Paper info

Customer involvement and organizational design:Different configurations of project business firms

Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi , Pauliina Ulkuniemi, Risto T. Salminen and Tuija Mainela

The paper was published at the 24th IMP-conference in Uppsala, Sweden in 2008.

Although there is, until now, a considerable amount of academic literature cumulated on project business firms, the diversity of the firms is not well recognized. Knowing industrial business relationships to be typically based on wide variety of interactions between buying and selling firms, we emphasize the influence of customers on the implementation of projects and the design of organizational structures in project business firms. On one hand, we illustrate the diversity of project business firms and, on the other hand, synthesize empirically grounded configurations of four ideal types of project business firms. In the configurations we emphasize the influence of customer involvement on the project organizing and on the overall organizational design of the selling firms. These three differentiating dimensions include eight elements that can be used to describe configurations named as product-like project business, successively operating adhocracy, standard project business and extreme project business.