Description
Operations Management Opportunities In Technology Commercialization And Entrepreneurship
Operations Management Opportunities in Technology
Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
Viswanathan Krishnan
The University of California, San Diego Rady School of Management, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA, [email protected]
T
he ?eld of Production and Operations Management (POM) is increasingly perceived as a rigorous but narrow ?eld,
antiquated and not very relevant to the current challenges and concerns of managers in job-creating growth compa-
nies vital to our economies. I argue that a narrower positioning of POM in the past is responsible for its perceived limited
utility to growth ?rms and global economies. POM at its core is about “doing more with less,” which is very well aligned
with the context and needs of resource-constrained entrepreneurial companies. My discussion is focused on how the
research paradigm of POM is and can be relevant to meeting the emerging challenges of growth companies of tomorrow.
Speci?cally, I examine how POM can help meet the needs of these organizations to become scalable and sustainable. The
objective is to stimulate thought and discussion and encourage early-stage POM scholars to seriously consider the con-
texts of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, and growth companies as avenues for future research.
Key words: technology commercialization; innovation; entrepreneurship
History: Received: October 2010; Accepted: June 2012, by special issue editors N. Joglekar and M. Levesque after 2
revisions.
1. Introduction
The “Kellogg Operations Workshop” is a biennial
conference organized by the Kellogg School of Man-
agement to bring together a variety of scholars and
review some of the latest research in greater depth
than in the national conferences. At one of the ?rst
meetings of this workshop in 2002, the participants
were addressed by the then dean of the Kellogg
school. The dean good-naturedly remarked that he
identi?ed with the audience because he himself had
set out to pursue his Ph.D. in Operations nearly two
decades ago. However, his doctoral committee mem-
bers had advised him that there was not much of a
future in Operations and he should consider switch-
ing to other promising areas. That is how he ended up
specializing in marketing and eventually became the
dean at one of the leading management schools!
Researchers who interact with senior faculty from
other disciplines in their school of business/man-
agement may have had similar experiences of
Production and Operations Management (POM)
being perceived as a rigorous but narrow ?eld,
antiquated and not very relevant to addressing the
current societal challenges and concerns of senior
managers in job-creating growth industries vital to
our economies. I argue in this piece that the issue is
one of framing—a narrower positioning of POM in
the past is responsible for its perceived limited util-
ity to growth ?rms and global economies. POM at
its core is about “doing more with less,” which is very
well aligned with the context and needs of
resource-constrained entrepreneurial companies. In
the past two decades, POM has been focused on
serving the needs of larger companies such as over-
head reduction and waste elimination, but the POM
concepts and methods are equally applicable and
adaptable to smaller companies in more dynamic,
high-growth environments without as much accu-
mulated waste or legacy inef?ciencies. My objective
in this piece is to discuss the central challenges of
growth and value/job creation confronting countries
and companies and how the research paradigm of
POM is and can be relevant to meeting these chal-
lenges. I conclude with an agenda of research ques-
tions that can help make POM more impactful to
growing companies. This “perspectives piece” is by
no means an exhaustive review of any area of
POM, but it does contain some discussion of current
research that helps point in the direction of increas-
ing relevance of POM for growth companies. There
have been other authors and papers, as early as
Ackoff (1979), that have underscored the need for a
“comprehensive re-conceptualization” of the Opera-
tions ?eld/methodology to increase its impact and
relevance. My key objective is not only to stimulate
1
Vol. 0, No. 0, xxxx–xxxx 2013, pp. 1–7 DOI 10.1111/poms.12012
ISSN 1059-1478|EISSN 1937-5956|13|00|0001 © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society
thought and discussion, but also to encourage early-
stage POM scholars to seriously consider the areas
of technology commercialization and entrepreneur-
ship as opportunities for future research and make
contributions that help improve the success rate and
productivity of organizations in these domains.
2. Emerging Challenges of 21st Century
Countries and Companies
Productivity advances associated with the industrial
revolution helped Western countries create substan-
tial wealth and prosperity. A virtuous cycle of job cre-
ation and goods consumption ensued, resulting in
signi?cant standard of living improvements in North
America, Western Europe, and eventually Asia. As
diminishing returns confronted the productivity
curve, further cost improvements required locating
operations off-shore, leading to an era of slower
growth, higher unemployment, and anxiety in the
developed economies. While the development of the
Internet tempered this trend and created opportuni-
ties, ?nding robust sources of growth continues to be
a cause for concern.
The emerging economies of Asia-Paci?c bene?ted
somewhat from the movement of production opera-
tions to their countries, but they also face their own
unique challenges. Widespread and extreme poverty
coupled with the lack of a strong infrastructure con-
strains the sustainable development and growth of
these countries. Unconstrained consumption of goods
threatens environmental degradation and the possi-
bility of global climate disruptions. A continual
increase in the standard of living of all inhabitants of
planet Earth is becoming dif?cult. There is a need for
different approaches and new ways of thinking to
realize sustained and sustainable wealth creation for
all global citizens.
The unemployed (especially in developed nations)
increasingly realize that they need to think and act
“entrepreneurially” if they are not to be at the mercy
of pro?t-maximizing major corporations. This means
embracing risk and capitalizing on opportunities to
create and sell new offerings that satisfy previously
un?lled market needs, thereby creating robust reve-
nues and pro?ts. There is also a growing consensus
that we need to bene?t from the discovery, develop-
ment, and commercialization of new technologies for
the growing global prosperity to not threaten the
natural environment, climate, and ecosystems. Thus
entrepreneurship and technology commercialization
are areas that have gained social importance, but have
been under-studied by the scholarly community in
general and the POM research community in particu-
lar (Shane 2006). I argue that the underlying paradigm
of POM is very much relevant to the management of
technology commercialization and entrepreneurial
organizations.
3. POM and Entrepreneurship
The terms “entrepreneur” and “entrepreneurship”
are used in different settings with somewhat different
connotations. For instance, entrepreneurship is used
to refer to self-employment, opportunistic business
growth, technology-driven startups, and even new
business spinoffs within larger ?rms (Shane 2006). In
teaching managerial classes, the Harvard business
school de?nition seems to have taken hold: “Entrepre-
neurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the
resources you currently control” (Stevenson 2000).
