School of Management (SoM)

Permanent URI for this community

https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/25

Browse

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
The Coevolution Of The Firm And The Supply Network: A Complex Systems Perspective
(Cranfield University, 2009-04) Varga, Liz; Allen, Peter M.
A complex adaptive systems approach has been permeating organizational studies and the field of supply network management helping to describe and explain supply network dynamics and emergent inter-firm structures. This has improved our theoretical knowledge of the nature of supply networks transforming raw materials into products, within a constantly changing environment. From the early days of simple structures, describing bi-lateral, local arrangements between firms for the creation of relatively simple products, we are now in an environment of various supply network archetypes, describing different global sourcing regimes of highly integrated, sophisticated products within multi-tier networks. This thesis is a study of the coevolution of the firm and supply network in the commercial aerospace manufacturing sector producing jetliners of 100 or more seats. One of the contributions of this research is to demonstrate how the holistic approach of complexity science can be applied to describe, understand and gain new insight into the coevolution of the firm and the supply network. Based on the findings of multiple interviews and questionnaires in eight global aerospace firms across multiple supply chain tiers, this research finds high-performing clusters of inter-firm characteristics, plus the aspects of structure and integration which deliver the supply network performance. Practitioners can use these specific results to examine their own firms and the new coevolutionary conceptual framework developed in the thesis may aid future research studies of complex adaptive systems in practice. The simple survey design and analysis method used in the final research stage of this research, has the potential for use in other industries, markets and other complex adaptive systems generally to examine performance outcomes and the effects of having or adopting new inter-firm characteristics. Finally, implications for policy include the potential to legitimize supply networks in order to stimulate competition and innovation in the economy.
Open Access
A complex system, agent based model for studying and improving the resilience of production and distribution networks
(Cranfield University, 2007-03) Datta, Partha Priya; Allen, Peter M.; Christopher, Martin
The very complexity and the extended reach of today’s globe-spanning supply chain networks, the low inventory levels and lack of redundancies required to achieve efficient operations expose businesses to a huge range of unexpected disruptions. This calls for building resilience in supply chains, which is not just recovery from the mishaps, but is a proactive, structured and integrated exploration of capabilities within the supply chain to resist and win against unforeseen happenings. Literature on supply chain and organisational resilience are informative in identifying resilience enhancing strategies and capabilities, but a detailed dynamic analysis of behaviour of the supply chain to understand the suitability of different resilience capabilities over time and under different scenarios is not carried out. The thesis addresses this gap by studying the internal decision making mechanisms, rules and control procedures through development of an agent-based model and its application to a paper tissue manufacturing supply chain. The model with a decentralised informational structure with informed and intelligent combination of push or pull type of replenishment strategy, flexibility, agility, redundancy and efficiency is found to enhance the resilience of the actual supply network in the face of large deviation of demand from forecasts. The effects of adopting several resilience improvement strategies in tandem or in isolation and the impact of applying different behavioural rules by different agents are studied in this thesis by carrying out numerical experimentation. The findings from the experiments suggest that, however flexible the resources are, however well-informed the different members are, however well-integrated the members are through coordination and communication, however wellequipped a supply chain is with mitigation and recovery capabilities the individual managerial judgements that can obtain a balance between various dimensions of performance (both global and local efficiency, quality and speed of responding to customer orders) and resilience (speedy reaction, maintaining buffers, flexibility in resource management) play the most important role in improving the resilience of the entire network. An important contribution of this thesis is to produce a conceptual framework for supply chain resilience. This framework is used to test the appropriateness of different resilience enhancement procedures. Another significant contribution of this thesis is to provide a theoretical template for further research in supply chain resilience. The template will guide development of effective procedures for managing different situations of uncertainty. By using complex systems modelling methods, such as multi-agent models described in the thesis, outcomes of the system under a significant range of possible agent behavioural rules and environmental events can be explored, and improved levels of functioning and of resilience can be found. Building such models as a means to understand and improve resilience of supply networks is a significant contribution.
Open Access
Measuring collective competencies of organisations - a systematic review of literature
(Cranfield University, 2007-08) Zibell, Laurent; Allen, Peter M.
The present Systematic Review explores the existing academic literature on the instruments to measure collective competences of organisations. The purpose is to identify those that could be further used in a PhD work on the competences of organisations involved in co-operative R&D projects. This area of research is at the intersection of Strategic Management, Human Resources Management, Evolutionary Economics and Business Performance Measurement. The methodology starts with a set of keyword strings for search in bibliographic databases. The extracted articles were then filtered for relevance and quality according to pre-defined criteria. An expansion of the resulting list was performed using cross-referencing and citation analysis. The final core list contains 33 articles. Descriptive statistics illustrate an emergent and highly fragmented field: the number of articles in the list rises sharply over the last 25 years, but no agreement is reached on either the nature of the variables to measure nor on the means to do so. The understandings of the concept of competence either aim at classifying firms (in a minority of articles), or at ranking them. In the latter case, the concept is assimilated to the proximity to best practices, to an efficiency or to an effectiveness in reaching functionally defined goals. Four families of methods are used in the existing literature to measure collective competences of organisations: questionnaires, exploitation of secondary data, case studies and interviews, in descending order of frequency in the core list. The selected articles provide a set of relevant concepts, of methods, of constructs, of third-party quantitative metrics and of individual questionnaire items useful for the further research.
