Hong Kong’s post-war catching up with economically advanced nations is well documented. Starting as a piece of ‘barren rock’, the island economy has emerged as the ‘Mart of East Asia’. While there are numerous explanations for the success from neoclassical development economists, few studies have focused on the technological strategies and paths of Hong Kong’s manufacturing firms, the chief eco...

In the situation of shortened product life cycles, modular product design enables organizations to adapt to unanticipated changes in their environments. This study extends modular systems theory to manufacturing process design and posits that: (i) firms can design their manufacturing processes for the same product into either an integrated or modularized structure, thereby being agile in dynami...

With careful theoretical development and empirical data examination, this paper investigates several key factors that influence the IT usage in Shanghai firms: technology resource, human resource and environment resource. On the basis of the resource-based view and the process model, the study imports government regulation policies, as well as e-government actions, as environmental resource to ...

This paper provides a review and introduction on agile manufacturing. Tactics of agile manufacturing are mapped into different production areas eight-construct latent : manufacturing equipment and technology, processes technology and know-how, quality and productivity improvement, production planning and control, shop floor management, product design and development, supplier relationship manag...

Because of the booming economy, interest in China has soared in recent years. The government has decided to privatize many state-owned enterprises (SOEs), so foreigners can much more easily invest in existing firms than ever before. Is it wise to consider investing in these SOEs? Certainly, many have major problems. How sophisticated are Chinese manufacturing firms? Do they understand modern pr...

We present a new approach for the empirical investigation of agglomeration patterns. We examine the clustering of manufacturing firms by identifying patterns of spatial network formation that deviate from randomly generated networks. Using firm-level panel data from Vietnam we calculate transitivity, a measure to determine the strength of clustering of manufacturing firms. We then test whether ...

World economic recession, globalization of business environment and advances in technologies pushing manufacturing firms for the adoption of outsourcing strategy in their product development processes. Nowadays, firms are realizing that being alone in product development process do not provide them any differentiation in their production lines. The objectives of such approach are not only for c...

This paper analyzes the relationship between factor substitutability and the energy intensity of manufacturing firms. Specifically, we compare the degree of substitutability between the input factors capital, labor, energy, and material for firms with low, medium, and high energy cost shares using a panel of Swiss manufacturing companies covering the period from 1997 to 2008. Our findings indic...

This paper re-examines the impact of a firm’s outward foreign direct investemnt on its R&D spending in the home country with propensity score matching method. Employing firm-level panel data on Taiwan’s manufacturing firms covering 1987-2003, this paper first demonstrates that firms with firm-specific and ownership advantages are more likely to undertake overseas inverstment. Controlling for ou...

This paper uses data from the European Regional Innovation Survey to provide insights into the innovative activity and innovation networking of the most important innovation actors, namely manufacturing firms, producer service firms, and research institutes. The innovation capacity of the metropolitan innovation systems differ markedly. In respect to cooperation partners, vertical relationships...