Lieutenant General Paul J. Kern is the senior military adviser to the Army Acquisition Executive and the Army Chief of Starr on all research, development and acquisition programs and related issues. He supervises the Program Executive Officer system, and serves as the Director, Army Acquistion Corps.

Organizational discontinuity appears to be an important contributor to venture success in rapidly changing technological environments. Most Silicon Valley ventures are assemblies of human, technological, and financial resources, and supplier/client relationships with disparate organizational heritage. We analyze ways in which organizational discontinuity, under conditions of high technological uncertainty, contributes to new ventures' competitive advantage and exposes difficulties inherent to simulating venturing within an existing industrial organization. We use a comparative framework to expose the relative abundance of organizational discontinuity in the U.S. high technology sector and identify institutional barriers that stifle it in its Japanese counterpart. Professor Cole is Loraine Tyson Mitchell II Professor of Leadership and Communication at the Haas School of Business. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Sociology. He is the co-director of the Management of Technology Program, a joint venture between the Haas School of Business and the College of Engineering. Professor Cole is a long-term student of things Japanese, having published three books and numerous articles on Japan. Most recently, he published the book, Managing Quality Fads, in 1999 with Oxford University Press, a study of how American industry learned quality improvement practices from the Japanese. This year, he published (with Sage Publications) The Quality Movement and the Organizational Theory, a book co-edited with Richard Scott of Stanford University.

Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and affiliated Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. where he is Director of the Scandinavian Consortium on Organizational Research, and Co-PI, with Nathan Rosenberg, of the KNEXUS Program on the Knowledge Economy.

Professor Powell works in the areas of organization theory and economic sociology. Author of many books and articles, heis most widely known for his contributions to institutional analysis, including a forthcoming edited book, How Institutions Change.

Powell is currently engaged in research on the origins and development of the commercial field of the life sciences. With his collaborator Ken Koput, he has authored a series of papers on the evolving network structure of the biotechnology industry.This line of work continues his interests in networks as a form of governance of economic exchange, first developed in his 1990 article, "Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization," which won the American Sociological Association's Max Weber Prize and has been translated into German and Italian. Powell and Koput and their research collaborators have developed a longitudinal data base that tracks the development of biotechnology worldwide from the 1980s to the present. With Jason Owen-Smith, Powell is studying the role of universities in transferring basic science into commercial development by science-based companies,and the consequences for universities of their growing involvement in commercial enterprises.