History and Mission

CVL was established in 1997 at Copenhagen Business School in association with the Department of Operations Management. The mission of CVL is to investigate how current management - technologies and concepts are developed and employed in the management of efficient business enterprises, as well as how business enterprises gain larger strategic and organisational advantages through the use of management systems and management information. We have summarised this mission using the term management technology. The aim of CVL is to contribute to a development of business enterprises by means of this research, which is meant to establish a new knowledge about what demands the new management technologies make on modern management and advising of today. The foundation of CVL is a powerfully increasing demand for knowledge of how management technology is rooted in a practical technical and scientific perspective. Hence, we have dubbed ourselves Research Centre for Business Development and Management. CVL is supposed to make application-oriented research exclusively, in a close cooperation with private and public enterprises. The starting point for the research, therefore, always has to be based on actual experiences and problems from the economic life. Only in this way, it is possible to create constructive solutions and working methods for the benefit of the business enterprises’ management practices and technology applications.

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Why do we focus on enterprise-development?

Most business enterprises will, sooner or later, become acquainted with a range of concepts and technologies. When they all have the same tools, it is the application and not the tools in themselves which lead to competitive advantages. CVL aims at focusing on the application of management technologies in order to create knowledge of how the business enterprises in that way develop specific advantages, competences and types of interaction. What factors of development are critical in order to obtain success with the technologies? Why do some business enterprises obtain success, while it is difficult for others to do so? It could be claimed that management technology, in this context, can be regarded as knowledge- and communications-media with the purpose of conveying valuable development affairs and educational courses. Success with management technologies will not be created until all employers and employees are able to understand, use as well as cooperate in using the technology and its built-in facilities. Management technologies also have to be able to change corporate culture. Hence, the aim of the research in CVL is enterprise-development, as IT-solutions and the management concepts are implemented with a starting point in considering competitive skills determined by qualified human resources and innovative competences. For this purpose, there is a need for knowledge about the demands for competence, which management technologies make on modern management and supervision in order to create lasting competitive advantages. The most essential questions therefore are: How can management technologies change people’s notions, linguistic habits, communicative skills and actions? What organisational conditions and circumstances will be able to encourage and impede technologies’ adoption, trenchancy and ability to change within organisations? How can the implementation of management technologies in an organisation contribute to the establishment of new management competences, structural changes and strategic advantages.

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CVL’s Criteria for Succes

CVL is supposed to engage in empirical, constructive and communicated research, and thereby produce professional knowledge of great practical relevance, as well as of high theoretical validity. The quality of this must be estimated with basis in three sets of criteria.

–The implementation of projects which generate an open, intensive and luxuriant work environment with a high degree of professional dialogue between researchers, communicators and practitioners.

- The creation of new professional knowledge which the participating business enterprises experience as being relevant and usable in connection with their working practice and further development.

- The creation of new professional knowledge which is original and valuable in relation to the international plane of the field.

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CVL also believes:

- that efficient management is the most critical factor for the competitive power and creation of value of the business enterprise, and thereby entirely determines the collective welfare of society.

- that knowledge about management and economy to an increasing degree is spread via standard based concepts and technologies.

- that standard based solutions are valuable as they, among other things, are based on broad experiences and focus on general fundamental organisational problems, which, at times, can be forgotten and therefore are important to repeat.

- that standard based solutions sometimes can be problematic for the very reason that they are general and global and can be copied by anyone, and because they divert the attention from the business enterprise’s unique strategic challenges and risks and the characteristic competences which only rarely can be expressed and dealt with through authorised standard systems.

- that knowledge of business enterprise development and management often is a result of a profound scientific reflection combined with practical experimentation and accumulation of experience.

- that the value of this knowledge is considerably increased through the dialogue between practitioners with a broad range of values, languages and roles.

- that knowledge about the performance of the business enterprise to an increasing degree is furnished by global standard based information systems which are authorised from outside and from above.

- that these information systems are built on terms, concepts and comparisons which relate to a standard from outside, controlled by tradition, and which we have often become used to over a long period of time.

- that management technologies, management information and management language must be system based in order to spread valuable knowledge; yet, they must be based on sincere thoughts, seek out what is unique as well as unknown and opposite, challenge what has already been established, create opportunities and originality, and open up the eyes of the employees who will lead the business enterprise into the future.

- that there is a difference between management, control and administration. Management has, to a too large extent, become administration restrained by uncertain and system fixed office workers, who especially take care to avoid things from going wrong, and who only can measure why it went wrong.

- that management has been reduced to control through the rational concepts, which have been expressed as the general accepted ideologies, systems, understanding of objectives, routines, organisation plans and procedures developed by well-meaning technocrats and compelling centres of knowledge, and authorised by the highest-ranking administration of the society which has as its primary aim to secure law and order.

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