Effective organizational beaming requires high absorptive capacity, which has two major elements: prior knowledge base and intensity of effort. Hyundai Motor Company, the most dynamic automobile producer in developing countries, pursued a strategy of independence in developing absorptive capacity. In its process of advancing from one phase to the next through the preparation for and acquisition, assimilation, and improvement of foreign technologies, Hyundai acquired migratory knowledge to expand its prior knowledge base and proactively constructed crises as a strategic means of intensifying its beaming effort. Unlike externally evoked crises, proactively constructed internal crises present a clew performance gap, shift beaming orientation from imitation to innovation, and increase the intensity of effort in organizational learning. Such crisis construction is an evocative and galvanizing device in the personal repertoires of proactive top managers. A similar process of opportunistic learning is also

Innovations and industrial renewal in Finland-

The widespread use of cooperative modes of company governance, such as joint ventures and a wide range of inter-firm alliances, during the past couple of decades has attracted a lot of attention by economists and policy decision makers alike (e.g. Hagedoorn, 1996; Osborn and Hagedoorn, 1997; Vonortas, 1997; Caloghirou and Vonortas, 2000). The expansion of research on joint ventures and alliances has, however, not led to systematic studies of the long-term patterns in these phenomena and the explanation of such patterns. This is surprising given the quite extensive effort going into the study of market entry and exit (Caves, 1998) and mergers and acquisitions (M&A’s), phenomena directly related to inter-firm alliances. A major reason for this omission is probably that the longitudinal data sources available to study alliances have been limited, both in terms of the actual number of databases and the time-horizon for most of these databases. This paper purports to start filling this gap by means of an exploratory empirical analysis to identify and explain cycles in inter-firm strategic technical alliances (STAs) during the past few decades. We use the CATI database of technology-intensive strategic alliances developed and maintained by one of the authors at the University of Maastricht. One of

The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the literature which leads to the building of the system notions that are currently widely used in industrial and technological analysis, such as, for instance, National Systems of Innovation and Technological Systems. It is shown how a coherent theoretical and methodological background can be derived from a pluralistic approach, which is built on different metaphors (e.g. the biological analogy, the thermodynamics, institutional economics).

the role played by temporary geographical proximity in knowledge transmission

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