Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

PÉTER LITERATUR CSIZMADIA
users (business and management services, legal
and accounting activities, market research, etc.)
and “new-technology-based services” (T-KIBS)
relying on ICT and technical activities. The
former group of KIBS is sometimes referred to as
“operational business services” (Viitamo 2007).
There is a breadth of literature that calls attention
to the importance of production strategies in
the firms’ manpower and knowledge utilisation
practices, innovative capacity and adaptation
to the market requirements. Regini (1995),
however, in analysing the flexible production,
found that a set of different competitive and
production strategies were being adopted by
the European firms’ managements and that
not all of these were consistent with the Post-
Fordist production, which gains competitive
advantage on the basis of quality, product
differentiation and customisation and flexibility.
In this relation, Lampel and Mintzberg (1996)
emphasise the importance of standardisation
and customisation of products and services as
the two dominant strategies in the economic
development of the past 100 years. The authors
refer to these two logics not as “alternative
models of strategic actions but, rather, as
poles of a continuum of real world strategies.
(Lampel & Mintzberg 1996:21)
Mason (2005), in investigating the
competitiveness and skill requirements of the
British plastic processing, printing, logistics
and insurance industries, analyses how product
strategies are developed and implemented
within UK companies as well as the nature of
any barriers that may inhibit companies from
moving to high value added products and
services. He concludes that high value added
production strategies, e.g. attempts to capture
choices made by enterprises regarding product
or service differentiation within particular
markets, take on very different forms in each
industry. In addition, high levels of skill and
knowledge are prerequisites for success in
high value added production along with the
strategic capability of the management to
combine different resources effectively in
implementing new production strategies.
In the following, I intend to examine which
production strategies can be identified in the
Hungarian KIBS sector and how these can
be linked to organisational innovations and
firms’ knowledge of development practices.
In order to classify the production strategies,
two dimensions were applied. The first
one concerns the composition of the firms’
service portfolios, e.g. to what extent they
provide a large or narrow scale of services.
The other dimension intends to capture the
degree of service standardisation. Following
this categorisation, two types of practices
were identified depending on the proportion
of standardised and tailor-made services the
firms dominantly provide. I hypothesize that
diversification of the service portfolio and
customisation of services are the dominant
strategies in the Hungarian KIBS sector. On
the other hand, I assume that firms following
these strategies rely more intensively on the
external knowledge sources and application of
organisational practices that support
the integration of these knowledge
sources as well as the organisationallevel
learning process. Figure 1 sum-
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marises the two dimensions. It must
be stressed here that only the standardisation
versus customisation of services and not that
of the operating processes were examined.