Agile strategy adaptation in semiconductor wafer foundries: An example from Taiwan

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and examine how two Taiwanese firms–TSMC and UMC–who compete in the highly dynamic global semiconductor industry, are able to use their unique strategies to create a new wafer foundry sector. The birth of foundry business gave rise to the vertical disintegration of the IC industry. As the foundry industry evolved along its life cycle of embryonic, growth to shake-out stage, the focus of the foundry business migrated from manufacturing-centric to technology-centric and now to customer-centric. Various strategies were adopted at each stage by the incumbents to cope with the changes in the industry environment to sustain business growth.     

商业模式与新进入者领先：来自电动汽车产业的实证研究

从商业模式视角探索为何目前在电动汽车市场上处于领先地位的是新进入者而非在资源上更具优势的在位者。分别在中美两国选择新进入者比亚迪和特斯拉及在位者上汽和通用汽车进行案例研究。基于专家访谈、实地参观和文献调研发现，新进入者和在位者商业模式存在显著差异，发挥电动汽车技术特性价值主张、垂直整合价值网络和可变成本较低的收支结构是新进入者获取领先优势的重要因素。丰富了现有关于新进入者创新及电动汽车产业商业模式的研究，有助于加深对两个问题的理解：一是当在位者比新进入者更早采用新技术时，新进入者应如何利用商业模式取得领先地位；二是哪种商业模式更有利于企业在电动汽车产业市场上获取领先地位。     

Copyright reform and business model innovation: Regulatory propaganda at German music industry conferences

Inspired by new digital technologies, diverse actors in cultural and creative industries propagate conflicting visions of how to adequately innovate – or rather preserve and strictly enforce – copyright-related business models, which has resulted in substantial amounts of regulatory uncertainty. Looking at a decade of regulatory discourse at industry events in the popular music industry in Germany, we investigate how these actors make sense of and strategically shape this uncertainty in the process of industry transformation. Our longitudinal argumentative discourse analysis reveals cycles of regulatory propaganda of two discourse coalitions that do not engage in debate, but aim to find support for competing business models among regulators and the public. Organizing, canceling, and participating in industry events are discursive strategies used effectively to transport their claims by both industry lobbyists and challenging actors, but industry incumbents are failing to use these sites for testing out and introducing new business models. We conclude that regulatory struggles, not least at industry events, mediate between disruptive technologies and business model innovation.     

The impact of electronic commerce on small and midsized spanish companies

Electronic commerce (EC) is not new for some European Union countries, but in others, such as Spain, it is only at the developmental stage. Now that Spain has joined the third phase of the economic and monetary union, Spanish companies' internationalization and the progressive change in the Spanish consumers' buying habits are determining the search for new business strategies. Starting with an analysis of the Spanish business environment, followed by an internal scanning of small and midsized Spanish companies, this paper will analyze the viability of EC as a new business strategy.     

Incumbent organisations shaping emerging technological fields: cases of solar photovoltaic and electric vehicle charging

We explore how large incumbent organisations shape emerging technological fields while establishing a position and business opportunities for themselves during technological shifts. We draw from innovation studies that increasingly emphasise the ability of incumbent organisations to survive technological transformations and studies on emerging technological fields to identify ways in which incumbent organisations shape novel fields during their emergence. Through longitudinal case studies of two emerging fields, we examine how incumbents shape the emerging technological fields of solar energy and electric vehicles. We discuss the interlinked and cumulative business and discursive activities utilized by the incumbents as well as the mechanism through which they influence the legitimacy, expectations and field boundaries of the emerging technological fields. Our study draws attention to the fact that incumbents enter emerging fields at an earlier stage and in more diverse ways than has previously been noted.     

Strategic experimentation and disruptive technological change

This paper studies the diffusion of a new technology that is brought to market while its potential is still uncertain. We consider a dynamic game in which an incumbent and a startup firm improve both a new and a rival old technology while learning about the relative potential of both technologies. The main findings are that (i) risk considerations make incumbents with higher market shares more likely to adopt the new technology and (ii) changes in market power are often preceded by a subpar performance of the new technology. We also show that introducing a better new technology or confronting a worse old technology may hurt the startup firm as its new technology is then adopted earlier by incumbents.     