My focus here is on early-stage ?rms (in their life-
cycle) with high-growth potential.
The ?eld of entrepreneurship has historically been
considered an intellectual backwater that does not lend
itself to a dynamic current of theory generation and
testing. There are so many variables in?uencing the
success of new ventures that scholars wonder if it is
possible to develop testable theory that can predict the
success of new ventures. However, at a societal level,
entrepreneurship has steadily grown in importance,
with more capital dedicated to it and some spectacular
examples of wealth creation during the last decade
that has captured the imagination of the general public
as well as investors (Gompers and Lerner 1999). Suc-
cessful entrepreneurs are seen as role models and soci-
etal heroes. International markets and economies are
also teeming with entrepreneurs, especially in emerg-
ing markets where the workforce is young and willing
to take risks (Acs et al. 2004, Economist 2010). Despite
the many challenges of theory generation and valida-
tion, entrepreneurship can no longer be ignored by
academics, and we must improve our understanding
of this socially valuable area.
There has been a growing body of scholarly work
relating to entrepreneurship, and it tends to be quite
disconnected and inter-disciplinary, ranging from
economics to sociology to ?nance to organizational
behavior. Each of these areas shines the light on one
aspect of entrepreneurship, still leaving signi?cant
voids on how to manage the operations of entrepre-
neurial ?rms. I now brie?y review the body of inter-
disciplinary literature that has contributed to the
current understanding of entrepreneurship.
Research from the economics perspective has
looked at the economic impact, incentives, and
rationale for entrepreneurship. Questions that have
been raised include the following: (i) Does entrepre-
neurship produce robust economic growth or how
many jobs do entrepreneurs really create? (ii) Do tax
cuts stimulate entrepreneurship? (iii) Why do entre-
preneurs work so hard for so little pay and why are
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
2 Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society
some ethnic groups less likely to be entrepreneurs?
There have been papers that have also looked at
whether small entrepreneurial ?rms are more innova-
tive than larger corporations and which entrepreneur-
ial ventures are most likely to survive and grow,
although the ?ndings are far from conclusive. A
review of this work is found in a number of papers,
most recently by Parker (2005) and Minniti and Le´v-
esque (2008).
Capital is critical to the founding and growth of
entrepreneurial ?rms, so a signi?cant literature on
new venture economics and ?nance has developed
over the past few decades (Gompers and Lerner
1999). Besides looking at the role of capital constraints
in forming companies and the success of loan guaran-
tee schemes in providing credit to new enterprises,
researchers have always looked at the reasons for the
signi?cant rise in venture capital, including decreases
in capital gains tax rates, easing of pension invest-
ment restrictions, and industrial and academic R&D.
A growing stream of work in the organizational
behavior area and the Academy of Management/
Strategic Management communities studies the paths
to ownership and social in?uences and behavioral
traits of entrepreneurs and how they differ from
administrators in large corporations. The Management
Science focused issue on entrepreneurship presents
some examples of this body of work (Shane 2006).
While this perspective is more detailed than the eco-
nomic and ?nancial views on entrepreneurship, it still
focuses on the entrepreneur and his/her traits, in?u-
ences, and motivations rather than the work and pro-
cesses of entrepreneurship.
One of the key distinguishing challenges of an
entrepreneurial venture is managing under severe
resource (or input) constraints. An entrepreneurial
manager’s prime concern is to grow the outputs with-
out growing inputs or build a company in the absence
of much money and talented people, so in this regard
the POM paradigm can come in handy. POM, at its
core, is about doing more with less (getting the most
high-quality outputs with the fewest inputs or grow
what economist called total factor productivity). In
the past few decades, POM has been focused on mini-
mizing waste (input), especially in large corporations,
where over a period of time, there is signi?cant
bloated overhead that offers opportunities for pro?t
and speed improvement. While entrepreneurial com-
panies are not typically associated with such inef?-
ciencies, they do face other operational challenges—a
primary one being growing and scaling in the absence
of adequate resources.
To be relevant to the entrepreneurial community,
POM must help improve and deepen our understand-
ing of the concept of scalability. Put simply, scalability
is the ability to grow revenue and/or output with the
same or fewer costs (inputs). In economic terms, this
corresponds to an increase in total factor productivity
(TFP).
The scenario facing an entrepreneurial ?rm may be
described as follows. Typically, when a company is
founded by a group of motivated and bright individ-
uals, the founding team is involved in most aspects of
the company’s operations in the early days of the
?rm. However, as the company grows, it must hire
new employees, because the founding team is capac-
ity constrained and does not have the bandwidth to
be involved in all aspects of the company operations.
Coordination challenges emerge, and the ?rm ?nds it
hard to meet its milestone targets. Even if the ?rm
was successful in launching one successful product, it
faces great dif?culty in creating repeatable and pre-
dictable results in terms of a line of successful prod-
ucts. On the ?nancial dimension, costs tend to grow
faster than the revenues, eroding margins and wors-
ening cash-?ow constraints. Many an entrepreneurial
start-up faces this scalability predicament, including
the new wave of companies launched in the clean-
energy space (Woody 2010).
The transition from craft production to mass
production helped make manufacturing much more
scalable during the 20th century. Speci?cally, core
POM techniques like bottleneck management and line
balancing helped increase the total factor productivity
of companies and nations, resulting in a large growth
in Gross Domestic Product per capita, especially in
developed countries. Most of these economies are
now facing a shift to information and knowledge-
intensive services. Some of these services are labor
intensive and not very scalable.
Scalability challenges in services as a whole, and
entrepreneurial ?rms in particular, are often due to a
lack of systematized procedures and practices that
POM background and process-orientation potentially
yields. A typical entrepreneurial ?rm is not only
unable to realize scale economies but also misses the
opportunity to bene?t from prior learning and experi-
ence, resulting in higher costs. In addition, the ?rm
may also face an elevated level of risk due to lack of
controls in developing and launching products, as
illustrated by the pains experienced by Dell Com-
puter in its earlier years (Krishnan and Bhattacharya
2002, Thomke et al. 1999). However, formal processes
are often associated with more established companies.
Some entrepreneurs even consider “process” a bad
word in their companies due to the organizational
rigidity, inertia, and bloat associated with them.
