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This paper examines the case of Nokia as a player of the mobile communication industry and provider of mobile communication system: Mobile handsets (consumer goods) and mobile networks (CoPS). Our aim is to analyze the impact of strategic management and dynamic capability developed by a firm of such an industry, which supports the entire system and manages inter-industry differences of consumer goods and CoPS. Recent convergence among technologies has raised competition among firms. Achieving and sustaining competitive advantage in this converging market is therefore possible by identifying threats and then developing strategies and capabilities to resolve them. This article concludes by examining how the firm can achieve its competitive advantage.

For some time now, successive generations of more sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been adopted by organisations to enhance or replace more traditional methods of accessing, recording and communicating information used in problem-solving activities. Professionals in most industries have had some experience of the impact of ICT innovation and might be expected to resist innovations which they perceive to have the potential to disrupt crucial processes. This appears particularly likely to occur where there is a substantial tacit knowledge component. In this paper, we report the perceptions of key groups of healthcare professionals of the barriers to adoption of videoconferencing into knowledge-intensive processes mediating high-level problem-solving. While there was some shared perception of the critical problems, the interpretations of the underlying issues differed. The findings give some insight into the conceptualisation issues surrounding innovation management within complex systems which are emerging in the adoption of ICTs. The nature of their impact on pre-existing core communication routines involving high level expertise and tacit knowledge is considered.

What can cause five postponements and a delay of two years in introducing a relatively simple ERP system that usually takes only a few months to be implemented? We find the answer to this puzzle by highlighting the context of use of this high technology IT capital good, an issue so far overlooked because the literature on complex product system (CoPS) focuses on the intrinsic dimensions of the product and the provider. We rely on an extensive case study of the ERP system Movex at the furniture manufacturer Edsbyn and on literature on user-related innovations, organisational studies and inter-firm relationships to extract a series of additional user-related complexity dimensions. These include the importance of the capital good for the user, the user's perception of its complexity and the strength and complexity of the routines to be changed at the using organisation. We conclude the paper with implications for complex systems providers.

In this paper, we address the evolution of coordination between multiple and diverse partners in a complex R&D innovation project. Because common understanding is crucial to help coordination in complex and uncertain contexts, we performed an in-depth case study of a large European project aiming to investigate the interaction between common understanding and coordination mechanisms during the life cycle of a complex product systems (CoPS) multi-party project. We found that coordination mechanisms are combined according to different stages of the project and create common understanding by managing tasks and roles as the project unfolds. Moreover, to cope with high interdependent tasks and many diverse partners, it seems crucial to implement an iterative process where tasks and roles evolve and mature progressively, and problems are identified earlier, leading to a validated and consistent result.