Limits to Competition: Managing Concept, Innovation and Strategy Beyond the Firm

Abstract

Corporatism is close to its end. Organisational empire, business strategy of deterrence, and competition within a defined turf of market went hand in hand for a couple of decades. It structured relations between employees, manager, and holders of debt and equity through the organisational prism. However, with new markets getting created, and with infusion of socially dispersed and socially produced intangible assets into transformative process, firm's status as the principal provider of assured growth has been jeopardised. Consequently, incentives and structures within an organisation that could ensure turnover has become frail. Knowledge organisation, described as porous, and governability of concept-led innovations through earlier modes of management has been rendered infructuous. A concept is a fruit of imagination. It grows within a medium of discourse with a guild, which is a social group sharing common belief systems and common approaches to theory. A concept imagines possible microworlds or novel utility-envelopes, or sometimes counterfactual worlds of utility. It brings in surprises and innovation that it seeks to achieve is highly uncertain dependent crucially on market making. The concept based innovation thrives on the ability to transform intangible into tangible form and hence it demands a unique understanding and a novel practice of strategies and incentives. A knowledge organisation cannot define a business strategy <i>a la </i>competition-driven product manufacturing organisation. Strategy

for such a new organisation, which is open and socialised, involves employees, customers and concept creating technological culture. Managing knowledge and concepts is socialised and this is what is described as social management. A social management signals the end to corporatism.