Organizational decisions are characterized by a multiplicity of choice criteria. This property, which in reality affects virtually all human behaviors, prevents use of the standard (neoclassical) theory of decisions based on the maximization of a single criterion. Rather, the outranking methods developed by the French school of operational research make it possible to deal with multicriterial choices and avoid the defects of the naive method. This paper develops a paradigmatic example in order to show the essential effects of the outranking methods and their compatibility with the theory of limited rationality and satisfactory choices.

The paper distinguishes between two types of inter-firm alliances: endogamy and exogamy. Endogamy occurs when partners share related profiles. On the opposite, exogamy appears when allies exhibit unrelated profiles. It is suggested that endogamy serves for accumulating similar resources and gaining scale effects while exogamy allows the combination of differentiated competences and the achievement of symbiotic effects. Two different cases are employed to infer practical recommendations regarding how these different types of partnerships should be managed.

During the last years a debate has raged within the field of Strategic Management between a rational view (IO, Positioning School, Strategic Planning, Cybernetics) and a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) view (Emergent strategies,complexity theory, chaos theory) of the field. This paper attempts to shed some light around an issue which must be clarified for the better development of such debate. Being the CAS view a response to the new realities of environmental turbulence, it was discussed which are the behavioral sources of such turbulence in order to clarify if such phenomena is a qualitatively new reality of business environments, or simply a contingent but circumstantial feature affecting many industries. For this purpose, the authors introduced and applied a theoretical model that conceives the strategy of the firm, as a dialectic process in a situation of conflict.

The topic of entrepreneurship has been the subject of a considerable amount of academic interest over the last twenty years. Despite a vast amount of published work there have been very few attempts to study the entrepreneurial process. In other words, we know little of the what happens as an entrepreneur moves from idea to the objective reality of a fully functioning business. A more recent phenomenon has been the shift from a focus on entrepreneurial traits to the study of entrepreneurial networks. This is recognition that even the most individualistic of entrepreneurs rely heavily on their social relationships during the creation of a new business. These two factors, networks and the entrepreneurial process, are brought together in this paper which utilises a first-hand account of activities associated with business startups. The paper also examines the way in which MBA education provides useful skills to even the most experienced entrepreneur.

This article presents a new method for the development of product ideas, where the initial focus for development is not product ideas, but fantasy worlds. Based on a mental visualization session groups develop fantasy worlds through writing stories in circles. Some of these stories are acted out in scenario play. Phrases from these stories are then used as basis for idea development. This method gives interesting ideas that would be hard to come up with through traditional brainstorming. It helps to get a broader and deeper understanding of the design task and it strongly influences the team spirit and atmosphere. The method is presented through a case with industrial design students in Oslo, where the task was to develop new mouth hygiene products for the Norwegian company Jordan.

This paper argues that executives and managers need to reevaluate and to reengineer their performance measurement system to make it more pertinent so that it would serve as an effective trigger as well as a critical piloting and control mechanism for effecting strategic management intervention.

Successful innovation depends on the development and integration of new knowledge in the innovation process. In order to successfully innovate, the firm will combine different innovation activities. In addition to doing own research and development, firms typically are engaged in the acquisition of knowledge on the technology market and cooperate actively in R&D with other firms and research organizations. In this paper the authors provide evidence on complementarity between different innovation activities. Using data from the Community Innovation Survey on Belgian manufacturing firms, the authors show that firms that are only engaged in a single innovation strategy, either internal R&D activities or sourcing technology externally, introduced fewer new or substantially improved products compared to firms which combine internal and external sourcing. This result is consistent with complementarity between own R&D and external technology sourcing activities. Furthermore, the authors show that the different innovation activities are strongly positively correlated and identify common drivers, resulting in the perceived complementarity between these innovation activities. An important finding is that a capacity to strategically protect intellectual property and a more basic R&D base which may serve as an absorptive capacity, are important common drivers for the different innovation activities.

Considerable attention has been directed towards corporate governance issues in recent years. There are however various limitations in the international mainstream research on boards of directors. Few studies address research questions beyond investigating the relationship between board composition and company performance. Most research is moreover based on empirical evidence from large publicly held US corporations. This paper summarises the accumulated knowledge from 100 student reports on boards of directors in Scandinavia. The contributions of the reports show the need to explore the influence of various contingencies, and also to take various stakeholder perspectives into account when researching corporate governance and boards of directors. The reports also show the need to go beyond counting only numbers of directors to gain insight into board working structures and relationships between directors and managers. Several advantages compared to the US mainstream research tradition can in this connection be found in Scandinavian research about boards of directors.