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The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the HR function can make a significant contribution to the achievement of global strategy and sustainable competitive advantage through identifying, building and deploying differentiating strategic capabilities (DiSCs). The DiSC model has been developed by William Scott‐Jackson over the past 15 years as a practical and strategically valuable development of the “resource‐based view of the firm”.

The paper first considers the strategic implications of global trading and then describes the strategic importance of DiSCs and their criteria – particularly in sales. This is based on applied research and strategic HR consultancy with over 30 global organizations over the past 15 years. Using a case study of a global outsourcing company, it describes the process by which DiSCs can be developed and deployed by the HR function to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in global trading.

The link between global strategic intent and the role of HR is clearly defined using the DiSC model and the examples given show the strategic value that can be achieved using the model to enable global trading.

The DiSC model can be deployed in any organization (profit or non‐profit) by HR to ensure that its global strategic intent can be achieved and to help ensure sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to the well‐understood HR competencies and processes which need to be deployed for global success, this model further allows the HR function to impact strategy development and implementation. This paper shows how DiSCs can be identified, built and deployed.

Despite growing evidence that large UK organisations are increasingly incorporating the environment into corporate strategy, there continues to be considerable scepticism as to whether this is leading to any meaningful action to reduce industry’s environmental impact. One possible explanation is the existence of a “gap” between policy formulation and implementation, and the authors suggest that this may be due to a failure on the part of business to ensure congruence between organisational context, values and capability. Utilising data drawn from a recent survey of corporate environmental policies and practices, the authors explore the interaction of external and internal factors with regard to policy development, and search for evidence of congruence. They conclude that very often policy formulation takes little consideration of the organisation’s capability to implement environmental strategies, and suggest that until this question is taken seriously, a gulf will always exist between what companies aim to do, and what they actually achieve.

Many corporations across the world are experiencing growing pressure to incorporate environmental issues into their strategic decision‐making process. This pressure characterizes the increased global significance of the environment. Examines the extent to which the issue is recognized by UK corporations, and how the environment affects corporate business planning. Additionally, reflects on the key motivational factors leading to the adoption of environmental policies, and comments on the nature of those influences. The key findings show that UK companies recognize the environment is an issue, but that the degree of importance attached is based on a variety of factors, resulting from unique corporate perceptions of opportunity and threat. Companies are generally concerned with meeting legal compliance levels and obtaining cost saving, without undertaking high levels of investment. Some companies are, however, seeking to become “environmental managers”, having identified the existence of opportunities for achieving competitive advantage.

WE have now to regard Indexing from quite another standpoint. Hitherto we have been assuming it to be undertaken from a co‐operative point of view, as in the case of Poole's Index and also in that of the Review of Reviews. In special work, the greater the magnitude of the task, as in the instance of Science as a whole, and any large divisions of Science, the more likely is co‐operative effort to be required, but speaking generally special indexes are largely the result of individual effort. It is here that that discrepancy in execution, allusion to which has been made earlier, becomes so manifest. It is my principal object to show how these contradictory methods, the natural result of several minds working on no fixed or settled plan, may be avoided. No space, therefore, will be wasted on detailing these inconsistencies, for the reader's and student's interests will be better served by the more positive method of pointing out how to index on a fixed and settled system. As in the previous section practical illustrations will appear later on to demonstrate this.

The burgeoning interest over the last decade in technology transfer at universities in the United States has driven contentious debates over patent policy. In this context, biotech patenting has become the poster-child for claims that the proliferation of patenting by universities, and in the private sector, is undermining scientific norms and threatening innovation. Commentators have expressed particular fears about the negative effects of biotech patenting on the public information commons and concerns about emerging “patent anticommons.” This chapter argues that the standard (finite) commons model is being misapplied in the biotech arena because, owing to the complexity of biological processes and the power of existing biotech methods to produce genetic data, biomedical science is, in crucial respects, an unbounded, uncongested common resource. These findings imply that strategic biotech patenting of problem-specific research tools (i.e., single-nucleotide polymorphisms, drug targets) is not economically justified and therefore is irrational.