Addressing specialization and fragmentation: product platform development in construction consultancy firms

Application of Lean Principles to Design Processes in Construction Consultancy Firms

Simulation modelling and Lean principles have both been applied in the construction industry to improve work processes. The outcomes from their implementation are outstanding and have motivated construction researchers to seek means by which other aspects of construction production could benefit from this development. Therefore the aim of this research is to use computer simulation as a tool fo...

Platform Product Development

The standard for minimum acceptable product development performance is high and rising in many industries. It is no longer possible to dominate large markets by developing and mass producing one product at a time. Increasingly, good product development means developing a family, or platform of products, and producing them in a flexible process tailored to the needs of individual customers. We d...

Vertical Specialization in Multinational Firms*

In the recent decades, growth of overall world trade has been driven in large part by the rapid growth of trade in intermediate inputs. This input trade results in part from multinational firms choosing to outsource input processing to their foreign affiliates, thereby creating global production networks in which each actor is vertically specialized. In this paper, we use firm-level data on U.S...

Specialization and Matching in Professional Services Firms

Economic theory indicates that firms can match workers to jobs and promote productivity-enhancing specialization better than markets, yet little data exists. We empirically test whether firms enhance matching and specialization in the context of obstetrics. We then examine whether consumers benefit from this. We find that high-risk patients in group practices match with specialists more than pa...

The Globalization of Management Consultancy Firms: Constraints and Limitations