Strategic Sourcing Development–Emerging Resource Combination and Knowledge Interaction

Journal article, 2013

This paper contributes to the understanding of strategic sourcing through resource combination, with focus on knowledge interactions. The IMP approach, and especially the resource combination framework, views knowledge interaction as embedded in business relationships. Knowledge is understood as having soft and hard aspects and involving both inter- and intra-organizational interactions, as well as emergent physical and organizational resource combinations, such as IT systems, aimed at enabling virtual organizing, and humans acting as boundary spanners. Two case studies of enterprise journeys are conducted. Especially the last five years both companies experience change in the resource combination, first the physical and then the organizational, adjusting the mechanisms to improve knowledge interaction and competence within their value chain and inter- and intra-organizational processes. One SME, re-organizes its processes and integrates knowledge through a specific resource and knowledge interaction setup and breaks out of the SME category; the other, medium sized, de-organizes into an SME and does some resource combination through virtual organizational elements, emphasizing virtual knowledge interaction through IT systems and through the concentration of offshored activities using physical, intermediary control elements. As resource combination and knowledge interaction becomes more complex, the companies shift from more loose relationships to tighter subsidiary types.