The purpose of this paper is to determine whether organizational strategies in various manufacturing industries are complementary with innovation. In particular, our interest is to discover which organizational strategies are complementary with major innovations (world-first and Canada-first). Knowledge of complementarity should pave the way for creating sustainable competitive advantage because the use of a complex strategy may be difficult to imitate. In other words, competitive advantage increases as the complexity of the strategy increases (i.e. because the number of strategy combinations follows a power law), which acts as a barrier to potential imitators (Rivkin, J.W. (2000) Imitation of Complex Strategies. Management Science, 46(6), 824-844.). Because of the static nature of our results (productivity and profit are for 1997), their interpretation can only be tentative. Thus, our research is really a first step along the road to understanding the (potential) importance of complementarities among firm strategies. Caveats aside, managers may want to compare their own firm's emphasis on particular strategies against what is empirically determined to be complementary with innovation and high-performance within their industry. The frequency of complementary pairs that involve innovation range from 40 to 50% depending on whether we are talking about profit, productivity, or strategies. This result is important—as it means that innovation outcomes are statistically significant for both increased productivity and increased profit. Furthermore, innovation was found to be complementary with many organizational strategies. The complementary strategies across industries were quite different, but this was expected to occur.Innovation, Strategy, Complementarity, Supermodular, Submodular,

The purpose of this paper is to determine which firm strategies, perceived benefits of innovation and objectives for innovating in various manufacturing industries are indeed complementary with innovation. The test for complementarity is performed by proving that the data satisfies a set of supermodularity parametric equation restrictions. Our estimation results, from Canada's national innovation survey, show a wide variation in complements affecting the perception of the value of innovation to a firm. In terms of profit, complementary variable pairs for world-first innovators exceed those of firms who report a Canada-first or firm-first innovation. With labour productivity, complementary variable pairs for the Canada-first innovators exceed those of the world- and firm-first innovators. It is readily apparent though, that a high-technology industry does not necessarily equate to a high degree of complementarity.Complementarity, strategy, innovation, objectives, impact,

One of the central problems in managing technological change and maintaining a competitive advantage in business is improving the skills of the workforce through investment in human capital and a variety of training practices. This paper explores the evidence on the impact of training investment on productivity in 14 Canadian industries from 1999 to 2005. Our productivity analysis demonstrates that in 12 out of 14 industries, training had a positive effect on productivity. However, when the analysis is put within a financial context, the return on investment was positive in only four industries. Faced with negative rates of return, why should managers in most of the industries in the study promote investment in training? Probably the best explanation is that new technology requires an investment in training. The investment in training is necessary just for the firm to maintain its current labour productivity. Employee turnover necessarily impedes the efficacy of training, because trained workers leave, and untrained workers arrive. Thus, training in this instance again is necessary just to maintain current labour productivity.

The purpose of this analysis is to use complementarity analysis to explain why some implementations of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) provide a high return on investment while others do not. By analysing the engineering environment, as well as the technology used in the manufacturing process, we hope to provide further insight into the necessary environmental conditions for high returns on investments in AMT. This paper aims to advance current understanding of the impact of organizational fit through complementarity analysis of 26 AMT and 12 engineering management practices. The results reveal that analysis on the dependencies of implementation of AMT must be conducted at the industry and plant size levels, otherwise the environmental differences may lead to inconclusive or misleading results for the majority of senior managers engaging in strategic AMT investment decision making.