The capabilities of new firms and the evolution of the US automobile industry

Firms that diversify into new and existing industries typicallyoutperform de novo entrants, but in some new industries diversifyingfirms are displaced by later-entering de novo firms. Littleis known about when and how new firms can overcome the advantagesof diversifying firms. This is investigated for one industry,automobiles, where new firms had considerable success. All theentrants into the industry from its inception in 1895 through1966 are identified. The heritage of every entrant into theindustry is traced, including the founders of de novo entrants,to explore how time of entry and pre-entry experience affectedfirm survival. While diversifying firms on average outperformedde novo entrants, de novo entrants founded by individuals thatworked for the leading automobile firms outperformed all firmsand dominated the industry. This is attributed to the novelorganizational challenges faced by automobile firms, which madethe leading firms ideal training grounds for new entrants. Theimplications of these findings for firm capabilities, industrycompetition and regional economic development are discussed.     

Non-continuous growth of firms: some empirical evidence from Italian manufacturing industry

Firms change their size through a row of discrete leaps. A basic model allowing for discontinuous growth can be based on several assumptions that entail testable consequences: profitability is not a continuous function of the firms’ size, but exhibits peaks, each corresponding to a locally optimal size. The model has been tested by using a panel of Italian manufacturing firms. Both the non-parametric analysis and a panel estimation confirm the presence of ‘peaks’ in the distribution of profitability by size.     

Exploring the relationship between types of family involvement and collaborative innovation in design-intensive firms: insights from two leading players in the furniture industry

ABSTRACT

Innovation in family firms has attracted considerable interest from scholars and practitioners in recent years. However, further theoretical and empirical research is needed to illuminate the intricate relationship between family involvement and innovation. This article studies the effect of different types of family involvement on the management of collaborative innovation. Based on empirical evidence from two leading Italian design-intensive firms in the furniture industry (B&B Italia and Cassina), this study illuminates how family involvement in control and management influences the way design-intensive firms collaborate with external designers to innovate their products. We use two indicators, design renewal and design identity, to capture differences in collaboration approaches through which design-intensive family firms involve external designers. Thus, our findings contribute to understanding how collaborative innovation is managed in family firms. This article also provides family firm owners and managers with insights on the forces that influence the collaborative innovation processes in design-intensive firms.     

Growth of De Alio and De Novo firms in the new and renewable energy industry

Firms entering new markets are either de alio, with business experience in other areas, or de novo, without such experience. De alio firms enter markets in advantageous situations, while de novo firms enter markets with innovation capabilities. This study determines whether de alio or de novo firms achieve faster sales growth as well as the duration of their growth when they enter the new and renewable energy industry. Panel data for global companies that entered the new and renewable energy industry after the 1990s show that de alio firms achieved higher growth rate than did de novo firms in the initial stages, but that entry type’s contribution to sales growth gradually decreased and disappeared four years after entrance. The results indicate that accumulated resources and new entrants’ former experiences in other industries have positive effects, contributing to initial success after market entry for a limited time. This finding suggests that firms improve the R&Cs (resources and capabilities) that are appropriate to their new environments for sustainable development.     

餐饮服务业废水的CODcr与BOD5相关研究

本文对宁德市较大宾馆酒店的废水进行COD_(cr)与BOD_5的测定,对两者相关进行了研究,对其回归方程作了方差分析及相关系数的显著性检验,回归方程的确立,对餐饮业的环境监测分析、环境管理具有实际意义。     

Some models for understanding the cooperation between the supplier and the buyer

This paper presents some stochastic models of cooperation between the supplier and the buyer. We first recall some of the results that pertain to the case where the buyer and the supplier formulate their inventory policies independently and sequentially. Next, we analyse the case where the buyer and the supplier jointly determine the optimal order quantities. Our analysis shows that only the supplier benefits from such cooperation. In order to motivate the buyer to cooperate, we consider some cooperative strategies. These include the analysis of the impact of (1) price changes, (2) discount policies and (3) partial deliveries. The importance of coordination is brought out from the analysis.     