Clearly, entrepreneurial ?rms do not have the
resources to invest heavily in codifying and enforcing
processes. The challenge is to realize the scalability
bene?ts of processes without incurring the costs and
drawbacks.
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society 3
With appropriate, ?exible, and ?nely-tuned pro-
cesses, an entrepreneurial ?rm can not only do more
with less but also build a basis for sustainable compet-
itive advantage. This is due to the fact that processes
are harder to reverse engineer and could help develop
a distinctive capability that translates to customer loy-
alty and more enduring pro?tability. Southwest Air-
lines offers a good illustration of how operating
processes can help build competitive advantage. With
its highly streamlined passenger boarding and ?ight
maintenance processes, Southwest has been able to
signi?cantly reduce its ?ight turnaround time and
increase the number of ?ights and passengers it car-
ried. This gave Southwest Airlines both a niche in
point-to-point travel and an enduring competitive
advantage due to better processes resulting in lower
costs and better on-time performance for a number of
years since its inception (Gittell and Oliva 2002). Con-
sequently, Southwest Airlines, with its process excel-
lence, has been (at least till 2010) one of the rare
exceptions in the airlines industry—a consistently
pro?table and shareholder value creating growth
company.
Scalability for an entrepreneurial ?rm is also about
building and pro?tably utilizing organizational and
technological capacity amidst environmental com-
plexity. Both Southwest Airlines and Dell illustrate
how the founding entrepreneurs tackled the problem
of scalability/capacity utilization in the face of declin-
ing prices and uncertain (raw material) costs. South-
west managed to control the cost of capacity with
faster turnaround times, while Dell sought to increase
its component inventory turns to confront component
price de?ation and perishability. Both of these exam-
ples show the role and relevance of operations in
helping ?rms grow their businesses without compro-
mising margins. While it may be hard to identify one
or even a few solutions that ?t all companies and
environments, we need a sharper focus on scalability
and how it may be achieved in different industry
environments. Our state of knowledge with respect to
entrepreneurial ?rms is fairly rudimentary in that we
lack an understanding of the underlying variables
and their inter-relationships that characterize these
complex environments. In today’s socio-economic
environment, entrepreneurial ?rms face so much tur-
bulence and uncertainty that they need concepts and
methods to manage complexity. As Jaikumar and
Bohn (1992) note in the context of manufacturing, sta-
tic approaches of the past may not be adequate to
manage the complexity associated with dynamic
environments. We need new research to advance our
state of knowledge of entrepreneurial companies and
their challenges.
Entrepreneurial ?rms, by their very nature, are
growth focused. This is only partly because they are
at an earlier stage of an organization’s lifecycle with a
lot of room to grow. Their stakeholders (investors,
founders, and employees) also expect them to grow.
Achieving sustained and sustainable growth is often
a challenge. While the notion of growth by mergers
and acquisitions (inorganic growth) has been studied
at length by colleagues in the strategic management
community starting with the classic work of Penrose
(1959), the operational challenges of sustainable inter-
nal or organic growth is not so well understood. POM
researchers have begun to make some headway in
this area. In an analytical model, Joglekar and Lev-
esque (2009) examine capital acquisition and resource
allocation decisions across successive stages of an
entrepreneurial ?rm’s growth. Speci?cally, they focus
on a startup ?rm faced with staged venture ?nancing
and signi?cant R&D and marketing expenses, and the
?rm valuation is increased by product quality and
market growth. The key decisions considered are the
timing of acquisition of working capital, and how the
acquired capital should be distributed between R&D
and marketing to maximize ?rm valuation. Their
results provide guidelines for budgeting R&D and
marketing expenses as a percentage of revenues.
Other papers have begun examining how knowledge
and experience can help entrepreneurs make deci-
sions such as opportunity assessment in a more rigor-
ous manner under uncertainty (Bailey and Gaimon
2010, Levesque and Maillart 2008).
I refer to the entrepreneurial ?rm’s ability to
achieve enduring growth and competitive advantage
as sustainability (to be contrasted with environmental
sustainability that I address later in the paper). As a
?rm grows, it must make a number of decisions and
take a number of actions that preserve, if not improve,
its distinctive advantage. A key challenge for ?rms is
how to continue to grow while sustaining their entre-
preneurial capabilities, intimate customer relation-
ships, and ?exible structure. Although the topic of
sustainable competitive advantage has been exten-
sively studied in the strategic management commu-
nity, resulting in concepts such as the resource-based
theory of the ?rm, not much is known about how a
?rm can achieve sustainability when it has very lim-
ited resources in the ?rst place. By building unique
operational processes and routines, like in the case of
Southwest Airlines, a ?rm may be able to build com-
petitive advantage that is hard to imitate at least for a
period of time.
In summary, the key goal of an entrepreneurial
company is to become a scalable and sustainable com-
pany that can grow revenues faster than costs in addi-
tion to building and sustaining its competitive
advantage over time (see Figure 1). POM research
should be able to help ?rms navigate to this top-right
quadrant, which makes these ?rms (in the words of
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
4 Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society
the legendary investor Warren Buffett) “businesses
with economic castles protected by unbreachable
moats.” For some companies (especially those that
start with a product business model), like ?rm A in
Figure 1, the challenge is to build a sustainable com-
petitive advantage while protecting their high gross
margins. For others (especially those that start with a
services or customized products business model), like
?rm B in Figure 1, the challenge is to become more
scalable while sustaining their competitive advantage
in terms of intimate customer relationships. Speci?-
cally, when their offerings require production, they
may be able to draw on the notion of micro-factories,
which allow small production scale and offer ?exibil-
ity (Anderson 2010). By understanding what makes
processes effective and agile, POM can help entrepre-
neurial ?rms achieve scalability and sustainability.
Indirectly, this approach increases the odds of success
of entrepreneurial ?rms, ensuring social welfare
through more productive use of capital and gainful
employment for professionals.
4. POM and Technology
Commercialization
With the maturing of manufacturing, companies large
and small are looking to other areas that offer oppor-
tunity for signi?cant value addition and growth. At
the same time, advances in sciences and engineering
are producing signi?cant new discoveries and tech-
nologies such as in genomics, stem cells, renewable
energy, and networked information technology. The
key challenge for ?rms is to convert these discoveries
into viable offerings that bene?t customers as well as
innovating ?rms. Technology commercialization
refers to the translation of technological capabilities
into bene?cial products and services that increase
pro?t and/or social welfare. Sources for such techno-
logical solutions include not only the university and
government research labs, but also the vast array of
individuals accessible through the Internet (Von
Hippel 2005).
