Organizational Capabilities, Patterns of Knowledge Accumulation and Governance Structures in Business Firms: An Introduction

Abstract

The capability-based view of the firm is based on the assumption that firms know how to do things. Assuming the existence of a thing called `organizational knowledge', in the first part of the paper we identify its main building blocks and we provide a description of its inner structure. This results in an analysis of the relationships among key concepts like organizational routines, organizational competencies and skills. In the second part, we consider some empirical implications of the adoption of a capability-based view of the firm in dealing with issues like horizontal and vertical boundaries of the firm, innovation and corporate performance. Some implications for strategic management are also discussed.

What do firms know? What do they produce? A new look at the relationship between patenting profiles and patterns of product diversification

“…And the directions of diversification themselves display coherence between neighboring activities also at relatively high degrees of diversification (consistently with the conjecture put forward in Teece et al (1994)). Both findings are well in tune with a capability-based theory of the firm (for a critical survey within a vast literature, see Dosi et al (2008)). The patterns of diversification -both in technologies knowledge and in products -are consistent with a branching process whereby knowledge on production and innovation, so to speak, "spurs out" from what the firm already does and knows.…”

Subsidiary managers’ knowledge mobilizations: Unpacking emergent knowledge flows

“…So -at least in the problemistic search situations studied here -top management may have had little influence in practice on what knowledge components got mobilized and recombined by subsidiary management in perhaps ways that were unpredicted and unplanned by top management. The solutions created by the subsidiary managers we interviewed often modified existing or developed new routines and technologies, thus initiated changes to the building blocks of organizational MNC competences and capabilities (Dosi, Faillo, & Marengo, 2008;Winter, 2003). This pinpoints towards the decentralization of competence development in the MNC (Birkinshaw, Hood, & Jonsson, 1998;Rugman & Verbeke, 2001;Tippmann et al, 2010).…”

A Normative Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategy, Know-How, and Competition

“…The construct remains open to a variety of conceptualizations and interpretations concerning even its most basic aspects, including how dynamic capabilities are defined." The attempt to parse the dynamic capabilities concept at everfiner levels of detail has lead to multiple competing definitions (for a comparison, see Dosi et al 2008). Even the most ardent supporters of a dynamic capabilities approach to strategy would have to admit that the framework has made little progress theoretically, and has certainly gained even less traction among practitioners.…”