Contracts as a facilitator of resource evolution

The formality of contracts is not external to the substance of business interactions, but a way of articulating, facilitating and simplifying the complexity of business interactions. An umbrella contract, in particular, is an abstraction of possibility and a refined version of the substance of business interaction in which resource leveraging may or may not occur. Umbrella contracts circumscribe an in-built platform or ‘architecture’ that enables regular and repeated knowledge-intensive interactions. Todayʹs business landscape is characterized by the heterogeneity of resources, activities and actors and contracts have become a key element in the interconnected path of resource evolution, activity specialization and actor co-evolution.