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Senior Fellows Projects

Three research areas have been identified for research by the AIM Senior Fellows. These broad subjects are meant to provide a common ground for relating work done in a wide variety of disciplines, in varied contexts and through different theoretical approaches.

Productivity and Performance Projects:

This project will explore the determinants of this growth. The sorts of factors will focus on include changes in the composition of activities undertaken within the sectors, change in the competition and the entry and exit of plants, improved efficiency due to scale effects, the adoption of new technologies along with other factors.

This project will extend a previous ESRC-funded study, which called for the dimensions of consumer choice it had identified to be developed into valid, and reliable quantitative measures of the choices brought about by retail competition at the micro-level (see Clarke et al, 2006; Jackson et al, 2006).

AIM's Deputy Director, Andy Neely and AIM Senior Fellow, Rachel Griffith led the study which examined the launch of performance measurement systems modeled on the Balanced Scorecard at the international building product firms, the Worseley Group.The Balanced Scorecard is one of the most widely used management performance tools in the world, made popular by Professor Robert Kaplan and consultant, David Norton.

This study comprises an academic re-analysis and extensive of the first ever-major longitudinal investigation into ways in which individual and group perceptions of competition impact on the development of strategy at the individual, group and industry levels of analysis.

This project will study the links between managerial practices and UK productivity - initially in the manufacturing sector, but later in the service sector. It will link managerial databases with government productivity databases in manufacturing.

Using OECD data, this project will make international comparisons of productivity using micro data for as many industries as possible, comparing entry and exit rates, cohort productivity rates and long tails.

Theoretical work on the impact of policies that affect the institutional and economic environment in which firms operate on the incentives firms face to innovate and adopt best practice has made contradictory predictions. Empirical work has largely been at odds with the dominant theories.

The study is analysing three sectors (food manufacturing, ICT, and the media). A total of 89 firms are being studied, embracing a detailed questionnaire survey of 384 employees. Issues addressed include: the quality of jobs; firm's employment strategies; and links with business networks.

In this research we aim to understand the impact of outsourcing on plant and firm level productivity. While outsourcing is accepted as a growing phenomenon there is little systematic quantification of what types of activities and to whom.

What are the drivers of productivity in retail? This research aims to improve our understanding of what behaviours and businesses processes might be contributing to the underperformance of this sector in the UK. We will compare firms and consumer behaviour in the UK to the US using micro data.

Survey of MNCs with UK operation, based on first reliable population of MNCs. The focus is 4 sets of HR practices and the degree of local decision-making autonomy, together with the organizational and structural context of these practices.

Analytical and conceptual studies of the organization of conflict and co-operation in the workplace, together with links between workplaces and firms and markets. The project builds on observational studies of workplaces, conducted by the authors and others, to develop a theoretical framework.

This project uses the Survey of Employment Tribunal Applications to access the distinctive experience of small firms. Small firms are predicted (1) to experience more claims than large ones, (2) to be subject to particular types of claim, (3) to be more likely to settle prior to reaching a tribunal, and (4) to be more likely to lose those cases reaching a tribunal.

The analystical nature of the field of employment relations, including the contribution to critical realism; the public policy implications.

Why do some firms create more knowledge than others? In this paper we estimate knowledge production functions for a cross- section of UK firms covering their operations from 1998 through to 2000. We focus in particular on the hypothesis from the trade literature that globally engaged firms - wither multinationals or exporters - have access to larger knowledge stocks.

This research aims to provide a context for many of the AIM research projects and help us gain a deeper understanding of why UK productivity continues to lag behind other major industrial economies. We began by providing a sectoral decomposition of the UK productivity gap with the US.

Gustavo Crespi, Chiara Criscuolo, Jonathan Haskel & Denise Hawkes - UK Intangible Expenditure

Sustained Innovation Projects:

Innovation is about creating new possibilities for the enterprise, for example through product/service offerings or process change. But there is significant scope for productivity improvement through the early adoption of process innovations with particular reference to the insights question which diffusion theory can offer to help policy agents (national/regional government, business and sector associations, supply chain 'owners' etc) accelerate the process.

