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This paper is concerned with the issues of developing the competencies of the firm. The relevance of this work is based on the conclusion that competencies are dynamic, rather than stable, entities and that firms, thus, need to focus both on today’s and tomorrow’s competencies. A model for competence development as a result of organisational learning processes is proposed and illustrated by means of a case study.

Increasing competition at product, firm, and industry level makes it more and more important to be able to develop new products and – at the same time – develop the necessary new technologies for producing those new products. In this paper we shall take a look at how four firms go about integrating their product and technology development. This serves as the basis of a model for this kind of integration and a general definition of possible means for integrating product and technology development.

This paper is concerned with the formulation of a framework for understanding the development and change of the competences of firms. Today, there is near universal agreement that the competitiveness of firms rests on the (core) competences that firms possess. However, little attention has been devoted to the notion of competence development. In the paper, it will be argued that there is, indeed, a need for research and management practice of competence development. It will also be argued that organisational learning theory is a key to understanding competence development. Based on this, a model for competence development is proposed. This is the main contribution of the paper. The paper then concludes with a number of questions yet to be answered by research on competence‐based strategy.

The need for firms to become more innovative has probably never been greater. Today concepts such as the new economy, new technologies, hyper‐competition and clock speed are used to explain that the dynamics of competition and markets has never been greater. Thus, there is a large focus on the concept of innovation management in firms. Discusses innovation management, understood as being the activities that firms undertake in order to yield new solutions within products, production and administration. The main contribution is a discussion of how a general framework for innovation management can be tailored to individual situations/different firms.

To avoid finishing last in a competitive race which requires its participants to master a range of things all at one time, more and more corporations are deciding to outsource subordinate aspects or competencies, thereby focusing their strategic spotlight on aspects more central to their business. Sourcing competencies in this manner is, however, accompanied by a wealth of difficulties. Mainly, the expertise encoded in a corporation’s competencies has a regrettable tendency to leak from this corporation’s sourcing‐partners to its competitors, who then receive direct access to the corporation’s competencies. In order to prevent this from happening, corporations must be better equipped to understand the competencies they intend to source and thereby ensure that only competencies or sub‐competencies, which are of no strategic importance to the corporation, are sourced. Therefore, a major portion of this paper is constructed as a model designed to describe how corporations can employ competence understanding in making sourcing decisions.

The purpose of the paper is to define the emerging concept of strategic innovation.

This is achieved by means of a literature review and discussion of the literature.

The concept is defined in precise and measureble terms.

It is now possible and much necessary to conduct empirical research on strategic innovation in order to test and strengthen the definition.

The definition is related to empirical praxis and can be used to test or analyze the practice of management.

A useful and practical definition aimed to creating future research.

Based on the strategic challenges faced by Western companies in the coming decade, this paper is concerned with the area of strategic management. In particular, emphasis is on the relationship between managerial problems, managerial practice and state‐of‐the‐art theories on strategic management. Interestingly, it is found that managerial practice over the past 10 years has had a poor relationship to the actual problems faced by managers and to the state‐of‐the‐art theories on strategic management. At the same time, however, state‐of‐the art theories of strategic management have also had a poor relationship to the problems faced by managers. Strategic management is, therefore, lost and needs to be reconsidered in light of the empirical challenges of the area.

Due to external challenges necessitating high degrees of innovation and customization without sacrificing cost and quality, many industrial firms need to transform their entire approach to product development. Traditionally, industrial firms have adopted a singular approach to product development based on theories that deal with the development of individual products, individual projects and their management, individual designers and developers, and so on. However, in order to mass‐customize products and services – while at the same time standardizing and streamlining a product platform internally – it is necessary to transform product development theory and praxis towards a perception called multiple product development. The main contributions of the paper will be a discussion of this concept and a case study on how an industrial company has begun the transformation towards multiple product development.