R&D and manufacturing activities regarding managerial effectiveness and open strategy: an industry focus on luxury knitwear firms

The authors structure the field of over-design, over-specification, and over-requirement (OOO) drawing from extant knowledge related to innovative managerial procedures in manufacturing systems, project portfolio management, and performance management. More specifically, we propose allowing the dominant perspectives of OOO and paving the way towards a coherent recognition foundation of innovative strategies in manufacturing systems. This lends itself to an analysis of innovative phenomena in design and production systems that generate OOO and helps to understand what the effects of the OOO on business performance are. The clothing industry in Italy was chosen as a target context because many innovative pioneering medium sized enterprises (MSEs) were operating in the industry. Because of the exploratory nature of the research, a multiple case study approach is adopted in this study. Drawing from extant managerial literature, the proposed structure shows which business model objects and interactions within R&D-manufacturing-marketing activities should be considered when engaging in managing innovative and temporary project portfolio.     

Research output and transnational cooperation in physics subfields: A multidimensional analysis

This paper compares the profiles of research output and transnational cooperation (as revealed through multicountry publications) of thirty six countries in ten subfields of Physics during the period 1981–1985. The data for comparative analysis were taken fromBraun et al. Since raw counts of publications are confounded by the size of the countries and the size of the research fields, this comparison is made, using relative indicators — activity index and collaboration index. The structures of research output and transnational cooperation are analyzed through Correspondence Analysis, which leads to the identification of countries with similar profiles (of research output and transnational cooperation) and the spatial representation of countries and Physics subfields. The configurations of research output and transnational cooperation are compared to assess the concordance between the policies of these countries for research and transnational cooperation in Physics.     

Supply chain agility: the influence of industry culture on asset capabilities within capital intensive industries

Supply chain agility in capital-intensive industries is argued as strongly linked to the capabilities of the individual processing assets comprising the chain. Therefore the desired asset capabilities conducive to overall agility need to be designed in to plant and equipment. However, in addition to asset design, how the assets are used in the production process is an important factor in determining capabilities. In culturally-conservative industries the penetration of modern operations management (OM) practices is expected to be limited and this will hold back the contribution that assets can make to supply chain agility.

First the paper begins by reviewing the need for agility in supply chains and links this to agile plant capabilities. Next the research context and collaboration is described, which focused upon the speciality chemicals industry and involved three UK universities and thirteen industrial partners. Experiences drawn from industrial case studies undertaken in the research initiative are used to illustrate in a practical manner the key asset capability underpinning agility, that of reconfigurability. The paper adopts a novel focus on a process industry to complement the work on agility that is more usually grounded in discrete manufacturing.     

Partnerships between industry and higher education

Using the experience of the Industrial Division of Honeywell Control Systems in the UK, this article examines the way in which partnerships between industry and education can enhance the development of engineers-to-be     

Impact of mergers & acquisitions on research productivity within the pharmaceutical industry

Several major econometric studies have looked at mergers and acquisitions (M&As) across various industries and concluded that, in general, there is no synergy created or released by M&A activity. This investigation concentrates upon research and development (R&D) performance in the pharmaceutical industry to examine the impact of M&A activity on corporate productivity. Findings indicate that, when compared to those companies within the pharmaceutical industry that did not experience merger activity during comparable time periods, as well as to the industry as a whole, pharmaceutical companies that merged were able to achieve more favorable post-merger productivity scores than were attained prior to their merger.     

