Innovation and Competition in Complex Environments

Do ‘large’ firms still matter? Do they still represent a sustainable way of organizing economic activities? Can they cope with the continuous emergence of new bodies of knowledge? Can they keep up with increasingly demanding customers? Or are large firms bound to fail against the rapidity and flexibility of smaller firms, organized in networks of specialized producers, closer to their customers, proactive, flexible? These are the fundamental question on which this book focuses. These are the questions on which a huge amount of research has tried to deal with in the past ten years. A good deal of this research is summarized and condensed, in an admittedly idiosyncratic way, in this book.