There is now a relatively stable picture of what constitutes 'good practice' in managing innovation, which is increasingly used as a reference model against which to audit and develop performance. This prescription works well for the 'steady state' conditions where the innovation challenge involves; doing what we do, but 'better' but it is less effective under discontinuous non-equilibrium conditions.

The Electronic Games Industry (EGI) is a maturing creative sector that has grown rapidly from a largely non-monetised 'bedroom' activity in the early 1990s to a global industry with a turnover of approximately 33bn in 2002.

This study focuses on the level of attention that foreign-owned subsidiary companies get from their corporate headquarters, and their ability to successfully chart their own strategic direction. Attention can be a blessing and a curse for the subsidiary, so this study examines the approaches that subsidiaries can use to achieve the right form of attention, and to use it to improve their operating performance.

Researchers have traditionally paid relatively scant attention to the dynamics of management innovation, that is, to the processes through which organizational principles and practices evolve and, perhaps, advance over time.

Dynamic capabilities refer to the ability of an organisation to adapt and innovate continually in the face of business and environmental change. For many years it has been of interest to researchers from strategy and economics because of the assumed link to organisational performance and competitiveness.

This project is looking at the design and build of one-off superyachts (25 meters and above). These processes involve various actors (customers, designers, shipyards, technical experts and brokers) in the negotiation and clarification of expectations, design and build possibilities. This makes it an interesting area to explore issues around knowledge management and exchange relations.

This project will seek to explain how some companies are able to achieve strategic transformation without trauma and the accompanying loss of value to shareholders and the economy.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms are increasingly relocating research activities to 'centres of excellence' in order to source new technologies. Research will consider how important this motivation has been in the observed shift of technological activity out of the UK and into the US.

This project is using mixed methods to explore the characteristics of biotech clusters in the UK and to better understand the policy requirements and economic development implications of such aggregations.

This research examines the attributes and performance of corporate venture units in the UK and the US. Using detailed data on 95 corporate venture units (questionnaire and interviews) collected at two points in time, the research sheds light on how corporate venture units can best be managed and how their roles fit the broader strategic goals of their parent companies.

Many industries today face a fast pace of technological and market change where the shifts are not just 'more of the same'. They are characterized by periods of discontinuous change in which the companies that emerge as the new winners often have very different competencies, networks, and backgrounds to the previous incumbents.

This project explores the problem of implementing what is already known about 'good practice' in managing innovation. It is developing an integrated and robust toolkit to help support building this capability and will field test and develop it in a number of cases.

This project examines strategic learning as a route to capability development that can contribute to competitiveness through distinctiveness in market contribution. It examines specifically the way individual managers' learning intentions and actions in conjunction with the organizational learning systems (HRD and KM) produce distinctive capabilities that enable organizations to be competitive.

This research project includes a cluster of distinct projects.

1. Dynamic capabilities of Western MNCs competing in China. This study covered 11 European companies and fieldwork has run from 2004 to 2006.
2. Examination of the relationship between knowledge management and dynamic capabilities in European companies.
3. A study of the learning trade-offs between foreign multinationals and local partners operating in China, in particular, looking at a question of who learns what from whom, and the implications for long-term competitiveness.

The purpose of this research is to explore and further explain 'diversity' in inter-firm networks. Diversity refers to the variety of information and resources associated with having a network in which the information and resources a firm gets from its partners are unique and non-redundant. The primary interest is to uncover the characteristics of organizational capability. The research will also seek to examine how diversity of contacts may lead to radical (discontinuous) innovations.

The Porter Report focused on a lack of institutions for collaboration as a weakness of the UK. In 2004 two government commissioned reviews (Lambert Review and Innovation Review) reported and announced several policy reforms.

Promising Practices Projects:

This was a joint research project led by Professor Gerard Hodgkinson in collaboration with Professor Gerry Johnson, Richard Whittington and Dr Mirela Schwarz, in association with the Chartered Management Institute.

Managing partnerships, alliances and other forms of inter-organizational collaborative arrangements is now a major aspect of most managerial jobs so the ability to do so effectively has become a seriously important managerial skill.

This project is at a very early stage. We will be examining leadership and process learning in optronic clusters in the UK and Germany.

Multinational companies (MNCs) vary in both their use of global strategy and in the systems of corporate governance in which they operate. Differences in national corporate governance systems will influence the behaviour of corporate actors, which in turn explains the ability of MNCs to achieve global integration.

