where these ideas were initially discussed and much of the work was done. We are especially grateful to John Padgett, organizer of the States and Markets group at SFI for his support and insights. We have benefited from comments from the audience at seminars

As the basis of value creation increasingly depends on the leverage of the intangible assets of firms, Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) are emerging as powerful sources of competitive advantage. However, the general recognition of the importance of such systems seems to be accompanied by a technology-induced drive to implement systems with inadequate consideration of the fundamental knowledge problems that the KMS are likely to solve. This paper contributes to the stream of research on Knowledge Management Systems by proposing an inductively developed framework for this important class of information systems, classifying KMS based on the locus of the knowledge and the a-priori structuring of contents. This framework provides a means to explore issues related to KMS and unifying dimensions underlying different types of KMS. The contingencies that we discuss: the size and diversity of networks, the maintenance of knowledge flows and the long term effects of the use of KMS provide a window into work in a number of reference disciplines that would enrich the utility of KMS and also open up fruitful areas for future research.

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Abstract. Understanding how to implement SPI successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, there has been no systematic attempt to synthesize and organize the prescriptions offered. The research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper provides a synthesis of prescriptions for successful quality management and process improvement found from an extensive review of the quality management, organizational learning, and software process improvement literature. The literature review was confirmed by empirical studies among both researchers and practitioners. The main result is an instrument for measuring the key factors of success in SPI based on data collected from 120 software organizations. The measures were found to have satisfactory psychometric properties. Hence, managers can use the instrument to guide SPI activities in their respective organizations and researchers can use it to build models to relate the facilitating factors to both learning processes and SPI outcomes.

We have benefited from our discussions with Kristian Kreiner, Paul Hirsch and Roger Dunbar. We have also benefited from inputs that were offered by participants at the Path Dependence and Creation workshop,

many helpful discussions, the anonymous referees for their comments, and managers of Lucent Strategy research consists of a balance between positive and normative theory. Normative theories suggest particular heuristics, or cognitive representations, to find appropriate solutions. Heuristics permit faster solutions to real-time problems; they also suffer from the potential of negative transfer to inappropriate applications. The theory of real options provides an appropriate heuristic framing of competencies and exploratory search. A real options approach marries the theory of financial options to foundational ideas in strategy, organizational theory, and complex systems. We join these approaches to identify three pairs of concepts: scarce factor and the underlying asset in option theory, inertia and irreversibility, and the ruggedness of landscape and option values. Strategic theories of resources largely define a core competence as unique and non-immutable. In doing so, this definition has wrongly forgotten Barney’s initial insight into scarce factor markets as determining the valuation of a competitive asset. Financial theory of real options derives its heuristics of investing in exploratory search by inferring future value of today’s investments from

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This paper studies, in a world with differing priors, the role of organizational beliefs and managerial vision in the behavior and performance of corporations. The paper defines vision operationally as a very strong belief by the manager about the right course of action for the firm. The interaction between employees ’ beliefs and the manager’s vision influences decisions and determines employees ’ motivation and satisfaction. Through sorting in the labor market, the manager’s vision also shapes organizational beliefs. Under weak conditions, a company’s board should select a manager with stronger beliefs than its own, although spurious effects may make vision often look better than it really is. The analysis shows that beliefs play an important role that goes beyond their information content. It also has implications for theories of corporate culture and business strategy.

This paper argues that not only Edith Penrose, but also Harold Demsetz should be seen as a dominant source of inspiration for RBP scholars, that these two crucial influences hold different and even conflicting views of the economic process, and that they helped found different research areas and research approaches within the RBP. Based on this discussion, the paper argues that the conflicting legacies of Penrose and Demsetz threathen the coherence of the RBP, that a central problem in the RBP is the lack of understanding of the process of resource-creation which tends to give the perspective a retrospective character, but that work on technological innovation and change, framed in the broader theoretical context of Austrian and evolutionary economics, may help remedy this shortcoming.