Kate Vitasek

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About: 

Kate Vitasek is an international authority for her award-winning research and Vested business model for highly collaborative relationships. She is the author of six books on the Vested model and a faculty member at the University of Tennessee. She has been lauded by World Trade Magazine as one of the “Fabulous 50+1” most influential people impacting global commerce.  

From this author

Jun 02, 2011    0

Common sense tells us that businesses grow when they innovate. And that those with the greatest amount of innovation benefit the most. 

It was Robert Solow, the 1987 Nobel laureate in economic sciences, who made the revolutionary connection between innovation and economic growth. Solow began his search more than 50 years ago with the idea that technological improvements are the major driver of economic growth. He defines technological improvements as “improvements in...

May 16, 2011    0

Next up in my series of columns about the great academic thought leaders who were seminal in the development and success of modern outsourcing are two of my favorite game theorists: the mathematician and Nobel laureate John F. Nash, who took economists a step or two beyond Adam Smith with his ideas on game theory and the art of collaborating, or playing together nice, for the win-win; and Robert Axelrod, who verified the beauty of cooperation through his early work with computers to solve a...

Apr 08, 2011    0

This week’s column focuses on big thinker Ronald Coase. Coase, a giant of modern economic science and 1991 Nobel laureate helps us understand a key fundamental of business: that business (and outsourcing decisions) are a math problem. 

While outsourcing has been in the limelight for some 20 years, various threads of economic thought and research stretching for more than 80 years planted the seeds of modern outsourcing, centering on growth theory, transaction costs, game...

Apr 06, 2011    0

This article originally appeared in Outsource Magazine Issue #23 Spring 2011

Leading academics charted a path that challenges the conventional definition of winning. Smart companies are applying these concepts, showing that win-win thinking is not just something nice to say: it’s smart business – and really is beautiful…

No one plays to lose in life or in business. You’ve all heard the clichés and their infinite variations...

Mar 02, 2011    0

What does Adam Smith tell us about outsourcing? The answer is somewhat complicated: Nothing directly, but then again everything.

I’ll explain. Obviously, the term outsourcing did not exist when Smith, the founding father of economics, was alive – but it existed in one form or another as mercantilism, markets and transactions developed and became more sophisticated. For example, when an entrepreneur formed a relationship with a guild of weavers to manufacture and sell...

Feb 08, 2011    0

Over the last five years I have been privileged to have funded research in partnership with the University of Tennessee and the United States Air Force to study outsourcing with the challenge to find a better way to outsource.

Along the way I have joined forces with the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM) and the Corporate Executive Board. I have also had the opportunity to work with progressive practitioners that are applying the best thinking in...

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