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Change Management & Innovation Case studies
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Seeds to Success: tough business decisions in a non-profit environment
Suse Greenstone, Program Director of the Seeds to Success Life-Skills Program, was spending the second half of November, 2004 preparing to address issues raised by the board of directors of the parent organization, South Central Community Action Programs (SCCAP). She needs to consider some tough decisions regarding the Seeds to...Community economic development through partnerships: The case of the Sudbury Regional Business Centre
The authors wish to recognize the assistance of Michelle Munro in creating an earlier retrospective on the Sudbury Regional Business Centre. The authors also wish to acknowledge the very helpful comments of the academic reviewers. Helen Mulc was the Manager of the Sudbury Regional Business Centre from its inception in...Walking a tightrope between artistry and entrepreneurship: The stories of the Hotel Woodpecker, Otter Inn and Luna Resort
In Västerås City, a town close to Stockholm, there is a city park as most towns tend to have. The park is generally a retreat for a pause at one of the park benches, a tranquil place for reading a book or a place for a pleasant picnic in the...Environmental uncertainty and vertical integration in a small business network: The case of Natural Valley Farms Inc.
The authors extend their special thanks to a Natural Valley Farm's employee who assisted them in identifying key informants. They also wish to express their gratitude to the interview participants for sharing their time and aspects of their project and work lives....Aboriginal partnerships in Canada: focus on the Diavik Diamond Mine
The authors would like to thank the reviewers who provided constructive criticism of an earlier version of this paper....Between a rock and a hard place?: A case study of the issues facing advisors in introducing IIP to SMEs
The multitude of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK and their importance to the economy has often been acknowledged (Wilson, 1995; DTI, 1997) and there have been numerous government promoted initiatives designed to assist SMEs develop their potential. Many of these involve the purchase of consultancy...Simulation usage in SMEs
The worldwide deregulation, the hi-tech information evolution and the saturation of the mass production market, have created an increased international competition in most industries. Customers, nowadays, are more informed and harder to please, always demand better value for money, products or services, expect lower prices, reliable delivery, more product varieties...A supplier development programme: the SME experience
The SME sector has become a popular feature of many areas of business and management research. Specifically, the interest for the author is examining how the smaller organisation manages change associated with supplier development and business improvement programmes and considers what role organisational learning has to play within these environments....Promoting entrepreneurship at the University of Glamorgan through formal and informal learning
The Welsh Enterprise Institute (WEI) is currently the largest research and development organisation of its kind in Wales. The WEI provides a centre of expertise in the areas of entrepreneurship, innovation, and small business management. It has 30 members of staff specialising in areas as diverse as strategy, regional development,...The impact of employment legislation on micro businesses: A case study from the licensed trade
This study has been undertaken to examine the nature of legal awareness and the extent of compliance with employment legislation in the micro business sector. The research centres on the hospitality industry, with particular focus on the licensed trade, which comprises many micro businesses. To cover all areas where there...Management of innovation networks: a case study of different approaches
The first and preliminary version of this paper (“Management of innovation networks –two different approaches”) was presented at the 20th IMP Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Conference 2004, Copenhagen, 2-4 September 2004 and published in their CD-ROM Proceedings....Evaluating an Australian public policy organization's innovation capacity
Innovation is often claimed to be a cornerstone of competitiveness (Denton, 1999; Jägle, 1999; Johannessen et al., 1999; Neely and Hii, 1998) and in some cases also profitability (Bose et al., 2002; Roberts, 1999). The role of innovation in a firm's strategy is further...Creating communities of practices to manage technological knowledge: An evaluation study at Rolls-Royce
In large companies, technological knowledge lies dispersed over individual specialists, business units and locations (Grant, 1996). Two engineers may be working on a similar problem in mutual ignorance, because they are working in different parts of the company. By sharing knowledge, organisation members enhance the utilisation of knowledge and...Staff development and performance appraisal in a Brazilian research centre
Current competitive markets are highly influenced by the markets being globalised, technological innovation and stiff competition. Competence-based management appears in this scenario as an approach to human resource management which provides interaction between human resource systems and a company's strategy (Santos, 2000; Schuler and Jackson, 1995; Meshoulam...Science-based innovation as systematic risk-taking: The case of new drug development
Much of the knowledge-management literature (Tsoukas and Mylonopoulos, 2004; Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2003; Newell et al., 2002; Prichard et al., 2000; Spender, 1996; Nonaka and Takeushi, 1995) and the literature on innovation (Jassawalla and Sashittal, 2002; Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Cheng...A template for commercialising science and facilitating innovation: A case study of Victoria, Australia
The title for this paper may appear paradoxical, is it really possible to develop a template for facilitating innovation? The authors argue that the Australian collaborative model between Government, research institutions, and industry has been successful in generating high levels of innovation in the state of Victoria. This model describes...Vehicles for attention creation: the case of a concept car at Volvo Cars
The main attraction at the Geneva International Motor Show in 2004 was the Volvo Your Concept Car (YCC), a concept car developed by a group of women, targeting an independent, professional – and female – premium customer. The launch was followed by the kind of media interest that makes marketing...Enabling intrapreneurship: the case of a knowledge-intensive industrial company
The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments made by Per Nikolaj Bukh, Anders Drejer and John Parm Ulhøi on an earlier version of this paper....Innovation through acquisition: The Jiangsu Little Swan Group Company in the People's Republic of China
First-class enterprises form standards and benchmarks; second-class enterprises form brands; and third class enterprises form products. (Xu Yuan, Deputy General Manager, the Jiangsu Little Swan Group Company, 18 November 2002)....Market-oriented new product development: How can a means-end chain approach affect the process?
