The Mobilization of Supplier Resources for Complex Projects: A Case Study of Routines in the Offshore Wind Turbine Industry

Abstract

Companies depend on supplier resources and boundary spanning managers need to find suppliers, and combine and coordinate resource bundles in exchange. But adequate and fitting resource flows are not automatic, as suppliers allocate and activate their resources for more customers in their portfolio. Therefore, buying companies also need to influence supplier actors to prioritize and optimize resource flows into their specific exchange. Based on a theoretical basis comprising the literature on buyer-seller relationship, including resource based research of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group, as well as Dynamic Capabilities theory and the project management literature, this paper presents the results from a study of applied buying company resource mobilization routines. We report on a qualitative investigation of routines applied in complex construction projects in the North European offshore wind turbine industry. Complex construction/production projects are widespread global business phenomena, but knowledge of resource mobilization routines in this context is scarce in the literature. We find that the complex project owner (buying company) applies a series of 11 particular routines to mobilize resources for the wind turbine constructions and that several of these routines differ from the routines applied in conventional production exchanges.