Managing and organising technical and scientific service firms: a taxonomy and an empirical study

In the last decade, firms have increasingly relied on external sources of technology to support their innovation process. A number of scholars have investigated several aspects of this phenomenon. Little attention has been paid to those companies that offer Technical and Scientific Services (TSS), although their number is increasing and it seems they have a positive impact on client firms' innovative performance. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a firm-level perspective and analyse the key organisational and managerial challenges TSS companies are confronted with. For this purpose, we first conducted a literature analysis in order to build a research framework that comprises: (1) a map of the organisational and managerial decisions that are critical to the TSS firm's competitiveness; and (2) a set of contextual variables that are likely to discriminate between alternative organisational and managerial choices. This research framework is applied in the second part of the paper to support a multiple case study analysis involving 12 TSS firms. A number of exploratory insights into the management and organisation of the analysed companies are presented and discussed.

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