Technology commercialization entails the sourcing
of technologies, adding value to make them viable
products and services, and launching these offerings
to the marketplace. There are clear parallels to the
manufacturing environment in the sense that technol-
ogies are analogous to manufacturing raw materials.
Much like the manufacturing supply chain, there is
the technology supply chain comprising suppliers
such as inventors and research laboratories. However,
there are some differences. Technologies are much
more risky and in a state of ?ux than manufacturing
raw materials. Readiness assessment becomes more
challenging for commercializing technology than
traditional manufacturing. In addition, the technology
risks must be managed alongside conventional mar-
ket and environmental risks. There are tools such as
the Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) framework
developed at the Department of Defense that can offer
a good starting point (NASA Technology Readiness
De?nitions undated), but more research is required to
facilitate the scouting for technology in non-defense
settings.
The growing sophistication of discovered technolo-
gies and the rising costs of commercialization may
require ?rms to collaborate in the development of
new offering by pooling their resources and entering
into resource-or cost-sharing arrangements. However,
commercialization that occurs jointly between compa-
nies presents new sets of challenges. While inter-?rm
collaboration enables each ?rm to focus on what it
does best and achieve certain economies of specializa-
tion, it also introduces issues associated with the
alignment of decisions and incentives that have to be
managed alongside conventional performance and
timing uncertainties of single ?rm technology com-
mercialization. Bhaskaran and Krishnan (2009) for-
mulate the problem of commercialization occurring
across ?rms speci?cally examining the implications of
two collaboration mechanisms found in industrial
practice, investment sharing and innovation sharing.
Their analysis shows that investment sharing plays
an important role in environments with higher levels
of technology uncertainty, and innovation sharing
produces better products and pro?ts when the collab-
orating ?rms are more “ef?cient” in working together.
Much more research is needed in this context of
multi-?rm technology commercialization to under-
stand how to manage inter-organizational collabora-
tions. In particular, product and system architecture
can be a key concept that can help manage the transla-
tion and commercialization of technology. Speci?-
cally, modular product/system architecture can help
attenuate the complexity by decoupling the design of
component modules and facilitating distributed
development and production (Arora et al. 1997,
Ramachandran and Krishnan 2008).
Figure 1 Scalability and Sustainability as Two Dimensions of Firm
Performance
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society 5
Projects are the key vehicles for translating technol-
ogies into viable offerings, and project management is
gaining greater prominence in organizations (Peters
1999). Traditional project management in construc-
tion-type settings allowed for relatively easier admin-
istration of project workers, where managers could
specify, de?ne, and schedule project tasks clearly. In
knowledge-intensive settings such as technology
commercialization, project managers face challenges
that arise from the increasing risk, knowledge
intensity, and autonomy of contributors. Much of the
information about project activities and tasks is
abstract and resides in the heads of individual con-
tributors, making it harder for managers to specify
and subdivide work. The increasing complexity and
specialization required for technology commercializa-
tion projects increases the power wielded by project
professionals. This has made it harder for managers
to dictate to individuals as easily as they could in a
traditional hierarchical organization. The greater ?ex-
ibility and discretion wielded by individual project
team members makes managers more vulnerable to
the behavioral quirks and limitations of these workers
(Loch and Wu 2007). Unlike the case of manufactur-
ing, the output in these new settings is not easily mea-
surable or fully contractible. Future POM research
must help understand how to manage the behavioral
quirks of project workers, such as their tendency to
leave more work for later completion (Krishnan and
Loch 2005). Research must help managers come up
with mechanisms and incentives to encourage work-
ers to engage in their task in an effective and ef?cient
manner (Wu et al. 2009).
Production and operations management must also
help develop a better understanding of the informa-
tion-intensive contexts in which technology commer-
cialization occurs today. During the past century, we
have a signi?cantly improved understanding of man-
ufacturing processes, which has helped achieve an
order of magnitude improvement in productivity.
Information and knowledge-intensive activities are
the areas of growth, and information-technology is
changing the landscape of business. One of the central
challenges especially in information and knowledge
intensive environments is coming up with the right
way to measure the output of workers. Unlike a
manufacturing environment, where throughput can
be counted at the end of a production line, outcomes
matters more than the outputs in the case of
information and knowledge intensive environments.
Consider the following example of an automobile
development project. A developer may come up with
a design that signi?cantly improves the side-impact
collision strength of the product. While this may
increase the durability of the vehicle and reduce the
number of vehicles (output) sold in the short to
medium term, it has the potential to enhance the rep-
utation of the company and gain market share in the
longer term. Counting outputs is not adequate in this
setting (as in many other service settings), and this
illustrates the central challenge of measuring and
managing processes in knowledge- and information-
intensive settings.
5. Conclusion
In summary, POM has a lot to contribute to the ?elds
of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship,
and growth-driven operations. The key is to recognize
that POM is not just about having less but also doing
more. By embracing a broader set of methodologies
going beyond conventional optimization approaches
—speci?cally including experimental and empirical
methods—POM can develop a well-grounded theory
of management of the entrepreneurial and/or tech-
nology commercializing ?rms especially in the con-
text of information and knowledge work, where most
such ?rms operate. Future POM research should help
develop processes uniquely suited to the challenging
context of small and medium sized ?rms. Research
will remain sympathetic to our current professional
dedication of ef?ciency, but should take an expanded
view of input factors (including network capital and
relationships), processes (including relations/incen-
tives with and for workers), and outputs (deriving
new products and markets from basic ideas and
research), all within the very tight ?nancial con-
straints characteristic of start-ups and small ?rms.
POM can thereby help substantially improve produc-
tivity and create prosperity in this century as it did in
the last century.
Acknowledgments
Feedback received from Roger Bohn, Bill Lovejoy, and the
POM editorial team (especially the editors) on the paper is
gratefully acknowledged.
