The impact of government policy on technology transfer: an aircraft industry case study

This case study explores the interaction between domestic and foreign governmental policy on technology transfer with the goal of exploring the long-term impacts of technology transfer. Specifically, the impact of successive licensing of fighter aircraft manufacturing and design to Japan in the development of Japan’s aircraft industry is reviewed. Results indicate Japan has built a domestic aircraft industry through sequential learning with foreign technology transfers from the United States, and design and production on domestic fighter aircraft. This process was facilitated by governmental policies in both Japan and the United States.     

Cyclicality of capital-intensive industries: a system dynamics simulation study of the paper industry

This paper provides a view on the cyclicality of capital-intensive industries that could add considerably to our understanding of how cycles in prices, profits and capacity come about. Previous studies of business cycles focus on macro-economic systems or on the agricultural sector. Causes for fluctuations are typically believed to be mainly exogenous in nature. We seek to extend the existing literature on industrial cycles by developing a model that incorporates endogenously generated cyclicality. A simulation model of the paper industry is developed, and validated on the basis of data for the US paper industry.     

Transformer in navigation: Diverse government roles for open innovation in China's high-speed rail

Based on a longitudinal case study of China's high-speed rail embedded in the emerging economy context, we focus on what role the government plays and how that matters to open innovation (OI) for competitive advantage. By linking the OI literature with the national political institutions literature to motivate our research question, we propose a statist-based OI view to differentiate diverse government roles, investigating how government adopts roles in a combined way to push OI in stages. Our findings suggest that government is an important strategic decision-maker for OI. Specifically, the government plays various roles as commander, protector, cultivator, and intermediator, reflecting state activism derived from national political institutions, to construct institutional-level OI for domestic OI activities, and inbound and outbound OI across national borders. We find government can deliberately and strategically use its diverse roles in a combined way to push OI for competitive advantage through the industrial evolutionary process over time. Our study contributes to the OI literature and integrates the strategic management literature with the study of OI to provide new insights to explain the origins of competitive advantage from the state perspective.     

Entry modes and national systems of innovation

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) have contributed to the productive and technological upgrading of many host economies, whereas discussion about entry modes and developmental effects is far from being concluded. We explore the relative importance of national systems of innovation in various forms of firm internationalization. We hypothesize that, adopting a dynamic perspective, institutional stability and the consolidation of R&;D capacities reinforce entrepreneurship and become key driver mechanisms to improve the attraction of foreign entries. The empirical analysis is built upon a sample of countries with dissimilar levels of development using longitudinal data for the period 1998–2004. The findings confirm that the relative technological advance of host countries differ for cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&;A) compared to other entry modes, taking into account the diversity of the developing world, the potential of emerging economies and the need to investigate new drivers for the attraction of FDI.     

Strategic responses to imposed innovation projects: The case of carbon capture and storage in the Alberta oil sands industry

Today's ‘activist’ attitudes and strong power of non-market stakeholders (such as government agencies, non-governmental organizations, labor unions) have triggered the phenomenon of imposed innovation projects. These are investment projects carried out by profit-seeking firms primarily in response to the demands of influential non-market stakeholders. Such projects are supposedly instrumental to the emergence of new, socially beneficial products and production processes. We use a stakeholder management perspective to analyze the case study of a set of salient imposed innovation projects in the realm of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, pursued in the 2011–2014 period by a number of energy companies in Western Canada. We describe the peculiarities of these projects and reveal the scope and drivers of firm-level actions in response to the pressure to pursue imposed innovations. The findings reveal a spectrum of strategic responses to imposed innovation pressures, with varying degrees of cooperation with other economic actors, and varying levels of engagement to tailor the imposed innovation to the firm's technological profile. We develop a set of propositions on the performance implications for firms implementing imposed innovation projects. The paper concludes with recommendations for policy makers concerned with the improved diffusion and effectiveness of such projects.     

