Browsing by Author "Zibell, Laurent"

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    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.
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    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.