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Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
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doc_410197348.pdf
Operations Management Opportunities In Technology Commercialization And Entrepreneurship
Operations Management Opportunities in Technology
Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
Viswanathan Krishnan
The University of California, San Diego Rady School of Management, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA, [email protected]
T
he ?eld of Production and Operations Management (POM) is increasingly perceived as a rigorous but narrow ?eld,
antiquated and not very relevant to the current challenges and concerns of managers in job-creating growth compa-
nies vital to our economies. I argue that a narrower positioning of POM in the past is responsible for its perceived limited
utility to growth ?rms and global economies. POM at its core is about “doing more with less,” which is very well aligned
with the context and needs of resource-constrained entrepreneurial companies. My discussion is focused on how the
research paradigm of POM is and can be relevant to meeting the emerging challenges of growth companies of tomorrow.
Speci?cally, I examine how POM can help meet the needs of these organizations to become scalable and sustainable. The
objective is to stimulate thought and discussion and encourage early-stage POM scholars to seriously consider the con-
texts of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, and growth companies as avenues for future research.
Key words: technology commercialization; innovation; entrepreneurship
History: Received: October 2010; Accepted: June 2012, by special issue editors N. Joglekar and M. Levesque after 2
revisions.
1. Introduction
The “Kellogg Operations Workshop” is a biennial
conference organized by the Kellogg School of Man-
agement to bring together a variety of scholars and
review some of the latest research in greater depth
than in the national conferences. At one of the ?rst
meetings of this workshop in 2002, the participants
were addressed by the then dean of the Kellogg
school. The dean good-naturedly remarked that he
identi?ed with the audience because he himself had
set out to pursue his Ph.D. in Operations nearly two
decades ago. However, his doctoral committee mem-
bers had advised him that there was not much of a
future in Operations and he should consider switch-
ing to other promising areas. That is how he ended up
specializing in marketing and eventually became the
dean at one of the leading management schools!
Researchers who interact with senior faculty from
other disciplines in their school of business/man-
agement may have had similar experiences of
Production and Operations Management (POM)
being perceived as a rigorous but narrow ?eld,
antiquated and not very relevant to addressing the
current societal challenges and concerns of senior
managers in job-creating growth industries vital to
our economies. I argue in this piece that the issue is
one of framing—a narrower positioning of POM in
the past is responsible for its perceived limited util-
ity to growth ?rms and global economies. POM at
its core is about “doing more with less,” which is very
well aligned with the context and needs of
resource-constrained entrepreneurial companies. In
the past two decades, POM has been focused on
serving the needs of larger companies such as over-
head reduction and waste elimination, but the POM
concepts and methods are equally applicable and
adaptable to smaller companies in more dynamic,
high-growth environments without as much accu-
mulated waste or legacy inef?ciencies. My objective
in this piece is to discuss the central challenges of
growth and value/job creation confronting countries
and companies and how the research paradigm of
POM is and can be relevant to meeting these chal-
lenges. I conclude with an agenda of research ques-
tions that can help make POM more impactful to
growing companies. This “perspectives piece” is by
no means an exhaustive review of any area of
POM, but it does contain some discussion of current
research that helps point in the direction of increas-
ing relevance of POM for growth companies. There
have been other authors and papers, as early as
Ackoff (1979), that have underscored the need for a
“comprehensive re-conceptualization” of the Opera-
tions ?eld/methodology to increase its impact and
relevance. My key objective is not only to stimulate
1
Vol. 0, No. 0, xxxx–xxxx 2013, pp. 1–7 DOI 10.1111/poms.12012
ISSN 1059-1478|EISSN 1937-5956|13|00|0001 © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society
thought and discussion, but also to encourage early-
stage POM scholars to seriously consider the areas
of technology commercialization and entrepreneur-
ship as opportunities for future research and make
contributions that help improve the success rate and
productivity of organizations in these domains.
2. Emerging Challenges of 21st Century
Countries and Companies
Productivity advances associated with the industrial
revolution helped Western countries create substan-
tial wealth and prosperity. A virtuous cycle of job cre-
ation and goods consumption ensued, resulting in
signi?cant standard of living improvements in North
America, Western Europe, and eventually Asia. As
diminishing returns confronted the productivity
curve, further cost improvements required locating
operations off-shore, leading to an era of slower
growth, higher unemployment, and anxiety in the
developed economies. While the development of the
Internet tempered this trend and created opportuni-
ties, ?nding robust sources of growth continues to be
a cause for concern.
The emerging economies of Asia-Paci?c bene?ted
somewhat from the movement of production opera-
tions to their countries, but they also face their own
unique challenges. Widespread and extreme poverty
coupled with the lack of a strong infrastructure con-
strains the sustainable development and growth of
these countries. Unconstrained consumption of goods
threatens environmental degradation and the possi-
bility of global climate disruptions. A continual
increase in the standard of living of all inhabitants of
planet Earth is becoming dif?cult. There is a need for
different approaches and new ways of thinking to
realize sustained and sustainable wealth creation for
all global citizens.
The unemployed (especially in developed nations)
increasingly realize that they need to think and act
“entrepreneurially” if they are not to be at the mercy
of pro?t-maximizing major corporations. This means
embracing risk and capitalizing on opportunities to
create and sell new offerings that satisfy previously
un?lled market needs, thereby creating robust reve-
nues and pro?ts. There is also a growing consensus
that we need to bene?t from the discovery, develop-
ment, and commercialization of new technologies for
the growing global prosperity to not threaten the
natural environment, climate, and ecosystems. Thus
entrepreneurship and technology commercialization
are areas that have gained social importance, but have
been under-studied by the scholarly community in
general and the POM research community in particu-
lar (Shane 2006). I argue that the underlying paradigm
of POM is very much relevant to the management of
technology commercialization and entrepreneurial
organizations.
3. POM and Entrepreneurship
The terms “entrepreneur” and “entrepreneurship”
are used in different settings with somewhat different
connotations. For instance, entrepreneurship is used
to refer to self-employment, opportunistic business
growth, technology-driven startups, and even new
business spinoffs within larger ?rms (Shane 2006). In
teaching managerial classes, the Harvard business
school de?nition seems to have taken hold: “Entrepre-
neurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the
resources you currently control” (Stevenson 2000).
My focus here is on early-stage ?rms (in their life-
cycle) with high-growth potential.
