Description based on print version record.

Introduction / Ron Sanchez -- Lobbying: strategies to make a firm's competences generate value / Martin Gersch, Christian Goeke, and Jörg Freiling -- Competence-based strategies of service transition / Tim Kessler and Michael Stephan -- Enhancing the inflow of knowledge: elaborating the absorptive capacity cycle in SMEs / Roberto Filippini, Wolfgang H. Güttel, and Anna Nosella -- Toyota's competitive advantage: path dependency, dynamic capabilities, and sources of inimitability - a contrastive study with Nissan / Evelyn Anderson -- Toward the theory of temporary competitive advantage in internationalization / Petri Ahokangas, Anita Juho, and Lauri Haapanen -- Relational quality, alliance capability, and alliance performance: an integrated framework / Koen H. Heimeriks and Melanie Schreiner / How to build alliance capability: a life cycle approach / Kim Sluyts, Rudy Martens, and Paul Matthyssens -- Modeling entrepreneurial action choice: from intent through rhetoric to action / Janice A. Black, Richard L. Oliver, and Lori D. Paris -- Self-organization of competence development and the role of managers / Martin Kröll.

This volume explores ways in which an organization's existing competences can be enhanced as sources of competitive advantage - either enduring or intendedly transitional. Competence enhancing activities considered include political lobbying to extend the lifetime and value of a firm's competences, expanding services to enhance the value of manufacturing capabilities, initiating knowledge management projects, strategically adapting a firm's governance structures to take advantage of government policy initiatives, staging development of competences in internationalization processes, improving capabilities in managing alliances, understanding the factors conducive to entrepreneurial action-taking, and using individual competency development in self-managing processes for organizational competence building.