A corporation’s culture as an impetus for spinoffs and a driving force of industry evolution

We offer a theory of spinoffs that explains some salient aspects of these important market entrants. In infant industries, a great share of new market opportunities is depleted by firms that spinoff from incumbents. A model emphasizing the relation between incumbents’ evolving corporate cultures and the generation of spinoffs explains this regularity in industry evolution. By doing so, we capture different patterns in firm development that finally will help explain the evolutionary paths that industries may follow. We show that organizations reach a critical size that entails the collapse of a cooperative culture and triggers the exodus of personnel founding own firms. Thereby, organizations with a cooperative culture active in a dynamic business environment provide ideal training grounds for potential founders. Moreover, we argue that cooperative firm cultures and processes of “entrepreneurial imprinting” are important sources of spinoffs’ superior capabilities concerning their later market performance. We relate our findings to empirical evidence on developmental patterns in industries, such as genealogies and performance of spinoffs.     

Incumbents as disruptor and their disruptive behaviour enabling disruptive innovation: case study of high performance and low cost CPU and foundry market

ABSTRACT

The ability and role of incumbents to enable and sustain disruptive innovation is underestimated so far, compared with new entrants. Thus, this research aimed to observe incumbents’ role as a disruptor and their disruptive behaviours to enable disruptive innovation in different market segments. Based on two case studies of CPU and foundry markets, it was observed that incumbents enabled disruptive innovation by adjusting disruptive window in the context of performance trajectories and discontinuous time, and they sustained their market leadership by having advantages through continuous cost reduction and accumulated technological knowledge in high performance and low cost market. This study has extended the theory of disruptive innovation by including incumbents’ role and their disruptive behaviours and has practical implications as well for incumbents and new entrants to establish competitive technology strategy at the organisation as well as national level.     

Modeling internal commitment mechanisms and self-control: A neuroeconomics approach to consumption–saving decisions

We provide a new model of consumption–saving decisions which explicitly allows for internal commitment mechanisms and self-control. Agents have the ability to invoke either automatic processes that are susceptible to the temptation of ‘over-consuming,’ or alternative control processes which require internal commitment but are immune to such temptations. Standard models in behavioral economics ignore such internal commitment mechanisms. We justify our model by showing that much of its construction is consistent with dynamic choice and cognitive control as they are understood in cognitive neuroscience.The dynamic consumption–saving behavior of an agent in the model is characterized by a simple consumption–saving goal and a cut-off rule for invoking control processes to inhibit automatic processes and implement the goal. We discuss empirical tests of our model with available individual consumption data and we suggest critical tests with brain-imaging and experimental data.     

Elections, Opportunism, Partisanship and Sovereign Ratings in Developing Countries

We empirically examine whether and how opportunistic and partisan political business cycle (“PBC”) considerations explain election‐period decisions by credit rating agencies (“agencies”) publishing developing country sovereign risk‐ratings (“ratings”). Analyses of 391 agency ratings for 19 countries holding 39 presidential elections from 1987–2000, initially suggest that elections themselves prompt rating downgrades consistent with opportunistic PBC considerations, that incumbents are all likely to implement election‐period policies detrimental to post‐election creditworthiness. But more refined analyses, integrating both opportunistic and partisan PBC considerations in a unified framework, suggest that election‐period agency downgrades (upgrades) are more likely as right‐wing (left‐wing) incumbents, become more vulnerable to ouster by challengers. Together, these results underscore the importance of integrating both opportunistic and partisan PBC considerations into any explanation of election‐period risk assessments of agencies and, perhaps, other private, foreign‐based financial actors important to the pricing and allocation of capital for lending and investment in the developing world.     

