Developing and managing organizational capabilities to meet emerging customer needs : insights from the Joint Strike Fighter program

Abstract

This research examines the development and management of dynamic organizational capabilities. These capabilities include, among other things, how enterprises generate and integrate knowledge, understand and respond to customer needs, manage technological interdependencies, create interorganizational alliance networks, and solve complex technical problems as they design and build complex engineering systems. Enterprises must meet emerging customer needs by combining, integrating and deploying their organizational capabilities. The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, which represents the largest defense acquisition program in history, provides an excellent natural experiment for an exploration of the link between the technological solutions offered to meet the emerging customer needs and dynamic organizational capabilities. This research focuses on the early Concept Demonstration Phase (CDP) of the JSF program, when the two competing teams led by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, respectively, offered their best possible technological solutions in response to a common set of customer requirements.

(cont.) This research examines these competing technological solutions in some detail in order to gain some new insights into the set of organizational capabilities the two competitor teams pulled together in order to win the big JSF contract. An expected contribution of this research, by focusing on the JSF program, is to provide significantly greater "real world" depth to the extant discussion on dynamic organizational capabilities in the context of developing such an extremely complex and technologically advanced engineering system.