization of Dell Computer

Abstract

Businesses reshape the territorial configuration of economic activity by creating new forms of organization as part of the innovation process. Focusing on the case of Dell Computer, this article builds an argument about the geographic development of economies that is structured around four elements: (1) the firm, (2) the innovation process occurring within the firm, (3) the business organization of the firm, and (4) the territory in which the firm operates and extracts profit. In tracing this route from the enterprise to territory, this article draws upon the notion of “communications revolutions”as a catalyst for the innovative impulse of firms. In adapting to communications revolutions, firms, such as Dell, emerge as innovators by learning to recalibrate the time increments that are expended during the steps of making and marketing products, thereby shifting competition from the product to the processes of capitalist circulation. This recalibration of time results in the creation of process-driven routines for making profit and a transformation in the organizational arrangements through which firms implement such routines. As firms reinvent forms of organization to implement these time-based innovative routines, they alter the linkages between adjacent steps in their profit-making activity. By reorganizing these linkages and changing the nature of business organization, innovative firms reconfigure the territory in which they operate and accumulate. This reconfiguration of territory, however, is not the mechanical result of efficiency criteria. Firms use power over other firms to redeploy the location of activity in their production networks in an effort to achieve time economies and innovative efficiencies.