Based mainly on surveys of 40 manufacturing enterprises in Mauritius and 41 enterprises in Kenya, examines the relationship between competitiveness, manufacturing capabilities and employment. Proposes a manufacturing capability index and examines the factors affecting it in each country....

ILO pub-WEP pub. Working paper on energy economics relating to fuelwood-based fuel saving stoves and the diffusion of related appropriate choice of technology in developing countries - discusses current manufacturing methods, technical aspects, maintenance issues, need for low-cost product...

This paper proposes an intertemporal model of venture capital investment with screening and advising where the venture capitalists time endowment is the scarce input factor. Screening improves the selection of firms receiving finance, advising allows firms to develop a marketable product, both...

During development of an innovative product there is often considerable uncertainty about component production cost, and it is of interest for both the manufacturer and the supplier to engage in a collaborative effort to reduce this uncertainty and lower the expected cost. Despite the obvious...

We gather detailed data on organizational practices and information technology (IT) use at 253 firms to examine the hypothesis that external focus--the ability of a firm to detect and therefore respond to changes in its external operating environment--increases returns to IT, especially when...

Product development teams sustain the level of ambiguity in product development projects through product configuration and project planning decisions. In this paper, we represent these decisions in terms of earliness, specificity and contingency of front-end activities and test their impact on...

In the area of Robust Design Methodology (RDM) less is done on how to use and work with data from the back-end of the product development process to support upstream improvement. The purpose of this paper is to suggest RDM practices for the use of customer claims data in early design phases as a...

To meet the volume requirements of new markets like restaurants and supermarkets, trout growers in the Southern Appalachians are considering forming a cooperative to process and market the fish. The growers say they would commit up to 1,260,519 pounds of trout to a cooperative. That volume will...

Green building has been adopted and became an accepted norm in the developed countries like USA, UK, Canada and Australia. Despite the good efforts shown by the developed countries on how to build green building, the developing and less developed countries inclusive Malaysia seem lag behind in...

During the last decades the idea of entrepreneurship in public institutions has been the subject of intense debates, activities and academic research. The scopes of our article are to briefly underline the importance of developing an entrepreneurial spirit by presenting a case study from a...