Firms as Laboratories: Re-inventing the Corporation
Firms as Laboratories: Re-inventing the Corporation
This chapter focuses on four areas — corporate governance, R&D, production and supply chains — where organizational change has been more pronounced. In corporate governance, many firms are trying to strike a better balance between the interests of shareholders and stakeholders on the one hand and between their central and peripheral organizations on the other. In R&D, all firms are coming under intense pressure to forge better links between their laboratories and their factories. In the area of production, the more innovative firms are trying to devolve responsibility to work teams who are empowered to use their local knowledge in the name of continuous improvement, with the result that the factory becomes more like a laboratory. The advent of more integrated supply chains suggest that innovative capacity rests not so much with the firm per se as with a network of firms in which formally independent bodies become ever more functionally integrated. The focus throughout this chapter is on emergent tendencies in the large-firm sector of the economy.
Keywords: corporate governance, research and development, production, supply chains, shareholders, stakeholders, laboratories, factories, innovative capacity
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