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TELCO is the leading manufacturer of commercial vehicles (trucks) in India. In 1998, TELCO succeeded in manufacturing a small car of international standards without financial or technological collaboration with any leading foreign car manufacturer. This case deals with TELCO's success in its small car project and the challenges that lie ahead. It highlights the role played by creative resource leverage in the success of firms from developing countries in a global environment.

Small firms facing today’s turbulent business environment often fail early in their life if they do not develop the necessary capabilities to survive. The main goal of this study is to investigate how IT and knowledge co-evolve, influencing a firm’s agility, within the context of micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Applying the resource-based view of the firm and dynamic capabilities, a multiple case study of eight firms was used to explore links among business, IT and knowledge strategies, resources, and capabilities. Links among IT and knowledge capabilities and firm agility were also explored. The results demonstrate that an MSE’s business strategy shapes, and is also shaped by, the firm’s IT and knowledge strategies; and that both IT and knowledge capabilities shape, and are shaped by, the firm’s agility, coevolving with it. By highlighting the important antecedents of small firm agility and presenting crucial links among agility, IT capabilities, and knowledge capabilities in MSEs, we encourage practitioners to think carefully about their IT and knowledge strategies and to rethink their use of firm resources and capabilities to develop agility in the face of environmental uncertainty and change.

Competitive advantage and sustainability of business organizations can only be achieved when an organization identifies, boosts, and directs its resources toward building its capabilities. The literature identified knowledge management (KM) resources and capabilities as the most critical enablers of organizational performance and innovations. This systematic review identified KM resources (enablers) and their effects on KM capabilities. The review also went into the theories used in the empirical research on the problem. To achieve those goals, the authors summarized 27 quantitative, peer-reviewed studies found in well-known databases and published in the last 5 years between January 2014 and April 2019. The review revealed that the primary organizational KM resources are culture, people, leadership, organization structure, resources, capabilities, strategy and technology. To these, the review added some factors, which are social factors, organizational knowledge and organizational characteristics. The study is significant in finding the most common variables or factors in business KM and their implication of them for enhancing knowledge capability and organizational performance.

The aim of study is to prioritize resilient capabilities required for an Industry 4.0 manufacturing business. These capabilities are prioritized considering the barriers faced by their supply chains in becoming resilient. After the review of literature and discussion with experts from the case company and other supply chain professionals, the barriers and resilient capabilities were shortlisted. The study utilized a hybrid of AHP-fuzzy TOPSIS technique to provide weights to the criteria variables (here barriers) and rank the alternatives (here resilient capabilities). Five criteria of barriers were identified for the purpose of the study, namely, strategic barriers, technological barriers, cultural barriers, individual barriers, and organizational barriers. Twenty-three subcriteria were identified for these barriers. Six capabilities were decided upon to be prioritized out of which planning capabilities were obtained to be the most important followed by collaborative, agile, supply chain design modification capability, interoperability, and supply flexibility. The study attempts to fill the gap identified in the literature regarding the lack of studies on supply chain resilience barriers. It therefore provides a realistic framework to prioritize the resilience capabilities required for mitigating such barriers.

This research aims to develop a conceptual framework in order to inquire into the dynamic growth process of university spin-outs (hereafter referred to as USOs) in China, attempting to understand the configuration of capabilities that are necessary for dynamic growth. Based on the extant literature and empirical cases, the study attempts to address the following question: How do USOs in China build and configure the innovation capabilities to cope with the dynamic growth? This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature by providing a theoretical discussion on the USOs' dynamic entrepreneurial process, by investigating the interconnections between innovation problem-solving and the required configuration of innovation capabilities in four growth phases. Further, it takes particular interest in the integrative capabilities and their impact on the USOs' entrepreneurial innovation process, in terms of knowledge integration, alliance, venture finance and venture governance. To date, studies have investigated the dynamic development process of USOs in China and have recognized the heterogeneity of USOs. Yet studies of capabilities that are required for rapid growth remain sparse. Addressing this research gap will be of great interest to entrepreneurs, policy-makers and venture investors.

With increasing globalization, firms in emerging countries are facing turbulent business environment that is marked by liberalization of economic policies and regulatory changes. In such cases firms have to undertake dynamic learning to develop new capability. In developing countries the challenge for firms to develop new competencies is more complex due to political and economic complexities. This paper shows the key role of Diaspora scientists and collaborative models of R&D in development of innovative capabilities in the Indian industry. It also reveals that Indian firms transformed their business models as a response to changing external environment and raises questions regarding future development of the industry.

