From the 3rd – 5th September I attended the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group’s annual conference; this year in Marseilles, France. As always there were some really interesting research papers presented. Two papers interested me particularly. First, a paper by Teea Palo, from the University of Oulu, Finland. Teea’s paper, entitled, “Examining business models for emerging technology-based services – a network perspective” looks at business models from a network perspective and explores network architecture; the ways firms come together to deliver something – a solution – to an end customers. In Teea’s paper she looks at the telecomms industry. Teea’s work raises questions about who owns a business model and how firms share business model artefacts (plans, network pictures and other documents that represent a shared vision of what their immediate network is and how it works) to enable to take collective action.
A second paper that raised significant interest was presented by Enrico Baraldi and Torkel Strömsten. Their paper, ”Managing Product Development the IKEA way-The role of accounting and control in networks” looks at how IKEA developed accounting control that directly affected the innovation behaviours of other firms in their business network. Again, we see the existance of IKEA artefacts affecting aims, activities and outcomes of other organisations in the business network and in the market. Enrico Baraldi has also published in the California Management Review; “Strategy in Networks. Experiences from IKEA” 50(4):99-126
