Between logics

Abstract: Industrial organizations rely, to an increasing extent, on intangible resources such as the knowledge and competence of highly skilled workers. This makes them successively similar to organizations closely associated with highly skilled workers, such as professional service firms. But many industrial organizations also share another characteristic with professional service firms, that of customizing their deliveries. Customizing deliveries to the specific needs of a customer requires a different way of working, a different logic, compared to producing and supplying standardized or off-the-shelf products. But although the organization customizes its deliveries, it also strives for reuse and repeatability so that it can utilize the scale benefits associated with the traditional industrial logic. This study is positioned at the intersection of these logics. By means of three cases it reveals how industrial organizations attempt to balance their activities and their competence utilization. It proposes a new value creation logic as part of a set of logics with which to describe an industrial organization’s point of strategic focus. The study also shows how these logics involve the competence resources of an organization through aggregation of two main types of individual resources. Thus, the study contributes to the field of value creation logics, and especially value constellations, as well as to competence based theories, at a time when dependence on highly skilled workers, and the ability to customize, become increasingly important.