Strategies for new product development

In spite of much evidence of its success, many managers hesitate to establish a policy for new product development. Their indecision often arises from two reasons: they fear that a defined strategy may discourage innovation and they are uncertain how to formulate a new product strategy. The author of this article discredits the former notion and, in reply to the latter, proposes the guidelines for developing such a statement. As new products are essential to the continued success of most firms, the strategy must exist and must be operant if the firm is to avoid wasted time, effort, and money as well as employee confusion and discouragement.     

Private labels and new product development

This paper provides a positive theory of private labels in new product development when a non-integrated distribution channel is faced with demand uncertainty. We consider a regular marketing environment in which a manufacturer endowed with a branded product seeks to design a new product to resolve its retailer’s mis-targeting problem and to optimally screen consumers. Assuming that only linear pricing schemes are available and that the retailer learns the state of demand earlier than the manufacturer does, we show that the presence of a private label always improves channel efficiency. Moreover, a private label is more likely to prevail when the existing branded product is a premium item.

加工贸易推动高新技术发展

最新的统计资料显示,2004年1月份,我国外贸出口357.2亿元,其中加工贸易出口190.2亿元,占比53.2％,充分反映了加工贸易在我国对外出口中发挥的作用。 数字是最好的说明,自1979年至2003年,我国加工贸易年均增速达26.9％,比同期外贸平均增速高12个百分点,2003年,我国加工贸易进出口额为4048亿美元,占全国进出口总额的48％。其中,加工贸易出口2419亿美元,占出口总额的55％。目前加工贸易涉及到我国绝大部分产业,在带动国内经济增长、促进区域经济繁荣、扩大出口、推动利用外资、引进先进技术和科学管理、增加就业等方面发挥了积极作用。在我国国民经济中的地位举足轻重。 在最近结束的“全国加工贸易研讨会”上,国务院副总理吴仪强调:要认真贯彻党的十六届三中全会精神,准确把握加工贸易发展的机遇和有利条件,进一步完善政策,创新管理方式,在保持数量增长的同时,切实把工作重点转移到提高加工贸易的质量和效益上来,及时引导加工贸易转型升级。 吴仪指出,加工贸易必须进行转型升级,扩大高附加值产品出口,全面提高出口竞争力,形成高新技术产品出口拉动机电产品出口增长,机电产品出口拉动全国外贸出口增长的新局面。 广东省是我国加工贸易最发达的省份,其中深圳市的加工贸易出口更是荣获连续11年全国大中城市排     

Familiarity and competence diversity in new product development teams: Effects on new product performance

When developing new products, most firms use cross-functional teams, but research on the effect of functional diversity on new product performance returns heterogeneous results. We propose a measure of competence diversity that is more comprehensive than the common functional diversity proxy. Empirical findings, based on a survey of 142 product and sales managers, support the improved predictive validity of our scale. We further observe a mediating effect of the instrumental use of information in the competence diversity–new product performance relationship. Finally, we discuss the moderating effect of familiarity among team members on the relationship between competence diversity and the instrumental use of information. All authors contributed equally to this article and are listed in random order.     

Fair trade and global cognitive orientation: a focus on Spanish fair trade consumers

In the past few years, there has been an increase in the ‘ethical consumer’, characterized by more reflexive values like solidarity, social responsibility, multiculturalism and ecology. This idea has found support in the appearance and development of proposals like fair trade, along with others, such as responsible consumption, the recycling business or sustainable development. In a parallel way, also during the past few years, various analysts have pointed out that the phenomenon of globalization is changing not only the aspect of the world but also our way of perceiving it, which is progressively becoming a ‘global orientation’. In the framework of these two tendencies, this paper examines the extent to which ‘global orientation’ is also a characteristic of consumers of fair trade products. The paper presents a two‐phase exploratory study. The first phase, of a quantitative nature, showed the greater global orientation of Spanish consumers of fair trade products, and it obtained a typology of them. This typology showed, however, that not all the clusters of consumers of fair trade products have a high global orientation, which reveals that the relationship between this dimension and the consumption of fair trade products is not a direct, straightforward one. The subsequent qualitative study examined the components of this global orientation in each of the three clusters where the consumption of fair trade products was the highest. The results showed that the purchase of fair trade products is influenced by the ‘global orientation’ of the consumer, although other factors, such as a sense of social responsibility and trust in international non‐governmental organizations, can condition this influence.     

