This chapter deals with complexity science issues from two sides: from one side, it uses complexity science concepts to give new contributions to the theoretical understanding of geographical clusters (GCs); from the other side, it presents an application of complexity science tools such as emergent (bottom-up) simulation, using agent-based modeling to study the sources of GC competitive advant...

Despite its ubiquity, the concept of competitive advantage is surprisingly under-defined. At its worst, it is nothing more than a tautology: successful firms are successful because they have competitive advantage, which in turn cannot be defined in any other way than as a quality that brings about success. Defining the possession in terms of the outcome it produces presents ontological difficul...

Synergy is a concept fraught with ambiguity about its sources and effects, perhaps as a consequence of of previous literature on the subject not distinguishing between these. In this paper, the sources of synergy are separated from the sources of sustainable competitive advantage in order to analyze the competitive implications of different types of synergies, and thus be able to answer the que...

In the last edition of TMI, we explored the elements, which comprise the financial supply chain. We looked in some detail at the order-to-cash (receivables) and purchaseto-pay (payables) processes and how these can be optimised to create internal efficiencies, reducing the number of cash days for a company and therefore working capital requirements. The benefits of automating internal processes...

Porter’s (1990) ‘Competitive Advantage of Nations’ was heralded on publication as a book which could build a bridge between the theoretical literatures in strategic management and international economics, and provide the basis for improved national policies on competitiveness. This review of the papers published in the following six years suggests that the book was enormously rich in its range ...

with regard to competitive advantage complexity and specific characteristics of high tech industries, in this research by a cognitive mapping methodology we develop a qualitative model for interpreting the competitive advantage in company level for high tech industries. in first, after describing the research problem, we present a comparative review of four recent theories of firm and competiti...