Open Access
Modelling Organisational Evolution and Change - a Complex Systems Modelling Perspective
(Cranfield University, 2008-05) Strathern, M.; Allen, Peter M.
The cumulative output of these papers emphasise that modelling organisational evolution and change from a complex systems perspective makes a significant contribution to organisational studies and brings new insight and understandings both to theory and practice. It is also true that the studies and modelling presented in these papers has pushed forward the boundaries of complex systems science, again both in theory and practice. The papers have made new findings and understandings of the processes, drivers and outcomes of the evolution of social systems and organisations through the development of new evolutionary models and frameworks that contribute both to organisational and complexity sciences. They have through a number of innovations based in complexity science addressed questions in organisational science concerning the importance of knowledge and learning, together with questions about the evolution and survival of organisations and industries. These innovations have played back into and developed complexity science.
Open Access
Outcome predictors of co-operative R & D in Europe: organisational capabilities and cultures
(Cranfield University, 2010-03) Zibell, Laurent; Allen, Peter M.; Paulre, Bernard
This research investigates organisational capabilities and cultures of both partners as potential explanatory factors of co-operative R&D projects outcomes. Contributions to theory are (1) a justification for the existence of organisational capabilities and 'world views', (2) a parsimonious typology of 'world views' and (3) a method to measure organisational capabilities. The survey covers 514 projects in the electronics industry, in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Finland. It obtains 120 full answers, each of which coupling responses from a matched pair of project managers having co-operated on the same R&D project. The survey refers to the organisation's capabilities, to those of the partner, to its 'world view', and to project outcomes. None of the traditional explanatory factors (geographic distance, difference in nationality, size or legal status, strategic compatibility) has any significant influence on any of the outcomes being studied (save one). The explanatory factors introduced by the research (organisational capabilities and 'world views') have a significant influence on almost all outcomes being considered of the co-operative R&D projects: attainment of concrete results, compliance with budget and schedule, creation and transfer of knowledge, learning (modification of capabilities). Cultural diversity, 'absorptive capacity', and teaching effects, selective according to the capability in question, are evidenced. Commonalities between partners are shown to be more important than distance. These results validate empirically organisational capabilities and 'world views' as descriptors of inter-organisational capabilities, and their operationalisation.
Open Access
Predictive performance of front-loaded experimentation strategies in pharmaceutical discovery: a Bayesian perspective
(Cranfield University, 2004) van Dyck, Walter; Allen, Peter M.
Experimentation is a significant innovation process activity and its design is fundamental to the learning and knowledge build-up process. Front-loaded experimentation is known as a strategy seeking to improve innovation process performance; by exploiting early information to spot and solve problems as upstream as possible, costly overruns in subsequent product development are avoided. Although the value of search through front-loaded experimentation in complex and novel environments is recognized, the phenomenon has not been studied in the highly relevant pharmaceutical R&D context, where typically lots of drug candidates get killed very late in the innovation process when potential problems are insufficiently anticipated upfront. In pharmaceutical research the initial problem is to discover a “drug-like” complex biological or chemical system that has the potential to affect a biological target on a disease pathway. My case study evidence found that the discovery process is managed through a front-loaded experimentation strategy. The research team gradually builds a mental model of the drug’s action in which the solution of critical design problems can be initiated at various moments in the innovation process. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the predictive performance of frontloaded experimentation strategies in the discovery process. Because predictive performance necessitates conditional probability thinking, a Bayesian methodology is proposed and a rationale is given to develop research propositions using Monte Carlo simulation. An adaptive system paradigm, then, is the basis for designing the simulation model used for top-down theory development. My simulation results indicate that front-loaded strategies in a pharmaceutical discovery context outperform other strategies on positive predictive performance. Frontloaded strategies therefore increase the odds for compounds succeeding subsequent development testing, provided they were found positive in discovery. Also, increasing the number of parallel concept explorations in discovery influences significantly the negative predictive performance of experimentation strategies, reducing the probability of missed opportunities in development. These results are shown to be robust for varying degrees of predictability of the discovery process. The counterintuitive business implication of my research findings is that the key to further reduce spend and overruns in pharmaceutical development is to be found in discovery, where efforts to better understand drug candidates lead to higher success rates later in the innovation process.

Browse

Browsing School of Management (SoM) by Supervisor "Allen, Peter M."

Results Per Page

Sort Options