Resources In New Ways Research Articles

The multi-channel challenge: A dynamic capability approach

The maturing of e-commerce, the diffusion of call centres into the B2B space and purchaser demands on price and service are leading to rapid change in the route to market in many B2B sectors, with shifting combinations of channels being offered to the customer in the search for advantage. In this situation managers can no longer rely on the channel resources that they have assembled to provide their extant competitive position. Instead they must be able to combine resources in new ways, gain additional resources and dispose of superfluous resources, and to do this repeatedly and rapidly if they are to compete successfully. The term ‘dynamic capabilities’ has emerged in the strategic management literature for these activities. Using four case studies and the analytic induction approach to data analysis, we identify seven dynamic capabilities for channel transformation.

Corporate Entrepreneurship: How?

Most organizations find that their ability to identify and innovatively exploit opportunities decreases as they move from the entrepreneurial to the growth phase. However, the key to success in the highly competitive and dynamic environment that most companies presently operate in is to retain this ability. Therefore, companies need to adopt an entrepreneurial strategy — seeking competitive advantage through continuous innovation to effectively exploit identified opportunities — in order to sustain and grow under such circumstances. For such a strategy to succeed, companies should develop an enabling economic and political ecosystem that does not impede small or large scale redeployment of resources in new ways towards creative, entrepreneurial ends. Companies have a range of options to choose from to achieve this objective. At the one end of this option spectrum is ‘focused entrepreneurship’ wherein specific innovation initiatives are created with the rest of the organization insulated from them. At the other end is a managerial approach that leads to the creation of ‘organizationwide entrepreneurship.’ Entrepreneurship in such organizations is a shared value and drives managerial behaviour in conscious and subconscious ways and creates an entrepreneurial spirit organization-wide. Many mature organizations, unwilling to alter the status quo, tend to create focused initiatives that are mandated to identify and exploit new opportunities. While such focused initiatives may stimulate innovation, the very nature of their design erects barriers between the existing organization and the innovation effort. This makes it difficult for the organizations to access and leverage the existing capability base and to integrate new initiatives back into operational activity. Companies intent on developing and preserving entrepreneurship organization-wide, independent of their stage of growth, create an environment in which those who believe in the attractiveness of opportunities feel encouraged to pursue them. The top managements of such companies will design an organizational context conducive to autonomous generation of entrepreneurial initiatives, provide a sense of overall direction to these initiatives, and ensure that promising ventures receive necessary resources as they move through the uncertain development process wherein: money is neither offered nor seen as a primary motivator entrepreneurial contributions are rewarded with recognition and through provision of opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial activities on a bigger scale failure is considered normal and when failure occurs, the focus is on problem solving and learning from it rather than apportioning blame appropriate processes are used to capture knowledge created in the innovation process and routines developed to enable integration of such knowledge to create organizational rents. The contrast between patterns of focused and organization-wide entrepreneurship runs across every element of the organization starting with its mission and covering strategy, structure, systems, processes, and people skills and attitude. Institutionalizing the elements of entrepreneurship is crucial to building a sustaining competitive organization in today's business environment.

Directionality in the history of life: diffusion from the left wall or repeated scaling of the right?

Issues of directionality in the history of life can be framed in terms of six major evolutionary steps, or megatrajectories (cf. Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995): (1) evolution from the origin of life to the last common ancestor of extant organisms, (2) the metabolic diversification of bacteria and archaea, (3) evolution of eukaryotic cells, (4) multicellularity, (5) the invasion of the land and (6) technological intelligence. Within each megatrajectory, overall diversification conforms to a pattern of increasing variance bounded by a right wall as well as one on the left. However, the expanding envelope of forms and physiologies also reflects—at least in part—directional evolution within clades. Each megatrajectory has introduced fundamentally new evolutionary entities that garner resources in new ways, resulting in an unambiguously directional pattern of increasing ecological complexity marked by expanding ecospace utilization. The sequential addition of megatrajectories adheres to logical rules of ecosystem function, providing a blueprint for evolution that may have been followed to varying degrees wherever life has arisen.