The role of absorptive capacity and innovation strategy in the design of industry 4.0 business Models - A comparison between SMEs and large enterprises

Technological innovations often lead to redesigns in the business models of established companies, requiring them to incorporate new external knowledge into internal activities. Against this background, this study integrates the concepts of business model design, absorptive capacity, and innovation strategy into a novel research model, which analyzes the redesign of established business models in response to the emergence of Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0, also known as the Industrial Internet of Things, constitutes a contemporary research context that is highly relevant for corporate practice but scarcely regarded in management literature until now. The article contains an analysis of data from 221 German industrial enterprises, conducted through structural equation modeling, with separate data for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises. First, the results indicate that the acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation of knowledge from the environment enable companies to engage in both exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies. Furthermore, the paper includes an evaluation of the role of exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies that reflects in efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model designs. The distinct characteristics differentiating SMEs from large enterprises are also explained. The implications of absorptive capacity on innovation strategies, which influence the redesign of extant business models, are discussed from a research and managerial perspective.     

Linking hybrid systems to ACD models: a case study in the fibre-glass industry

This paper is aimed at formalising and testing a model for hybrid systems where the interactions between the continuous process parts and the manufacturing sub-systems are given by minor stoppages. The proposed approach consists in representing the effects of the continuous process dynamics on discrete manufacturing sub-systems by means of autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models originally conceived to treat high-frequency and irregularly spaced financial transaction data. The model has been applied to a real-life furnace and spooling-bushing department system of a fibre-glass production plant. Results conclude that the ACD-based model proved useful for representing the occurrence of fibre-glass breakage on the spooling-bushing machines and, in more general terms, that the proposed methodology could be really suitable for the logical modelling of the hybrid production systems where the relationships between the continuous and the discrete parts are given by the occurrence of minor stoppages.     

Barriers and drivers for process innovation in the petrochemical industry: A case study

Process innovation and energy efficiency improvement are among the key options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in petrochemicals production. This case study presents some of the main drivers and barriers to activities aimed at improving existing processes and developing new processes in the petrochemical industry. Interviews, statistics and related literature were used. The results suggest that as far as strategic scenario planning is concerned, feedstock economics of new processes is of strategic importance, while energy efficiency is much less important. This explains why firms see new processes as strategic innovations, although they are often less energy efficient than existing processes.     

The impact of social power and influence on the implementation of innovation strategies: A case study of a UK mega infrastructure construction project

Influence plays a key role in reaching consensus among multiple actors involved in project-based decision-making processes. While prior literature devotes considerable attention to describing influence, little attention has been paid to influence at the individual level of the strategic project manager within the context of megaprojects. This research intended to fill this knowledge gap by identifying and describing the influence strategies that a strategic project manager applies when implementing innovation strategies on megaprojects. A qualitative case study was used to examine the complex social processes involved in a major UK capital investment programme. The findings underline a critical subset of influence strategies, notably higher-management support, inspirational appeal and bargaining. The study proposes a utilitarian structure of social power comprising selective, supportive and executory power bases.     

Flexible manufacturing systems performance in U.S. automotive manufacturing plants: a case study

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) philosophy is a key weapon in achieving global manufacturing competitiveness. It encompasses a wide range of dimensions to improve all aspects of operational performance metrics. The aim of the study is to examine the current state of flexibility adoption in U.S. automotive manufacturing facilities and its impact on operational performance metrics. It utilizes survey questionnaire developed based on previous work in U.S. manufacturing industry. The survey was originally distributed to 420 facility managers in the U.S. domestic automotive industry. It was revealed that 70% of the respondents had implemented all 15 flexibility dimensions listed in the questionnaire. The data analysis conducted shows that implementation of certain flexibility dimensions will lead to significant improvement in specific operational performance metrics. This considerable finding can be used as a guide for manufacturing managers to achieve certain objectives in operational performance improvement in a rapidly changing environment.     

Task parallelism in distributed supply organizations: a case study in the shoe industry

This paper describes the application of the parallel integration evaluation model (PIEM) in an industrial case study. The PIEM model is based on modelling the interactions among supply network parties. It generates the parallel configuration of production and supply servers yielding the minimum total production and supply time/cost for the system, Φ. The design solution recommended by the model obeys the tradeoff that parallelism introduces into the networked supply operating system: while direct-production/supply time Π decreases, the overhead of interaction time among the networked parties, T, increases. The interaction time comprises two delay generating factors, limiting the implementation of massively parallel supply networks: the delay due to communication, negotiation, and coordination among the parties, K, and the congestion delay Γ at shared resources in the supply network. These two types of delay factors are positively correlated with the network's degree of parallelism, Ψ, and they affect inversely the total production supply and delivery time of the organization. The PIEM model has been applied to the case of a globally distributed shoe supply network. The resulting recommendations yielded significant savings of about 35% of the annual operating costs. Following the success of this case study, the model has been generalized and implemented as a supply network design optimization tool.     

