Managing competence development in production chains

Summary form only as given. In much of today´s technology management, there seems to be a paradox between developing competencies and outsourcing. This leads to consideration of how firms can manage and improve the development of their competencies, when the competence are distributed throughout the firm´s production chain. In this paper, it is argued that this represents a special problem in relation to competence development, mainly due to the fact that, in a production chain, firms are legally and organizationally separate entities. Furthermore, it is argued that competence development and organization for learning are possible means for developing competencies in production chains