Paper info

Value Transparency in Supply Relationship: An Innovation Systems Approach

Nigel Caldwell, Richard Lamming and Wendy Phillips

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

Adopting an innovation systems approach, this paper addresses how institutions in supplymarkets (in the institutional economics sense of informal constraints and formal rules)influence the innovation process between firms. Within an innovation system, institutionsmay contain the ability not only to support but also to restrain the co-ordination of knowledgeand skills in inter-organisational relationships. The paper proposes that value transparency,characterised as a relationship resource, is an alternative to existing institutions (such as openbooknegotiation) which appear to have failed to adapt to the changing nature of product andprocess technologies.4