The means-end chain (MEC) theory is widely used in consumer research and for the development of advertising strategies (Gutman, 1982; Reynolds and Whitlark, 1995). This paper shows an attempt to apply a MEC approach to the development of new products. The aim is to investigate how the introduction...Adoption of behaviour: predicting success for major innovations
Predicting whether an innovation will be adopted in a market has always formed a major scientific challenge. Generations of scientists have pursued this challenge, by studying the subject from different disciplinary angles and for different kinds of innovations. Sociologists and psychologists have tried to pinpoint the unique characteristics of the...New knowledge creation through dialectical leadership: A case of IT and multimedia business in Japan
Rapid progress in information and multimedia technologies is leading the way for gradual renovation in diverse areas including society, economy and industry. Ever widening acceptance of the internet, intranet and extranet is spawning the flattening of corporations on novel communications platforms as well as the creation of a new-business model...Intuition and pharmaceutical research: the case of AstraZeneca
Innovation is at the bottom line, and based on the firm's ability to manage creativity. Although creativity is a most contested and polymorphous construct, here it is used to represent new ideas and thoughts that precede an innovation. Madjar et al. (2002, p. 757) write:We consider employee creativity to...Hollywood wives revisited: a study of customer involvement in the XC90 project at Volvo Cars
Despite intense research since the 1970s on new product development (NPD), there is little evidence that R&D effectiveness has increased (Cooper, 1999). Among areas that are still problematic, the voice of the customer is neglected, especially in the early phases of product development. Consequently, NPD is often depicted as...Guiding innovation socially and cognitively: the innovation team model at Skanova Networks
The history of innovation management is littered with analyses of the difficulties that are often confronted by large corporations with respect to fostering and managing innovation (Dougherty, 1992; Dougherty and Heller, 1994; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995). It should come as no surprise therefore that there is also a burgeoning literature...Restructuring for agility at Volvo Car Technical Service (VCTS)
In the last decade, the pressures for change on organizations have been more pronounced than ever. One of the more dominant of these pressures has been new technology, particularly information technology (IT) which has precipitated increasing globalisation of markets, deregulation of industries, and the rise of new organizational forms such...Enterprise support for older entrepreneurs: the case of PRIME in the UK
This paper emerged on the basis of research conducted by the authors for the project “Enterprise Dynamics and the Ageing Population”, commissioned and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and coordinated by the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research. The cooperation by PRIME and their staff in...Constructing narratives of enterprise: clichés and entrepreneurial self-identity
The paper explores the narrative practices associated with the creation and maintenance of entrepreneurial identity. Based on an illustrative ethnographic account which supports a theoretical approach to identity construction, the paper shows how entrepreneurs use clichés to secure a robust, useful, and achievable sense of entrepreneurial self-identity. In contrast to...Metaphor use in the entrepreneurial process
Our intention in this paper is to investigate the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. The critical analysis of the use of metaphor will contribute to the literature on the entrepreneurial process by adding insights from metaphor theory. In particular, we are interested in how metaphors take part in...The entrepreneurial role of organisational members in the internationalisation of a franchise system
Business format franchising can be defined as “the granting of a license for a predetermined financial return by a franchising company (franchisor) to its franchisees, entitling them to make use of a complete business package, including training, support and the corporate name, thus enabling them to operate their own businesses...