Inkoop, Leveranciers en Innovatie: Van VOC tot Space Shuttle

Finn Wynstra is professor by special appointment in Purchasing and Supply Management at RSM Erasmus University, on behalf of the Dutch Association for Purchasing Management (NEVI) and the 'Vereniging Trustfonds EUR'. He studied Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and conducted his PhD research at the Department of Technology Management, Technical University Eindhoven, and Uppsala University (Sweden). His research is focused on the role of suppliers in product innovation and has been published in, among others, Accounting, Organizations & Society, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management and Journal of Supply Chain Management. Finn Wynstra is co-author of two books (Buying Business Services, and Developing Sourcing Capabilities, Wiley) and Editor of Journal of Purchasing an Supply Management

Purchasing and supply management studies the initiation, design, control and evaluation of activities within and between organisations aimed at obtaining goods and services from suppliers. Already during the times of the "Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie", purchasing turned out to be an important function that could provide a substantial contribution to business success. More recently, the significance of purchasing and supply management has only grown, due to the trend towards increased specialisation and vertical disintegration. At the same time, incidents such as the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters have demonstrated that effective purchasing and supply management is far from simple. Education and research in this area is thus of great importance.As a management research discipline, purchasing and supply management is fairly young and can be dated back to the mid-1960s. The last 15-20 years, however, a more specialist, distinct field has been developing. In doing research in this field, theories and concepts developed in other areas such as Operations Management and Marketing are highly relevant. The risk, however, of becoming a more distinct research area, is that these neighboring disciplines tend to be disregarded. A multi-disciplinary approach in studying purchasing and supply management could limit such a risk.