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The case introduces students to aspects of operations management (OM) and management theory and provides examples of the real-world challenges facing a practitioner. It requires students to think about the operational manager’s responsibilities and how organisational context influences choices and possibly even fit within an organisation.

In this case, a factory lead protagonist presents her OM challenges and choices within a for-purpose, rather than for-profit, a social enterprise in South Africa. The context presented unusual constraints that required thoughtful adaptation and judicious choices. The case introduces students to aspects of OM and management theory and provides examples of the real-world challenges facing a practitioner. It requires students to think about the operational manager’s responsibilities and how organisational context influences choices and possibly even fit within an organisation.

The case is aimed at postgraduate business students studying OM.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and logistics.

This study investigated the issue of collaboration in new product development within the context of the South African textile and clothing industry. The following aspects were analysed in order to contribute to the understanding of the collaboration process: the perceived benefits of collaboration in the new product development process, the risks of collaboration, the effect of collaboration on the new product development process, and the factors that increase the likelihood of a successful collaboration.

This study aims to investigate the role of governance on knowledge acquisition and loss by new technology‐based firms engaged in inter‐firm collaborative new product development projects.

This work draws on the relational exchange perspective, transaction cost theory and the resource‐based view in order to develop hypotheses. Survey data collected from British new technology‐based firms, operating in three industry sectors, was used to examine these hypotheses.

Relational governance was found to have a positive relationship with the acquisition of knowledge‐based resources. Increased comprehensiveness in the formal contractual governance structure was found to be associated with lower levels of harmful knowledge loss.

This study was conducted in one country. Future research should be done in different countries to determine the generalizability of the findings.

Managers engaging in collaborative new product development projects need to develop both relational as well as formal contractual governance mechanisms, so that positive collaboration outcomes can be maximized, while negative outcomes are minimized.

A review of the literature indicates that the study of the governance of short‐term, focused inter‐firm relationships has been neglected. Additionally, while there has been extensive examination of knowledge acquisition there has been much less exploration of knowledge loss within these inter‐firm relationships. This study contributes to the literature by responding to this need.

This study aims to examine logistics infrastructure, trade differences, and environmental and social equity factors, for a set of 89 countries.

Following recent work which uses secondary data sources for supply chain research at the country‐level, data were obtained from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund databases. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to compute country‐level efficiencies and ANOVA was used to do regional comparisons.

The analysis shed light on country‐level dimensions of logistics infrastructure and trade performance. It also provided insights regarding environmental (e.g. CO2 emissions) and social equity (e.g. health expenditure) dimensions for different regions.

Panel data rather than longitudinal data were used to draw the conclusions. A more exhaustive study could consider a multi‐year timeframe. A limited number of dimensions were examined. As the study was exploratory, further work could consider a more extensive number of dimensions.

The study has important implications for policy makers, since the attractiveness of various resource endowments like those considered here (environmental, social, supply chain logistics) can be seen to be associated with trade performance.

This is one of the few studies to explore efficiency differences (enacted through DEA and ANOVA analyses), differentiating the research from the usual country clustering approaches. It also contributes to the understanding of differences between countries from a macro perspective, which provides insights for firms intending to expand their supply chains.