Despite increased attention from scholars and policy makers, the growth of informal entrepreneurship and its challenges have been reported continuously and are growing frequently. However, there is an inadequate study on informal entrepreneurship growth in view of resources and capabilities. Thus, the objective of this paper is to propose a model of informal entrepreneurship in view of resources and capabilities by examining the existing literature and field study data in the context of a developing country. An exploratory field study was undertaken, where fourteen interviews were conducted. A content analysis technique was applied to identify the resources and capabilities factors with their associated variables and a research model was developed. Outcomes from field study recognized the resources and capabilities factors and variables, as well as their relationships. It vibrates well with the existing literature and establishes the proposed model. This study proposes a model for future informal entrepreneurship research and identifies theoretical and policy implications.

In order to cope with technological change, publishing companies need to effectively combine their capabilities and use them to support the development of new and existing products. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the market and technology capabilities of publishing companies and their online innovations. Our comparative case study focuses on four cases representing newspaper and magazine publishers. The case companies seem stronger in market than in technology capabilities. We also note an apparent tendency to build on the strongest capability area and to focus on leveraging those capabilities rather than taking a risk and experimenting in an area in which they are relatively weaker. Further, it seems that publishers have been able to leverage their market capabilities through online experimentation, but have not been able to develop their technological capabilities in the same manner. From the scientific perspective, this study makes two main contributions. Firstly, the empirical in-depth investigation of the capability portfolios of the case firms complements the emerging work on innovation-related capabilities. Secondly, the study adds to the literature on media management in enhancing understanding of the online-related capabilities that are required in publishing companies, and the related development patterns. Our study suggests that experimenting online and producing innovations requiring new types of internal market-related processes and practices is an efficient strategy to develop one's current market capabilities online.

Research on innovation has focussed on management structures, processes and tools, whereas research on entrepreneurship and creativity has been more interested in individual personal traits. However, many of the most successful innovative firms and technologies were co-created, by multiple founders. Moreover, these founders typically have different but complementary capabilities, and we argue that it is this interaction of talent that is at the core of many innovative new ventures, what we refer to as Conjoint Innovation. We examine 15 case studies, historical and contemporary, to demonstrate the prevalence and utility of the concept of Conjoint Innovation. We identify three generative mechanisms in such interactions: complementary capabilities; contrasting cognitive and creative styles; and adjacent networks. Whilst multiple founders are a defining condition for Conjoint Innovation, all three generative mechanisms appear to be necessary for constructive interaction and innovation.

Within the strategic management literature, both managerial cognition and dynamic capabilities have been identified as drivers of change and transition in changing business environments. The purpose of this study is to explore the interplay of dominant logic and dynamic capabilities in the magazine publishing industry. We investigated four magazine publishing business units of a large media corporation situated in four different countries, namely Finland, the Netherlands, Hungary and Russia. A total of 40 magazine managers were interviewed. The results imply that dominant logic and dynamic capabilities coevolve in a reciprocal relationship, and the interplay of cognition and capabilities seems to be most visible in the seizing and reconfiguring capabilities. The results of the present study also illustrate that there may be several contradictory dominant logics within a single company. Dynamic capabilities useful to innovation processes are developed in the areas that are pinpointed by the managers as the locus of attention. Industry transition does not automatically change what companies think and do. That requires managerial attention and an active reconceptualization of the business and active development of not only day-to-day operations, but capabilities needed to change the way we work.

Prior literature suggests that dynamic capabilities enable, on the one hand, firms to respond successfully to the changes in the markets, and on the other hand, to embrace firms’ ability to shape their business environments. However, existing studies have not fully considered how some firms within the same industry are able to shape markets, and why others need to adapt to these changes in a Kirznerian manner. We make an attempt, based on contemporary literature on the microfoundations of dynamic capabilities, to explain how resource allocation between marketing and R&D function — as one of the microfoundations and as a central contributor to innovation — influences the sustainability of competitive advantage and, consequently, a firm’s ability to create or respond to exogenous shocks. Findings from our multiple-case study on internationalizing SMEs indicate that investments in marketing and R&D functions per se are a necessary though not sufficient condition for building dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage. Rather, the extent to which companies are able to follow their own strategies is closely tied to the microfoundations of dynamic capabilities.

