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5th Charles Cooper memorial lecture

Date & Time:
Wednesday, 6 November, 2013, 16h00-17h30

Venue:
Conference Room
UNU-MERIT
Keizer Karelplein 19
6211 TC Maastricht
the Netherlands
Registration

More information: info@merit.unu.edu

     Dynamic Capability: The Concept and How It Helps Us
   Understand Economic Change
 
Rob Gonsalves, http://huckleberryfineart.com/Rob-Gonsalves-prints/

Sidney G. WinterSidney G. Winter, Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management, Emeritus, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA

 

 

Speaker: Sidney G. Winter, Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management, Emeritus, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Lecture Abstract
Dynamic capability is a concept that arose from the field of Strategic Management, or “strategy”, an academic field largely practised in business schools. It emerged in the quest to understand the basis of “sustainable competitive advantage”. In other words:

How can a business make money and keep doing so for a long time?
How can advantage be sustainable in the face of continuing change?

Dynamic capability is offered as an answer to these questions. By virtue of its relevance to the phenomena of economic development in a market system, dynamic capability is a concept that should be of interest to related fields, particularly innovation studies, the economics of growth and development, and organization studies.

Academic specialization has hindered the development of fruitful cross-field collaboration centred on dynamic capability. The counter-force to that tendency comes from evolutionary economics, which speaks with one voice to these different fields – although that one voice tends to be heard in different and field-specific ways. 

This lecture will explain the concept and the fundamental questions about change that it presents.  It seeks to strengthen the bridges from Strategic Management to the related fields, starting from the business end of those bridges.  Incidental to that, it addresses the question of how investment in dynamic capability affects business profitability.

Overall, the lecture argues that dynamic capability, appropriately handled, is actually transformative of our understanding of economic change. 

Speaker Profile
Sidney Graham Winter (born 1935, Iowa City, Iowa) is a US economist and Professor Emeritus of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is recognized as one of the leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics. In 1982, he co-published with Richard R. Nelson An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, a book which has since been cited nearly 25,000 times. Winter was Chief Economist of the US General Accounting Office from 1989 to 1993. He won the Viipuri Prize for Strategic Management in 2008.

This lecture was recorded in HD video, and is available on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/UNUMaastricht

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