TY - JOUR T1 - Competency rallying for technical innovation: The case of the Virtuelle Fabrik JF - Technovation Y1 - 2008 A1 - Bernhard Katzy A1 - Kevin Crowston KW - Virtual Organization AB - Technology improves at an ever-increasing rate, but the speed at which firms can adapt their strategies and competencies to develop technological innovations and exploit market opportunities remains limited. While networks provide an option to increase agility through collaborative access to relevant external competencies, we know little about systematically managing such networks. This paper identifies a collaborative network process that we label competency rallying. We describe the set of inter-organizational routines involved in competency rallying in a case study of the interactions among the partners of the Virtuelle Fabrik, a case of an organized regional network in the manufacturing industry in Switzerland. We describe competency rallying as the (1) identification and development of competencies, (2) identification and facing of market opportunities, (3) marshalling of competencies, and (4) short-term cooperative effort for technological innovation and commercialization. The paper contributes a model that furthers the understanding of the organizational character of networks based on specific, learned network capabilities and which allows prediction of the likelihood of success of practical collaboration projects in networked organizations. VL - 28 ER - TY - Generic T1 - Competency rallying processes in virtual organizations T2 - Proceedings of the IFIP Working Group 8.2/9.5 Working Conference on Virtuality and Virtualization Y1 - 2007 A1 - Bernhard Katzy A1 - Kevin Crowston ED - Kevin Crowston ED - Seiber, Sandra KW - Virtual Organization AB - Firms face an environment changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Unfortunately, the speed at which organizations can adapt their strategies and competencies to exploit such opportunities remains limited. In this paper we weave together an external perspective on market-facing with an internal perspective on competency development and marshalling to describe the organizational activities necessary for firms to cooperate within a virtual organization. We argue that firms can address their individual limitations through a systematic process that we call “competence rallying,” with which they can access market opportunities and additional needed competencies. Specifically, we present a local process theory of how one network of firms reliably engineers and delivers manufacturing projects using an inter-organizational process that works to meet short-term market opportunities. Our theory is grounded in the experiences of the Virtuelle Fabrik project, an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry around the Bodensee in Europe. The success of manufacturing projects in a virtual organization is predicated on specific organizational activities in four phases of the competence rallying process: 1) identification and development of competencies, 2) identification and facing of market opportunities, 3) marshalling of competencies, and 4) a short-term cooperative effort. The Virtuelle Fabrik project was started by the Institute for Technology Management, University of St. Gallen. Financial support was provided by The Swiss Commission for Scientific Research (KwF) and the Virtuelle Fabrik partner companies. The Virtuelle Fabrik project team included Günter Schuh, Bernhard Katzy, Kai Millarg, Thomas Zehnder, Stefan Eisen, and Åsa Göransson, as well as managers from the partner firms. The authors thank all of the participants in the Virtuelle Fabrik for their contributions and in particular, for the many discussions that led to the concepts discussed in this paper. The authors take sole responsibility for the work presented here. This paper has benefited greatly from discussion with Paul van Fenema, Steven Sawyer, Ping Zhang, Robert Heckman, Barbara Kwasnik, and Gisela von Dran. JF - Proceedings of the IFIP Working Group 8.2/9.5 Working Conference on Virtuality and Virtualization PB - Springer CY - Portland, OR ER -