The ?eld of entrepreneurship has historically been
considered an intellectual backwater that does not lend
itself to a dynamic current of theory generation and
testing. There are so many variables in?uencing the
success of new ventures that scholars wonder if it is
possible to develop testable theory that can predict the
success of new ventures. However, at a societal level,
entrepreneurship has steadily grown in importance,
with more capital dedicated to it and some spectacular
examples of wealth creation during the last decade
that has captured the imagination of the general public
as well as investors (Gompers and Lerner 1999). Suc-
cessful entrepreneurs are seen as role models and soci-
etal heroes. International markets and economies are
also teeming with entrepreneurs, especially in emerg-
ing markets where the workforce is young and willing
to take risks (Acs et al. 2004, Economist 2010). Despite
the many challenges of theory generation and valida-
tion, entrepreneurship can no longer be ignored by
academics, and we must improve our understanding
of this socially valuable area.
There has been a growing body of scholarly work
relating to entrepreneurship, and it tends to be quite
disconnected and inter-disciplinary, ranging from
economics to sociology to ?nance to organizational
behavior. Each of these areas shines the light on one
aspect of entrepreneurship, still leaving signi?cant
voids on how to manage the operations of entrepre-
neurial ?rms. I now brie?y review the body of inter-
disciplinary literature that has contributed to the
current understanding of entrepreneurship.
Research from the economics perspective has
looked at the economic impact, incentives, and
rationale for entrepreneurship. Questions that have
been raised include the following: (i) Does entrepre-
neurship produce robust economic growth or how
many jobs do entrepreneurs really create? (ii) Do tax
cuts stimulate entrepreneurship? (iii) Why do entre-
preneurs work so hard for so little pay and why are
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
2 Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society
some ethnic groups less likely to be entrepreneurs?
There have been papers that have also looked at
whether small entrepreneurial ?rms are more innova-
tive than larger corporations and which entrepreneur-
ial ventures are most likely to survive and grow,
although the ?ndings are far from conclusive. A
review of this work is found in a number of papers,
most recently by Parker (2005) and Minniti and Le´v-
esque (2008).
Capital is critical to the founding and growth of
entrepreneurial ?rms, so a signi?cant literature on
new venture economics and ?nance has developed
over the past few decades (Gompers and Lerner
1999). Besides looking at the role of capital constraints
in forming companies and the success of loan guaran-
tee schemes in providing credit to new enterprises,
researchers have always looked at the reasons for the
signi?cant rise in venture capital, including decreases
in capital gains tax rates, easing of pension invest-
ment restrictions, and industrial and academic R&D.
A growing stream of work in the organizational
behavior area and the Academy of Management/
Strategic Management communities studies the paths
to ownership and social in?uences and behavioral
traits of entrepreneurs and how they differ from
administrators in large corporations. The Management
Science focused issue on entrepreneurship presents
some examples of this body of work (Shane 2006).
While this perspective is more detailed than the eco-
nomic and ?nancial views on entrepreneurship, it still
focuses on the entrepreneur and his/her traits, in?u-
ences, and motivations rather than the work and pro-
cesses of entrepreneurship.
One of the key distinguishing challenges of an
entrepreneurial venture is managing under severe
resource (or input) constraints. An entrepreneurial
manager’s prime concern is to grow the outputs with-
out growing inputs or build a company in the absence
of much money and talented people, so in this regard
the POM paradigm can come in handy. POM, at its
core, is about doing more with less (getting the most
high-quality outputs with the fewest inputs or grow
what economist called total factor productivity). In
the past few decades, POM has been focused on mini-
mizing waste (input), especially in large corporations,
where over a period of time, there is signi?cant
bloated overhead that offers opportunities for pro?t
and speed improvement. While entrepreneurial com-
panies are not typically associated with such inef?-
ciencies, they do face other operational challenges—a
primary one being growing and scaling in the absence
of adequate resources.
To be relevant to the entrepreneurial community,
POM must help improve and deepen our understand-
ing of the concept of scalability. Put simply, scalability
is the ability to grow revenue and/or output with the
same or fewer costs (inputs). In economic terms, this
corresponds to an increase in total factor productivity
(TFP).
The scenario facing an entrepreneurial ?rm may be
described as follows. Typically, when a company is
founded by a group of motivated and bright individ-
uals, the founding team is involved in most aspects of
the company’s operations in the early days of the
?rm. However, as the company grows, it must hire
new employees, because the founding team is capac-
ity constrained and does not have the bandwidth to
be involved in all aspects of the company operations.
Coordination challenges emerge, and the ?rm ?nds it
hard to meet its milestone targets. Even if the ?rm
was successful in launching one successful product, it
faces great dif?culty in creating repeatable and pre-
dictable results in terms of a line of successful prod-
ucts. On the ?nancial dimension, costs tend to grow
faster than the revenues, eroding margins and wors-
ening cash-?ow constraints. Many an entrepreneurial
start-up faces this scalability predicament, including
the new wave of companies launched in the clean-
energy space (Woody 2010).
The transition from craft production to mass
production helped make manufacturing much more
scalable during the 20th century. Speci?cally, core
POM techniques like bottleneck management and line
balancing helped increase the total factor productivity
of companies and nations, resulting in a large growth
in Gross Domestic Product per capita, especially in
developed countries. Most of these economies are
now facing a shift to information and knowledge-
intensive services. Some of these services are labor
intensive and not very scalable.
Scalability challenges in services as a whole, and
entrepreneurial ?rms in particular, are often due to a
lack of systematized procedures and practices that
POM background and process-orientation potentially
yields. A typical entrepreneurial ?rm is not only
unable to realize scale economies but also misses the
opportunity to bene?t from prior learning and experi-
ence, resulting in higher costs. In addition, the ?rm
may also face an elevated level of risk due to lack of
controls in developing and launching products, as
illustrated by the pains experienced by Dell Com-
puter in its earlier years (Krishnan and Bhattacharya
2002, Thomke et al. 1999). However, formal processes
are often associated with more established companies.
Some entrepreneurs even consider “process” a bad
word in their companies due to the organizational
rigidity, inertia, and bloat associated with them.
