Focusing on the digital camera industry with high Japanese competitiveness in IT industry, entrants are analyzed in detail as to how growth was achieved after the period of market introduction and particularly from the view of modularization and platform strategies of leading companies. As a...

Expansion of the wastes coordinated by the Ozark Poultry Litter Bank is needed. This study examined a method of combining low value poultry wastes to produce compost. Analyses of four compost blends and two hypothetical production systems provide entrepreneurs with the production and financial...

The UK housing industry has been slow to adopt new working practices which have brought improvements in product quality and customer focused operations to many sectors of manufacturing industry. Instead, the dominant business driver has been land and house price inflation, with the market...

This study describes a process in which a firm relies on an external consumer community for innovation. While it has been recognized that users may sometimes innovate, little is known about what commercial firms can do to motivate and capture such innovations and their related benefits. We...

The discipline of ergonomics studies the interaction between man and the designed technical and organizational environment. In product ergonomics, this knowledge is used to develop user-friendly products and in production ergonomics to design human-friendly (production) processes. Beside social...

In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of...

Casson and Wadeson (International Journal of the Economics of Business, 1998, 5, pp. 5-27) have modelled the dialogue, or conversation, which customers have with their suppliers in order to convey their requirements, while taking production implications into account. They showed that this has...

This study examined design cases involving new product development related to Taiwanese home appliance firms for exploring the strategic groups formed by local firms and their performance in new product development and other issues related to product design strategy. The questionnaire survey...

Emerging market subsidiaries constitute an increasingly important asset for the innovative activities of multinational corporations (MNCs). This study examines how different types of these subsidiaries may be integrated into global R&D using two essential coordination mechanisms — hierarchical...