recently many researches have studied technological innovation capabilities (tics) and their impacts on firm’s competitive performance in the field of manufacturing industries. this paper pursued yam et al. (2004) framework to study the relevance of tics and firm's competitive performance in a mainly-service-based industry in iran (ict). empirical data were collected through a questionnaire...

abstract in the past few years, diversification has turned into a highly controversial issue amongst numerous managers in almost each and every business. it is contended by many that diversification is vitally important and highly effective especially when it comes to evaluating the financial performance. there are several studies about the relationship between diversification and financial per...

A rapidly changing competitive landscape and dynamic customer expectations require manufacturing firms to seek flexibility in product development. Product concept flexibility (i.e., developing design options) and product prototype flexibility (i.e., creating working models) emerge as effective ways to quickly develop new products that meet competitive challenges and satisfy customer demands. Pr...

Manufacturing in developed economies is under massive pressure. Swaths of industrial sectors have been lost to the emerging economies in the Middle and Far East. Commentators have advocated that manufacturing firms in developed economies should respond by moving up the value chain, seeking to innovate and create more sophisticated products and services so that they do not have to compete on the...

One of the most celebrated features of modern manufacturing is the newfound capacity for information sharing between firms. Manufacturing guides suggest that buyer-seller communication can help firms achieve more efficient production and trading decisions (Schonberger (1986)), as long as the trading firms truthfully report to one another. In this paper, we study the incentives for firms to stra...

We highlight the difference between the service sector and the manufacturing sector in regard to the determinants for a firm to start FDI and the productivity growth it achieves. This paper analyzes two questions: (1) whether a certain level of productivity explains a Japanese firm’s choice to be a multinational firm (by starting FDI), and (2) how the productivity of such a multinational firm c...

Hong Kong’s post-war catching up with economically advanced nations is well documented. Starting as a piece of ‘barren rock’, the island economy has emerged as the ‘Mart of East Asia’. While there are numerous explanations for the success from neoclassical development economists, few studies have focused on the technological strategies and paths of Hong Kong’s manufacturing firms, the chief eco...

In the situation of shortened product life cycles, modular product design enables organizations to adapt to unanticipated changes in their environments. This study extends modular systems theory to manufacturing process design and posits that: (i) firms can design their manufacturing processes for the same product into either an integrated or modularized structure, thereby being agile in dynami...

With careful theoretical development and empirical data examination, this paper investigates several key factors that influence the IT usage in Shanghai firms: technology resource, human resource and environment resource. On the basis of the resource-based view and the process model, the study imports government regulation policies, as well as e-government actions, as environmental resource to ...

This paper provides a review and introduction on agile manufacturing. Tactics of agile manufacturing are mapped into different production areas eight-construct latent : manufacturing equipment and technology, processes technology and know-how, quality and productivity improvement, production planning and control, shop floor management, product design and development, supplier relationship manag...