This short extract is part of a wider study into the use of the web for research into the presence and structure of industrial clusters and is concerned here with the discernment of networks of firms and the presence of commonalities of competence amongst firms within the identified networks. The research shows that the information that can be extracted using web based methods is sufficiently i...

An important change in the socio-economic environment of industrial firms is the increasing diffusion of Internet Technologies in production processes. Applications of Internet Technologies may be directly implemented on the shop floor, e.g. in networking dislocated assembly lines, as well as in assisting management processes, e.g. in production planning and control. This leads to a strong appr...

With the rise of the Internet as an important dimension of business, fierce competition is resulting in industries that fit skew distributions, where those few firms that can best leverage the digital economy accrue the majority of the revenues. Porter points out that the Internet erodes industrial profitability and intensifies the need for sound strategy. As a tool for modeling the growth of f...

Economic growth in pre-industrial Europe was driven by the expansion of the market. The ‘market’ was a complex commercial structure made up of merchant firms, merchant associations, and organized markets. This paper provides an overview of the pre-industrial commercial structure, of how it functioned, and of how it evolved. JEL Categories: N13, D23, L14, L81, O12 *This paper is a draft chapter ...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) applications within large European firms are discussed. Many industrial applications have been proposed for cradle to grave assessments of environmental burdens of products, including technology design and optimization, technology strategy, green marketing and environmental foresight. There is evidence of a growth of LCA competences and applications within industrial...

As innovation becomes an ever more central issue for the development of firms and world economies, so the need for improved assessments of innovative performance grows more urgent. This paper suggests that trademark analysis can contribute in capturing relevant aspects of innovation phenomena and the process of industrial change. We propose trademarks as a complementary indicator in the portfol...

The past two decades have seen the realization of the manufacturing firms towards quality consciousness. The various firms worldwide employed the statistical tools for minimizing the deviations and subsequently the number of rejects of the manufactured parts. In this process, more prominence is laid on prevention of defects rather than detecting and rejecting the defect in the usual traditional...

The paper econometrically investigates the determinants of industrial agglomeration in 2001, taking as reference recently developed measures. The considered explanatory variables comprised sector-level variables and local infrastructure and incentive policies variables. The evidence showed that variables reflecting input utilization and knowledge spillovers at sector-level had important impacts...

This paper explores the relationship between micro-level innovation performance, changes in institutional frameworks and the mediating role of strategy embeddedness in the context of firms from emerging economies (known as latecomer firms). The paper is based on a multiple case-study design that draws on first-hand longitudinal evidence gathered during a three-year fieldwork campaign centered o...