This paper considers the trade-off between leveraging external sources of innovation by outsourcing design and engineering activities and the ability to develop internal product development competences. The trade-off arises because the division of labor within and across firms' boundaries has a...

Netnography i.e. the systematic observation and analysis of online communities to generate insights for an innovation process, has been established as a method of user innovation in consumer goods industries. In this study we apply this technique for the first time in the context of a complex,...

Using plant-level data underlying the Census of Manufactures, total factor productivity (TFP) growth and its determinants are analyzed for the Japanese automobile industry since 1980s. The average annual TFP growth rate from 1981 to 1996 was only about 0.6 percent for the automobile assembly...