Brian Wixted

Research Domain 3: Strategy and Organisations

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The global value system architecture, revealed by my work on cluster complexes, differs by industry and underlying technology. I am therefore beginning to pursue research opportunities to explore the business and organisational dimensions in configuring particular complexes.

Research Outputs

Currently I have two pieces of work under this domain.

Environmental Velocity. With colleagues we have been working on how to conceptualise the idea of the velocity of business environments. My particular interest in this project has turned increasingly to how our understanding of how to characterise different business environments might be used to understand organisational design in particular industries and possibly the structure of industries. We have presented this work in various forums and it is currently being prepared for the final submission to the Academy of Management Review journal.

Cluster Rents. My other work is more directly related to my research on innovation system cluster complex architectures. Research on economic geography, including the branch of innovation studies focussed on clusters or regional innovation systems has not problematised the question of competitiveness. Survival and exports are deemed success. However, in the economics and strategy literature there is the issue of economic rents and whether it is possible for organisations to maintain good profits over the long term. However, the strategy literature has focussed on whether economic rents can be attributed to industry opportunities or organisational capabilities. Whether there is an economic geography of rents is an under-develop field of research. I am working on bringing the strategy and innovation systems literature together at this ‘value’ focal point. In this paper I again use inter-country input-output modelling, this time to differentiate simple flows (trade) from high value flows (where the value of flows is significantly higher than the trade data would indicate).

Download my first draft paper on this (delivered at DRUID 2008) at:

http://www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewabstract.php?id=3415&cf=29

Research Projects

Teaching

Interesting Links

Centre for Biotechnology Management at SFU http://business.sfu.ca/cbm/

Michael Jacobides (Industry Architectures) http://faculty.london.edu/mjacobides/index.html

Walter Powell (Networks etc) http://www.stanford.edu/group/song/woody_index.html