广交会:品牌效应铸就辉煌

新年伊始,笔者就第95届广交会的筹备情况采访了中国机电产品进出口商会展览部刘永强副处长,据介绍,琶洲展馆经过第94届试运行后,本届将要全面投入使用。第95届广交会将如期在琶洲展馆和流花路展馆两地分两期同时举办,本届广交会展览毛面积54万平方米,展览净面积24.3万平方米,展位总体规模为27000个(含两期户外展场     

金融创新视域下农产品贸易的发展格局与高质量发展对策研究

中国作为农业大国,在农产品贸易方面取得了一定的发展,现已成为世界农业贸易大国。中国农产品贸易极大缓解了国内农产品剩余压力,增加了国内农民的经济收入,促进了中国农村地区的建设和发展。但是在整个发展过程中,仍然存在金融支持力度不够、金融创新不足等问题,这些问题严重制约了中国农产品贸易的发展。从金融创新视域入手,分析了中国农产品贸易的发展格局,研究了当前中国农产品贸易存在的问题,最后提出针对性对策,以期在一定程度上帮助提高中国农产品贸易金融创新力度,促进中国农产品贸易的健康发展。     

广交会:中国外贸逆风飞扬

亚运前夕的羊城广州,呈现出别具一格的魅力.夜幕低垂时,美丽的珠江和江边高耸的建筑物,被五彩的霓虹灯点缀得愈加让人沉醉.与这夜景一样有吸引力的,自然还有每年两届在这里举行的广交会.在很多外贸人眼里,广州不啻是一座"命运之城",每年两次,他们如朝觐般从全国各地涌向这里.而后危机时代的第108届广交会,更如同珠江边炫目的灯火,让人倍感扑朔迷离.     

试论服务贸易在国际贸易中的发展趋势

随着产品生产、销售的进一步全球化,资本也更加国际化,服务也将进一步全球化。先进的信息技术的发展与应用也必将进一步对服务贸易的发展带来巨大的深刻的影响,国际服务贸易的发展与国际物资贸易的发展相辅相成,在技术和全球化力量的推动下,国际服务贸易出现了新的发展趋势。     

Dimensions of success in new product development: An exploratory investigation

As a key element in survival and sustaining growth, the constant development and re‐development of products has been the subject of many academic and consulting group studies. The specific focus of these studies has often been to identify and describe those factors which determine the outcome of new product developments; the critical success factors in NPD. In order to fulfill their objectives, the studies have focused on many aspects of the management of new product development programmes in companies, and attempted to relate them to a number of alternative outcomes. This has called for the measurement of “success” itself. Unfortunately, there is very little consensus amongst the studies regarding how best to operationalize “success”, and researchers have employed a variety of measures, focused on different levels of analysis, sought data from different sources and used different data collection methods. This paper examines the performance measures used in several major NPD studies and shows how success “measures” have been treated as financial and non‐financial. In addition, attention is drawn to the problems inherent in the different definitions of success. Finally, using data from an empirical survey, the relationship between financial and non‐financial outcomes is examined.     

An investigation of the black-box supplier integration in new product development

This research examines black-box supplier integration in new product development (NPD). A model and several hypotheses are proposed to study the relationship between product task characteristics (importance and complexity), supplier integration, and product performance. Data from 136 U.S. high-tech firms were used to test the hypotheses. Results suggest that assessing the importance and complexity of NPD tasks is critical to the implementation of supplier integration innovation strategy. Firms are likely to perform NPD tasks that are related to firms' core competencies in-house. They tend to externalize complex tasks to suppliers in order to utilize suppliers' resources and to increase NPD speed. The black-box supplier integration influences the speed to market. However, it is more effective on speed to market when technology uncertainty is low than when technology uncertainty is high.     