Production planning and inventory control in a company manufacturing PC parts: A case study

In this paper, we present a case study on the production planning and inventory system in a company manufacturing personal computer (PC) parts. In the case study, the targets are specified for developing a system for production planning and inventory control. The current state of the company is analysed for clarifying the points necessary to achieve the targets. Also, a system based on the analysis is proposed and its effects are estimated.     

Overcoming pandemic challenges through product innovation: The role of digital technologies and servitization

The fast-changing scenario related to the COVID-19 pandemic calls for firms to rapidly redefine and innovate their strategies to sustain their businesses, with research emphasizing the key roles of digital technologies and servitization. We aim to enrich the theoretical debate on this matter by assessing how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) achieve product innovation under time constraints by leveraging two specific technology groups (information and communication technologies [ICT] and Industry 4.0 data-processing technologies) and servitization. The research is based on a mixed-method approach consisting of an original survey completed by 257 Italian SMEs (grounded on a previous qualitative study about such SMEs' behaviors during the first Italian lockdown), followed by in-depth interviews with the owners and/or managers of the eight SMEs that participated in the survey. The results show a positive relationship between the increased use of digital technologies (ICT and Industry 4.0 data-processing technologies) during the pandemic with servitization and, in turn, with product innovation. Specifically, the increased use of ICT during the pandemic had a direct positive effect on product innovation, while Industry 4.0 data-processing technologies affected product innovation only through the full mediation of servitization. The qualitative study allowed us to highlight how the different kinds of digital technologies supported SMEs’ innovation (servitization and product innovation) during the pandemic. The theoretical and practical contributions of this study are discussed.     

Shopfloor control practices in three Pacific basin countries: a comparative view of small machine tool industry

The strategic importance of manufacturing decisions to the competitive position of a firm is well known. As the sphere of competition has expanded from regional to national to international, successful manufacturing decisions have become ever more complex. The success of manufacturing strategics ultimately rests on proper tactical implementation at the shopfloor level. In order to explore various operating policies and procedures at a basic level, and to contrast them with some commonly held beliefs, this paper examines and compares the shopfloor practices of companies in the small machines too! industry in selected countries in the Pacific rim, namely; Japan,

China and South Korea. While many popular views on manufacturing practices in these countries are supported by the study, the results challenge other commonly held views.     

Analysing critical success factors to implement sustainable supply chain practices in Indian automobile industry: a case study

The aim of this article is to analyse the critical success factors (CSFs) behind the successful implementation of sustainable supply chain practices in Indian automobile industry. Supply chain sustainability is a critical and timely topic for the developing country like India that captures increasing concerns over sustainability, whether driven by current legislation, public interest or competitive opportunity. Identification of CSFs responsible for sustainable supply chain practices and evaluating their contextual relationships has the potential to affect future government policy, current production operations and identify new business models. In response to this, this paper intends to identify CSFs based on organisational theory and model them to implement sustainable supply chain practices in Indian automobile industry. Twenty-five CSFs to implement sustainable supply chain practices based on organisational theory are recognised by means of the literature review and in discussions with experts in one case study organisation. A solution methodology based on the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique is used to propose a structural model, which not only helps in understanding the contextual relationship among these CSFs, but also in determining their interdependence to implement sustainable supply chain practices. Further, the importance of CSFs has been determined based on their driving and dependence power using MICMAC analysis. Our overarching thesis is that the insights gained are useful for Indian automobile industry and would help practitioners, regulators and academicians to focus their efforts towards implementation of sustainable supply chain practices.     

Manufacturing strategy: A study of machine tool companies in the UK

This paper describes findings from an empirical study carried out in a group of small to medium sized companies within the U.K. machine tool industry. Notions of manufacturing strategy are discussed and a contingency model of change within production systems is proposed. Based on the model, a research programme is described, the object of which was to determine why firms adopt particular production systems, under what conditions these are changed, and the criteria and procedures which are used. A focus for change is taken to be the make-or-buy decision. The results showed that the key criteria used by the firms in their evaluations were: capacity, utilization and process capability (technology). From the study, it is concluded that response to change was largely based upon operational considerations and that the firms lacked a framework for reviewing the strategic implications of their decisions. Hence, the need is argued for a methodology whereby firms can establish consistent functional strategies, with the plans and policies to achieve them.