Revolutionizing how we generate new knowledge: a challenge for librarians, health professionals, service users and researchers

Revolutionizing how we generate new knowledge: a challenge for librarians, health professionals, service users and researchers

Directionality in the history of life: Diffusion from the left wall or repeated scaling of the right?

Issues of directionality in the history of life can be framed in terms of six major evolutionary steps, or megatrajectories (cf. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995): (1) evolution from the origin of life to the last common ancestor of extant organisms, (2) the metabolic diversification of bacteria and archaea, (3) evolution of eukaryotic cells, (4) multicellularity, (5) the invasion of the land and (6) technological intelligence. Within each megatrajectory, overall diversification conforms to a pattern of increasing variance bounded by a right wall as well as one on the left. However, the expanding envelope of forms and physiologies also reflects—at least in part—directional evolution within clades. Each megatrajectory has introduced fundamentally new evolutionary entities that garner resources in new ways, resulting in an unambiguously directional pattern of increasing ecological complexity marked by expanding ecospace utilization. The sequential addition of megatrajectories adheres to logical rules of ecosystem function, providing a blueprint for evolution that may have been followed to varying degrees wherever life has arisen.

Managing Technology: Perspectives and prospects for a new paradigm

T he purpose of this first column is to establish the context and emphases for “Managing Technology,” a new feature in JAL. Guest contributors will give primacy to technology, particularly information technology, because it is the significant force in a transformation generally accepted as a “paradigm shift” for all types of libraries. This shift places libraries in what is arguably their first major transition in the last 100 years. Library managers, constantly challenged by the dynamics of this shifting terrain, must frequently make decisions to meet information needs of students and faculty by gambling on innovation and distributing scarce resources in new ways. In many respects, the current landscape is no more treacherous than that which existed a century ago. Libraries as we know them were invented over a very short span of time and we are faced with the challenge to re-invent them in no less time. Academic libraries before 1900, with a few notable exceptions, were neither very impressive nor secure institutions. They were small and contained only a handful of materials. In fact, collections of student societies were often larger in size and more germane to the curriculum. In 1900, even among the 21 largest academic libraries, the median was only 88,000 volumes. But the conditions for the rapid emergence of academic libraries were set, due to convergence of a group of related technologies; the work of a cluster of visionary leaders who established a model for the organization and management of libraries: and the emergence of librarianship as an identifiable profession with formal education and a professional association. Most of this took place in the last quarter of the 19th-century. In 1875 there were libraries and librarians, but not a library profession with a unified set of principles and a body of practice. The creation of the modem library institution was really a remarkable achievement, and understanding how this happened is helpful in deciding how to manage the current challenges.

The Economics of Natural Resources

ECONOMISTS HAVE STUDIED NATURAL RESOURCES from the earliest days of the profession and for good reason. Resources are seen as the basis for national prosperity, power, and wealth. For example, the ability to harness energy resources in new ways is recognized as perhaps the major factor underlying the industrial revolution. Even more fundamental, food supplies depend on forests, fisheries, and agricultural land. Yet only relatively recently have broad theories been developed specific to natural resources and energy economics. Previously, examination of these fields relied upon the general economic theories used to analyze other commodities. Now, however, economists recognize that certain special characteristics of natural resources require theories that account explicitly for these characteristics. Only in the last generation have agricultural land, forests, and fisheries been perceived and described as renewable resources. Of course, this does not imply unconditional renewal. Such resources are self-renewing at a limited rate, which may itself depend on the size of the stock in existence at any given time and on the extent and nature of human intervention into the stock dynamics. Regardless, renewable resources is an apt and useful term. In contrast, minerals and many energy commodities now are seen as depletable or nonrenewable resources-resources for which only a limited, concentrated stock exists for allocation over all time. For these resources, a central issue involves when they should be extracted and used. Using a given portion of a stock at one time precludes the option of using that portion at another time. Even more recently have the environmental resources-air, water, open space-also been seen as renewable or, in some cases, depletable resources. The image of environmental resources, fisheries, and wild animal stocks as common property resources owned by everyone and hence by no one has played an enormous role in economic reasoning about these resources in recent decades. Furthermore, economists systematically have in-