Clearly, entrepreneurial ?rms do not have the
resources to invest heavily in codifying and enforcing
processes. The challenge is to realize the scalability
bene?ts of processes without incurring the costs and
drawbacks.
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
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With appropriate, ?exible, and ?nely-tuned pro-
cesses, an entrepreneurial ?rm can not only do more
with less but also build a basis for sustainable compet-
itive advantage. This is due to the fact that processes
are harder to reverse engineer and could help develop
a distinctive capability that translates to customer loy-
alty and more enduring pro?tability. Southwest Air-
lines offers a good illustration of how operating
processes can help build competitive advantage. With
its highly streamlined passenger boarding and ?ight
maintenance processes, Southwest has been able to
signi?cantly reduce its ?ight turnaround time and
increase the number of ?ights and passengers it car-
ried. This gave Southwest Airlines both a niche in
point-to-point travel and an enduring competitive
advantage due to better processes resulting in lower
costs and better on-time performance for a number of
years since its inception (Gittell and Oliva 2002). Con-
sequently, Southwest Airlines, with its process excel-
lence, has been (at least till 2010) one of the rare
exceptions in the airlines industry—a consistently
pro?table and shareholder value creating growth
company.
Scalability for an entrepreneurial ?rm is also about
building and pro?tably utilizing organizational and
technological capacity amidst environmental com-
plexity. Both Southwest Airlines and Dell illustrate
how the founding entrepreneurs tackled the problem
of scalability/capacity utilization in the face of declin-
ing prices and uncertain (raw material) costs. South-
west managed to control the cost of capacity with
faster turnaround times, while Dell sought to increase
its component inventory turns to confront component
price de?ation and perishability. Both of these exam-
ples show the role and relevance of operations in
helping ?rms grow their businesses without compro-
mising margins. While it may be hard to identify one
or even a few solutions that ?t all companies and
environments, we need a sharper focus on scalability
and how it may be achieved in different industry
environments. Our state of knowledge with respect to
entrepreneurial ?rms is fairly rudimentary in that we
lack an understanding of the underlying variables
and their inter-relationships that characterize these
complex environments. In today’s socio-economic
environment, entrepreneurial ?rms face so much tur-
bulence and uncertainty that they need concepts and
methods to manage complexity. As Jaikumar and
Bohn (1992) note in the context of manufacturing, sta-
tic approaches of the past may not be adequate to
manage the complexity associated with dynamic
environments. We need new research to advance our
state of knowledge of entrepreneurial companies and
their challenges.
Entrepreneurial ?rms, by their very nature, are
growth focused. This is only partly because they are
at an earlier stage of an organization’s lifecycle with a
lot of room to grow. Their stakeholders (investors,
founders, and employees) also expect them to grow.
Achieving sustained and sustainable growth is often
a challenge. While the notion of growth by mergers
and acquisitions (inorganic growth) has been studied
at length by colleagues in the strategic management
community starting with the classic work of Penrose
(1959), the operational challenges of sustainable inter-
nal or organic growth is not so well understood. POM
researchers have begun to make some headway in
this area. In an analytical model, Joglekar and Lev-
esque (2009) examine capital acquisition and resource
allocation decisions across successive stages of an
entrepreneurial ?rm’s growth. Speci?cally, they focus
on a startup ?rm faced with staged venture ?nancing
and signi?cant R&D and marketing expenses, and the
?rm valuation is increased by product quality and
market growth. The key decisions considered are the
timing of acquisition of working capital, and how the
acquired capital should be distributed between R&D
and marketing to maximize ?rm valuation. Their
results provide guidelines for budgeting R&D and
marketing expenses as a percentage of revenues.
Other papers have begun examining how knowledge
and experience can help entrepreneurs make deci-
sions such as opportunity assessment in a more rigor-
ous manner under uncertainty (Bailey and Gaimon
2010, Levesque and Maillart 2008).
I refer to the entrepreneurial ?rm’s ability to
achieve enduring growth and competitive advantage
as sustainability (to be contrasted with environmental
sustainability that I address later in the paper). As a
?rm grows, it must make a number of decisions and
take a number of actions that preserve, if not improve,
its distinctive advantage. A key challenge for ?rms is
how to continue to grow while sustaining their entre-
preneurial capabilities, intimate customer relation-
ships, and ?exible structure. Although the topic of
sustainable competitive advantage has been exten-
sively studied in the strategic management commu-
nity, resulting in concepts such as the resource-based
theory of the ?rm, not much is known about how a
?rm can achieve sustainability when it has very lim-
ited resources in the ?rst place. By building unique
operational processes and routines, like in the case of
Southwest Airlines, a ?rm may be able to build com-
petitive advantage that is hard to imitate at least for a
period of time.
In summary, the key goal of an entrepreneurial
company is to become a scalable and sustainable com-
pany that can grow revenues faster than costs in addi-
tion to building and sustaining its competitive
advantage over time (see Figure 1). POM research
should be able to help ?rms navigate to this top-right
quadrant, which makes these ?rms (in the words of
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
4 Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society
the legendary investor Warren Buffett) “businesses
with economic castles protected by unbreachable
moats.” For some companies (especially those that
start with a product business model), like ?rm A in
Figure 1, the challenge is to build a sustainable com-
petitive advantage while protecting their high gross
margins. For others (especially those that start with a
services or customized products business model), like
?rm B in Figure 1, the challenge is to become more
scalable while sustaining their competitive advantage
in terms of intimate customer relationships. Speci?-
cally, when their offerings require production, they
may be able to draw on the notion of micro-factories,
which allow small production scale and offer ?exibil-
ity (Anderson 2010). By understanding what makes
processes effective and agile, POM can help entrepre-
neurial ?rms achieve scalability and sustainability.
Indirectly, this approach increases the odds of success
of entrepreneurial ?rms, ensuring social welfare
through more productive use of capital and gainful
employment for professionals.
4. POM and Technology
Commercialization
With the maturing of manufacturing, companies large
and small are looking to other areas that offer oppor-
tunity for signi?cant value addition and growth. At
the same time, advances in sciences and engineering
are producing signi?cant new discoveries and tech-
nologies such as in genomics, stem cells, renewable
energy, and networked information technology. The
key challenge for ?rms is to convert these discoveries
into viable offerings that bene?t customers as well as
innovating ?rms. Technology commercialization
refers to the translation of technological capabilities
into bene?cial products and services that increase
pro?t and/or social welfare. Sources for such techno-
logical solutions include not only the university and
government research labs, but also the vast array of
individuals accessible through the Internet (Von
Hippel 2005).