The broad set of research questions developed in collaboration with the AIM team are: What is a promising practice? How do practices emerge? What are practices adopted? What is success? What practices can/should lead to success? What is transferable?

This is a broad study of a new field 'experience economy' and the emergence of promising practices associated with it. The agenda has developed as the study progresses. The first focus is the nature of experience-based services with particular focus on emerging models of destinations, measurement of experience outcomes, and evaluation of experience investments.

This project addresses the shortage of research into how strategy is developed and shaped within and across organizational levels. The project examines the role of the cognitive competencies of Middle and Senior Managers' in strategizing at the individual and team levels.

This project extends 'Exploring Cognitive Capabilities in Action I' by exploring the impact of the operating environment on sensemaking processes of senior management teams within the same organization.

The project concerns how multinational companies should manage relationships with their multinational customers and suppliers. In particular should they manage these relationships on a country-by-country basis or on a global basis (Global Customer-Supplier Management or GCSM)?

The handbook, which will be published by Oxford University Press, is intended as a seminal piece, bringing together contributions from an international set of authors writing from the many disciplines through which IOR is researched. The Handbook has three major sections focusing on Manifestations of IORs, Theories and Disciplines, and IOR themes.

Learning is a focal issue in many inter-organizational collaborations in both public and private sector settings. It is also central to practice adoption and innovation through alliances and networks. This project is concerned with developing an understanding of approaches to learning in such contexts, with particular reference to the planned or emergent possibilities for collaborative advantage which might thereby result.

There has always been an interest by some strategy scholars in the activities of managers as they relate to the development of strategy. In this, several strands of research have started to.

One is concerned with what strategists actually do - with strategizing. The second is the gap highlighted by resource based theorists: the need to understand the activities that underpin the distinctive competences bestowing competitive advantage on organisations.

This project is a link with the EPSRC community and is seeking to bring AIM inputs into a project started at the Cambridge Innovation Manufacturing Research centre. There are three sets of issues within benchmarking. First, content; most of today's practices are based on 1980's or 1990's knowledge.

Amongst other projects, Professor Gerry Johnson is involved in studying a common but under researched organizational phenomenon - strategy workshops or away days and the role they play in strategy development in organizations. These are episodes of organizational practice that bring together the use of common strategy tools within the political context of group interaction that has been a concern of much strategy process research.

This project partly parallels the 'role of stories' project but is specifically concerned with storying in relation to collaboration practice. It is focusing on two aspects of the role of stories. Firstly, their role in relation to collaboration practice transfer, and secondly the use of stories, as a forms of sources of data for building practice relevant theory about collaboration.

The era of internal competition is dead. In a world where value must be created through innovation, where ubiquitous communication technology has levelled the playing field, where resources are coupled flexibly as needed, cooperation becomes the most critical organization capability.

Cooperation is a crucial building block for innovation and productivity. In this project we undertake a literature review and begin to build a theory of cooperation.

This work is concerned with the presentations about their experiences of successful practice that managers (both high profile 'circuit speakers' and unknown 'experience sharers') are often asked to make to other managers. The research is concerned with understanding how such presentations are constructed and whether and how they are effective in transferring useful practice.

Managing partnerships, alliances and other forms of inter-organizational collaborative arrangements is now a major aspect of most managerial jobs so the ability to do so effectively has become a seriously important managerial skill.

Our anaylsis places organizational learning, centre stage, arguing that there is an urgent need for new work to investigate with much greater rigour the efficacy of frameworks, tools and techniques that purport to foster strategic learning, and we call for the development of empirical work to further understanding of the interactive role played by a variety of psychological and contextual factors in the successful adaptation of these procedures.

Tradition is most often alluded to in connection with culture, but often in rather unproblematized terms. Whereas culture has been shown to be a source of challenge to management practice in interorganizational collaboration, tradition has not been investigated.

Basic demographic data and relevant psychological data concerning work locus of control and work centrally have also been gathered to investigate the possible moderating impact of these theoretically important factors on the way in which individuals internalize their worlds.

This project is concerned with exploring how those engaged in collaborative initiatives conceive the nature of success. This is an important contributor to understanding issues in the transfer of collaboration practice.


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