Education,trade and development

A two-sector trade model with scale economies in education can account for some broad features of the contrasting development of those countries which have pursued import substitution and those pursuing export promotion, assuming that the former group is at a ‘low education’ equilibrium where relatively few workers are educated and that the latter group is at a ‘high education equilibrium’ where most workers receive an education. Our analysis suggests that the recent switch toward export promotion by countries disappointed with import substitution may fail to achieve some important development goals, unless the switch is accompanied by major initiatives in education.     

国际贸易环境下我国对外贸易政策的发展方向

近十几年来,全球贸易量取得了惊人的跨越式增长,而自由贸易与环境的关系问题也日趋尖锐。一方面,许多发达国家利用不对等的贸易和投资手段从发展中国家攫取大量战略性资源,却造成这些国家境内生态环境的严重失调;另一方面,一味地追求贸易扩张、资金积累和工业化又实际加剧了全球环境的恶化。环境效应对贸易的挤压性制约日益上升为国际贸易发展的焦点。在此背景下,引入环境变量,促进贸易策略的可持续性便成为实现我国对外贸易科学发展的必然之路。     

Fair trade,ethical decision making and the narrative of gender difference

Fair trade (FT) is of growing interest to those carrying out research into ethical decision making. In this paper, we report findings from a recent survey of FT purchasing among 688 retail shoppers in the United Kingdom. We examined the relationship between individual differences, in terms of gender and age, and three outcome measures: purchasing, word of mouth (WOM) recommendation and social advocacy. Though age appeared to have no significant effects, we found evidence of gender difference in each outcome measure. Females in our sample were more likely to purchase FT goods, to recommend them by WOM, and to advocate FT purchasing to friends and family. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of the literature on ethical decision making and gender difference.     

Fair trades by trade fairs: Information providing institutions under monopolistic competition

It is a standard result of search theory that the optimal reservation supply price, e.g. wage, is negatively correlated to search costs. This paper applies the inverse relationship, between demand prices and limit prices, to the analysis of an hitherto unexplored topic: trade fairs. Trade fairs bloomed during the Middle Ages and early trade-based capitalism and survived for centuries. In last decades, their growth became sustained: they attract every year hundreds of thousands of exhibitors and tens of millions of visitors.The driving forces behind the trade fair activity are increasing return to scale of search for information, under conditions of imperfect competition, particularly large group monopolistic competition. Under these circumstances, trade fairs offer their participants a collective substitute for information activities that would be beyond individual possibilities. This mechanism is of paramount importance for small firms. Where there are many small suppliers and buyers, and product differentiation, trade fairs give agents the opportunity of low-cost, high-density information exchanges, under spacetime constraints. This leads to lower search costs and lower limit prices, then fairer trades. But this mechanism also implies natural monopoly or oligopoly: the larger the trade fair, i.e. the larger the number of suppliers and visitors who participate, the less the average cost of the service. More generally, natural monopolies arising from decreasing-to-scale search costs ask for a new view of government's role either in the organization or in the regulation of information exchanges. Policy implications for small business development are stressed, including tariff regulation, public investment, and involvement of small business associations in the design and organization of trade fairs.     

新贸易保护主义研究述评

新贸易保护主义是近年来理论界探讨的一个重要的热点问题,尤其是后金融危机时代新贸易保护主义的抬头更加引起人们的关注。文章主要从两个方面对有关文献进行综述性研究:首先,总结了新贸易保护主义出现的原因、特点、以及各种形式;其次,分析了新贸易保护主义对中国经济发展的影响以及面对各种保护政策应采取的应对措施。     

Contingent effects of managerial guanxi on new product development success

A survey of new product development (NPD) managers finds both a linear, positive relationship between managerial guanxi and new product speed to market and an inverted U-shaped relationship between managerial guanxi and new product innovativeness. In addition, both transaction-specific investments (TSIs) and relationship commitment have a positive moderating impact on the relationship between managerial guanxi and new product speed to market. However, TSIs increase the damaging effect of managerial guanxi on new product innovativeness, whereas relationship commitment reduces such an effect. The results from this study can help business practitioners use guanxi to improve NPD performance under different contexts of inter-firm relationships.