This paper examines the changing composition of technological opportunities and corporate leadership that affected the major British and German pharmaceutical companies from 1930 to 1990. It draws on both the theory of technological change and Schumpeter's theory of profits and growth. Evidence is derived from US patent statistics for 15 indigenous British and German pharmaceutical companies in 47 technological activities. The findings suggest that shifts in both technological leadership and opportunities tend to be gradual rather than radical. The diffusion of technology reduces, but does not fully erode, firm-specific capabilities. However, well-established leaders risk becoming locked into declining technologies. Nevertheless, the composition of leadership in the pharmaceutical industry often persists for several decades. More recent changes, though, suggest that the once dominant group of leaders is on the verge of being replaced by a different group, to the extent that the shifting cycle reflects a changing technological paradigm.

In this paper, we propose a risk-based framework for military capability planning. Within this framework, metaheuristic techniques such as Evolutionary Algorithms are used to deal with multi-objectivity of a class of NP-hard resource investment problems, called The Mission Capability Planning Problem, under the presence of risk factors. This problem inherently has at least two conflicting objectives: minimizing the cost of investment in the resources as well as the makespan of the plans. The framework allows the addition of a risk-based objective to the problem in order to support risk assessment during the planning process. In other words, with this framework, a mechanism of progressive risk assessment is introduced to capability planning.

We analyze the performance of the proposed framework under both scenarios: with and without risk. In the case of no risk, the purpose is to study several optimization-related aspects of the framework such as convergence, trade-off analysis, and its sensitivity to the algorithm parameters; while the second case is to demonstrate the ability of the framework in supporting risk assessment and also robustness analysis.

This paper describes research work aimed at designing realistic reasoning techniques for humanoid robots provided with advanced skills. Robots operating in real-world environments are expected to exhibit very complex behaviors, such as manipulating everyday objects, moving in crowded environments or interacting with people, both socially and physically. Such — yet to be achieved — capabilities pose the problem of being able to reason upon hundreds or even thousands different objects, places and possible actions to carry out, each one relevant for achieving robot goals or motivations. This article proposes a functional representation of everyday objects, places and actions described in terms of such abstractions as affordances and capabilities. The main contribution is twofold: (i) affordances and capabilities are represented as neural maps grounded in proper metric spaces; (ii) the reasoning process is decomposed into two phases, namely problem awareness (which is the focus of this work) and action selection. Experiments in simulation show that large-scale reasoning problems can be easily managed in the proposed framework.

The fifth industrial revolution is known as Industry 5.0 and is being evolved to focus on the personalized demand of customers. This industrial revolution is required to provide better interaction among humans and machines to achieve effective and faster outcomes. It provides a new era of personalization and solves complex problems. Digital technologies provide a new paradigm in manufacturing and eliminate repetitive jobs. It applies human intelligence to understand the requirement of a human operator. The data in manufacturing can be analyzed using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). This paper discusses the development of all industrial revolutions and differentiates between Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. Further, it identifies the significant elements and capabilities of Industry 5.0 in the manufacturing field. This paper finally identifies 17 critical components of Industry 5.0 and discusses them briefly. Intelligent machines used in this revolution are efficiently used to solve real problems. It provides higher accuracy and speeds up the industrial automation with the help of critical thinking of human resources. Industry 5.0 provides computing power to the industry, which is to facilitate the digital manufacturing systems that are built to communicate with other systems. Thus, with mass personalization, there is customer delight with higher value addition through Industry 5.0.

The dynamic capabilities framework analyzes the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by private enterprise firms operating in environments of rapid technological change. The competitive advantage of firms is seen as resting on distinctive processes (ways of coordinating and combining), shaped by the firm's (specific) asset positions (such as the firm's portfolio of difficult-to-trade knowledge assets and complementary assets), and the evolution path(s) it has adopted or inherited. The importance of path dependencies is amplified where conditions of increasing returns exist. Whether and how a firm's competitive advantage is eroded depends on the stability of market demand, and the ease of replicability (expanding internally) and imitatability (replication by competitors). If correct, the framework suggests that private wealth creation in regimes of rapid technological change depends in large measure on honing internal technological, organizational, and managerial processes inside the firm. In short, identifying new opportunities and organizing effectively and efficiently to embrace them are generally more fundamental to private wealth creation than is strategizing, if by strategizing one means engaging in business conduct that keeps competitors off balance, raises rival's costs, and excludes new entrants.