The Influence of Customer Scope on Supplier Learning and Performance in the Japanese Automobile Industry

By Kentaro Nobeoka, J. H. Dyer, Anoop Madhok. 2002

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most studies of Japanese supplier-automaker relationships have focused on the nature of the dyadic interfirm relationship and the performance of the assembler. We examine the relationship from the point of view of the supplier and argue that a broad “customer scope strategy” (i.e., number of customers) leads to superior performance, primarily because of learning opportunities. In addressing these learning opportunities, we draw attention to the important distinction between relation-specific and re-deployable knowledge and the complementary relationship between them. Our analysis of 125 Japanese suppliers supports the key argument that less exclusive ties may be a superior strategy. The argument has important implications for vertical integration and the structure of buyer-supplier relations.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c343c98b8078eee05be27bb4b402c8e76a4df5ee

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In Management Information Systems

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

What happens to gazelles? The importance of dynamic management strategy (2010, methodology): “…strategies, drawing upon prior work and given the available data (see below), we characterise the external environment in three dimensions: market attractiveness [Davidsson et al. (2002)], bargaining power [Nobeoka et al. (2002)], and market competitiveness [Bruderl and Preisendorfer (2000)].”
The effect of relationship characteristics on relationship quality and performance (2008, background): “literature in marketing and quality management exhorts suppliers to get closer to the customer (Hines, 1994; Kotabe et al., 2002 ).”
The impact of buyer–supplier relationships on supplier innovativeness: An empirical study in cross-border supply networks (2013, methodology): “These routines may enable them to implement new ideas, methods, or way of doing things (Cheung et al., 2011; Helper, 1991; Nobeoka et al., 2002).”