Most articles on strategic breakthroughs tend to concentrate on large, high-tech organizations. Yet the French firm 1001 Listes, which creates and manages wedding lists, has shown that it is possible for even a relatively small organization to generate strategic breakthroughs with standard off-the-shelf information technology. Its experience highlights two points that previous studies have over...

E-Business standards are critical for inter-firm collaboration; and many standard development organizations have been formed to coordinate standard development and adoption efforts in various industries. In this paper, we focus on the research question: what are the factors that drive firms to partake in e-Business standard development in e-Business industry standard consortia? In this work-in-...

This paper explores the role of Information Systems in breakthrough strategies and offers an alternative perspective to that found in most of the literature on this topic, which tends to be dominated by large organizations that deploy novel and specialized Information Systems. It presents a longitudinal case study of a comparatively small French based company that has crafted a breakthrough str...

This paper focuses on a framework for supporting knowledge sharing in organizations through computer support. Results from three ethnographic field studies of organizational knowledge in three kinds of settings show that sharing of knowledge, or finding things out, is a highly contingent matter. There is no single solution to support this. Instead, a combination of communication tools, awarenes...

This study aims at empirically investigating whether technology incubators help academic high-tech start-ups to establish collaborations with other organizations, thus increasing the competitiveness of these firms. In doing so, we take into account the specificities of academic hightech start-ups with respect to their non-academic counterparts. We compare the effects of incubation on academic a...

Knowledge management, innovativeness and innovation have an important impact on business development and survival. Empirically analyzing these three concepts is critical because of the importance of these concepts for creating competitive advantage. Organizations need to generate, modify, and manage knowledge in order to maintain their innovation capability. This study examines the relationship...

In some cases the optimum is the minimum of the objective function (mathematical optimum), but in other cases the optimum is given by a technical constraint (technical optimum). The present paper shows the both types in two problems. The first problem is to find the optimum dimensions of a ring-stiffened circular cylindrical shell subject to external pressure, which minimize the structural cost...

Elements of the work of Basil Bernstein’s (Bernstein, 1996, 2000) are used in this paper to analyse the national structure and policy of vocational education and training (VET) in Australia. The analysis is part of work towards a Doctor of Education degree at Monash University which aims to investigate the impact of online technology on the teaching practice of teachers employed in Technical an...