Technology commercialization entails the sourcing
of technologies, adding value to make them viable
products and services, and launching these offerings
to the marketplace. There are clear parallels to the
manufacturing environment in the sense that technol-
ogies are analogous to manufacturing raw materials.
Much like the manufacturing supply chain, there is
the technology supply chain comprising suppliers
such as inventors and research laboratories. However,
there are some differences. Technologies are much
more risky and in a state of ?ux than manufacturing
raw materials. Readiness assessment becomes more
challenging for commercializing technology than
traditional manufacturing. In addition, the technology
risks must be managed alongside conventional mar-
ket and environmental risks. There are tools such as
the Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) framework
developed at the Department of Defense that can offer
a good starting point (NASA Technology Readiness
De?nitions undated), but more research is required to
facilitate the scouting for technology in non-defense
settings.
The growing sophistication of discovered technolo-
gies and the rising costs of commercialization may
require ?rms to collaborate in the development of
new offering by pooling their resources and entering
into resource-or cost-sharing arrangements. However,
commercialization that occurs jointly between compa-
nies presents new sets of challenges. While inter-?rm
collaboration enables each ?rm to focus on what it
does best and achieve certain economies of specializa-
tion, it also introduces issues associated with the
alignment of decisions and incentives that have to be
managed alongside conventional performance and
timing uncertainties of single ?rm technology com-
mercialization. Bhaskaran and Krishnan (2009) for-
mulate the problem of commercialization occurring
across ?rms speci?cally examining the implications of
two collaboration mechanisms found in industrial
practice, investment sharing and innovation sharing.
Their analysis shows that investment sharing plays
an important role in environments with higher levels
of technology uncertainty, and innovation sharing
produces better products and pro?ts when the collab-
orating ?rms are more “ef?cient” in working together.
Much more research is needed in this context of
multi-?rm technology commercialization to under-
stand how to manage inter-organizational collabora-
tions. In particular, product and system architecture
can be a key concept that can help manage the transla-
tion and commercialization of technology. Speci?-
cally, modular product/system architecture can help
attenuate the complexity by decoupling the design of
component modules and facilitating distributed
development and production (Arora et al. 1997,
Ramachandran and Krishnan 2008).
Figure 1 Scalability and Sustainability as Two Dimensions of Firm
Performance
Krishnan: Operations Management Research and Impact Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship
Production and Operations Management 0(0), pp. 1–7, © 2013 Production and Operations Management Society 5
Projects are the key vehicles for translating technol-
ogies into viable offerings, and project management is
gaining greater prominence in organizations (Peters
1999). Traditional project management in construc-
tion-type settings allowed for relatively easier admin-
istration of project workers, where managers could
specify, de?ne, and schedule project tasks clearly. In
knowledge-intensive settings such as technology
commercialization, project managers face challenges
that arise from the increasing risk, knowledge
intensity, and autonomy of contributors. Much of the
information about project activities and tasks is
abstract and resides in the heads of individual con-
tributors, making it harder for managers to specify
and subdivide work. The increasing complexity and
specialization required for technology commercializa-
tion projects increases the power wielded by project
professionals. This has made it harder for managers
to dictate to individuals as easily as they could in a
traditional hierarchical organization. The greater ?ex-
ibility and discretion wielded by individual project
team members makes managers more vulnerable to
the behavioral quirks and limitations of these workers
(Loch and Wu 2007). Unlike the case of manufactur-
ing, the output in these new settings is not easily mea-
surable or fully contractible. Future POM research
must help understand how to manage the behavioral
quirks of project workers, such as their tendency to
leave more work for later completion (Krishnan and
Loch 2005). Research must help managers come up
with mechanisms and incentives to encourage work-
ers to engage in their task in an effective and ef?cient
manner (Wu et al. 2009).
Production and operations management must also
help develop a better understanding of the informa-
tion-intensive contexts in which technology commer-
cialization occurs today. During the past century, we
have a signi?cantly improved understanding of man-
ufacturing processes, which has helped achieve an
order of magnitude improvement in productivity.
Information and knowledge-intensive activities are
the areas of growth, and information-technology is
changing the landscape of business. One of the central
challenges especially in information and knowledge
intensive environments is coming up with the right
way to measure the output of workers. Unlike a
manufacturing environment, where throughput can
be counted at the end of a production line, outcomes
matters more than the outputs in the case of
information and knowledge intensive environments.
Consider the following example of an automobile
development project. A developer may come up with
a design that signi?cantly improves the side-impact
collision strength of the product. While this may
increase the durability of the vehicle and reduce the
number of vehicles (output) sold in the short to
medium term, it has the potential to enhance the rep-
utation of the company and gain market share in the
longer term. Counting outputs is not adequate in this
setting (as in many other service settings), and this
illustrates the central challenge of measuring and
managing processes in knowledge- and information-
intensive settings.
5. Conclusion
In summary, POM has a lot to contribute to the ?elds
of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship,
and growth-driven operations. The key is to recognize
that POM is not just about having less but also doing
more. By embracing a broader set of methodologies
going beyond conventional optimization approaches
—speci?cally including experimental and empirical
methods—POM can develop a well-grounded theory
of management of the entrepreneurial and/or tech-
nology commercializing ?rms especially in the con-
text of information and knowledge work, where most
such ?rms operate. Future POM research should help
develop processes uniquely suited to the challenging
context of small and medium sized ?rms. Research
will remain sympathetic to our current professional
dedication of ef?ciency, but should take an expanded
view of input factors (including network capital and
relationships), processes (including relations/incen-
tives with and for workers), and outputs (deriving
new products and markets from basic ideas and
research), all within the very tight ?nancial con-
straints characteristic of start-ups and small ?rms.
POM can thereby help substantially improve produc-
tivity and create prosperity in this century as it did in
the last century.
Acknowledgments
Feedback received from Roger Bohn, Bill Lovejoy, and the
POM editorial team (especially the editors) on the paper is
gratefully acknowledged.
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