Product Planning techniques: investigating the differences between research trajectories and industry expectations

According to several literature sources, Product Planning is acknowledged as a primary driver of future commercial success for new designed products, and it is schematically constituted by the identification of business opportunities and the selection of most promising alternatives. Despite the recalled relevance of Product Planning, it emerges that a marginal quantity of companies have adopted formal methods to carry out this task. The paper attempts to provide a major understanding about such a limited implementation of Product Planning techniques and other open issues emerging from the analysis of the literature concerning the initial phases of engineering design cycles. The presented study investigates the claimed benefits of methods described in the literature, the level to which such tools are diffused through educational programs in Technical Institutes, the expectations and the demands of a sample of enterprises with respect to new tools supporting Product Planning. It emerges that, whereas existing methods strive to fulfil relevant properties according to the perception of the companies, limitations come out in terms of the transfer of the proposed techniques and their perceived reliability.     

Information contained in the motion field of lines and the cooperation between motion and stereo

We investigate the relationships that exist between the three-dimensional structure and kinematics of a line moving rigidly in space and the two-dimensional structure and kinematics (motion field) of its image in one or two cameras. We establish the fundamental equations that relate its three-dimensional motion to its observed image motion. We show how this motion field can be estimated from a line-based token tracker. We then assume that stereo matches have been established between image segments and show how the estimation of the motion field in the two images can be used to compute part of the kinematic screw of the corresponding 3D line. The equations are linear and if several lines belong to the same object provide a very simple way to estimate the full kinematic screw of that object. Finally, we show how the motion field can constrain the stereo matches by establishing necessary conditions that must be satisfied by the motion field of segments which are images of lines belonging to the same object. Only part of this theory has been implemented yet. This part uses Kalman filtering. Several experimental results using synthetic and real data are presented.     

A note on 'Some models for understanding the cooperation between the supplier and the buyer'

Concern has been expressed that UK organizations are lagging behind their competitors in the adoption of advanced manufacturing technology. It has been suggested that it is not the shortcomings of the technology that is resulting in the rejection of AMT projects but possibly the inappropriateness of the economic evaluation methods used in its appraisal, the difficulties in evaluating the potential benefits and the criteria used to assess management performance. A postal survey, addressed to large UK manufacturing organizations, into the ‘state of the art’ of investment appraisal of AMT projects has identified that there is concern that the traditional financial appraisal techniques may be inappropriate for appraising long-term projects. This research also identified the concern over the difficulties experienced in appraising AMT projects and supports the argument that a short-term business philosophy may exist in some major UK manufacturing companies. Areas for further academic research are highlighted.     

Scientific cooperation between Chile and Spain: Joint mainstream publications (1991-2000)

The scientific production measured by the number of mainstream joint publications, resulting from the cooperative research efforts between Chile and Spain, considering disciplines, application field, type of journal, impact factor, and research institutions involved, was analyzed for the 1991-2000 period. Databases from several institutions, such as the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in USA and other national organizations, were employed to quantify the number of publications and to determine the profile of the mutual-collaboration research groups of both countries. It was possible to establish the strong points of the mutual work in some disciplines and the formation of a critical mass of researchers, showing that the scientific cooperation between countries of emerging-economies, like Chile, and developed nations, as Spain, is possible and leads to mutual benefits. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Collaborative network of firms: antecedents and state-of-the-art properties

The concept of collaborative networks has attracted considerable attention, especially in two knowledge domains: innovation and operation management. Although collaborative networks have evolved into many forms, their central role in triggering debates has not gone unnoticed. In this paper, we aim to contribute to these debates through a bibliometric review of a decade of research on collaborative networks (2002–2015). By using a combination of document co-citation and bibliographic coupling analyses, we unveil the origins and evolution of collaborative networks over time by analysing the references from the most important academic contributions. Our goal is threefold: first, to systematise the state of the art in the Input-Process-Output (IPO) framework; second, to elucidate the antecedents of the research field on collaborative networks (research streams originating from the field, main authors and journals) by organising them in six thematic clusters; and third, to show how the antecedents shaped the IPO framework. While ‘collaborative networks’ used to belong to two distinct domains, the research agendas seem to converge because of the interactions between their most active authors. As such, cross-fertilisation occurs with the International Journal of Production Research, which plays a central role in this process.