Guest Editor's Introduction to the Thematic Issue
What should the risk level of loosing sustainable operative competitive advantage be in turbulent business environment? What might be the sustainable competitive operations (op) and technology/ knowledge strategies when the world economy is in turbulence for different reasons?
The studies on global manufacturing strategies created separate results to be integrated into resource allocations to implement strategies when we can't be at all sure about the long term business environment. Competitive categories (prospector ... reactor) might be integrated into sense and respond (s&r) resource and technology allocations by the s&r attributes according to their influence to cost, time, quality or flexibility performance. The importance of different technology levels (basic, core or spearhead) affects strategy implementation. The knowledge required to create the chance to build dynamically the future change of competitive operations strategy varies a lot according to the technology/knowledge ranking versus their effect to performance, and versus acceptable operative sustainable competitive advantage level and especially versus the risk level (probability by which the operations strategy has to be essentially changed in the near future).
By case studies from traditional industries and knowledge intensive services, it has been possible to find out a preliminary model between the technology and op strategies preferred. We should be able to answer what risk level we should take and bear to be strong (resilient) enough all the time against the different turbulences?
We are grateful to the organizers of the Make Learn 2015 conference (http://makelearn.issbs.si/) who preselected ten papers for the review process. After about 20 reviews, five papers have been accepted to be published in this thematic issue. We express our special thanks to the writers of these approved papers.
Josu Takala
University of Vaasa, Finland
management 10 (2): 109