虚拟创业孵化器有效刺激变量研究

通过对我国“互联网+”下虚拟创业孵化器与传统创业孵化器实践对比,再经文献研究,提出我国虚拟创业孵化器系统的23个“可能刺激变量”。在此基础上,借鉴复杂适应系统理论中的刺激-反应模型,以北京市创业孵化器为研究对像,对筛选甄别后的“可能刺激变量”进行有效性实证检验与强弱性统计对比。结果表明,在当前“互联网+”下,有效刺激变量对虚拟孵化器系统的影响作用呈现出正反馈、负反馈、不反馈（弱反馈）、优势性、同等性、劣势性6类特征。最后,构建刺激变量有效性与强弱性坐标图,并对不同象限提出各自的管理应对策略。     

Innovation,competition and firm size distribution on fragmented markets

This paper presents a simple model of firm and consumer behavior. We formulate a sub-market entry game, where boundedly rational firms decide on investing in R&D for inventing new products that will appeal to targeted groups of consumers. The success depends on the amount of resources available for the project as well as on the firm’s familiarity with market characteristics. Successful innovation feeds back into the firm size and (potentially into) market knowledge and increases the future R&D productivity. A new product decreases the market-shares of incumbents. However, this business stealing effect is asymmetric across incumbent population. We identify the section of parameter space where firms have an incentive to diversify horizontally. In this section, the model results in rich industrial dynamics. Firm size heterogeneity emerges endogenously in the model. Equilibrium firm size distributions are heavy tailed and skewed to the right. The heaviness of the tail depends on submarket specificity of firm’s market knowledge. This relationship is non-monotonic, emphasizing two different effects of innovation on industrial dynamics (positive feedback and asymmetric business stealing).     

Is limit pricing evolutionarily stable?

We have analyzed the question whether or not limit-pricing behavior can be viewed as a strategy, which survives the replicator dynamics in a game in which firms change strategies through imitation. Our results show that, regardless of the proportion of low cost incumbents in the population, potential entrants that play the strategy "enter" when they observe limit output are wiped out. The unique ESS consists of all low cost incumbents playing the "limit output" strategy, and all high cost incumbents playing the "monopoly output". This ESS includes potential entrants playing "stay out" after observing the limit output, and playing "enter" if monopoly output is observed in the first stage. Hence, limit pricing survives the replicator dynamics and appears in the stable state of the population.JEL Classification: B25, C73, L11We would like to thank an anonymous referee for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Correspondence to: U. Soytas     

Adoption of network technologies in the presence of converters

In many high-tech industries, the emergence of new digital technologies allows companies to develop converters to overcome technology incompatibility. In this paper, we analyze the effects of converter introduction on the adoption process of competing, incompatible technologies in the presence of network externalities. Converter introduction may accelerate, extend or reverse the technology lock-in process. We determine which conversion options are profitable for weak as well as for dominant incumbents, depending on the timing of converter introduction and the degrees of conversion. We find that the optimal strategy for weak incumbents is to introduce full one-way converters early. For dominant incumbents, the optimal conversion option is to provide two-way converters with partial compatibility for the users of the competing network at a later introduction time. We illustrate our analytical results with numerical examples.     

How Do Business Interest Groups Respond to Political Challenges? A Study of the Politics of German Employers

Social scientists dealing with business and politics have tended to focus mostly on the power of business and less on the political challenges and constraints that business interest groups face. This paper analyses how business interest groups respond to political initiatives that challenge their interests, using four episodes of political conflict in Germany. The paper elaborates a model of response strategies and their likely impact on political outcomes. The model suggests that business interest groups can respond to political challenges in two ways: by seeking confrontation or by pursuing adaptation. The paper illustrates these two response strategies with four episodes of political conflict in the political-economic history of Germany: (i) the adoption of social insurance under Bismarck, (ii) the adoption of unemployment insurance in the 1920s, (iii) the adoption of board-level codetermination in the early 1950s, (iv) and the Agenda 2010 labour market reforms of the early 2000s. These four case studies show that adaptation facilitates social compromise, while confrontation results in a bifurcated outcome, producing either dominance or defeat of business interests, depending on what side government takes. Furthermore, the analysis finds that confrontation tends to be associated with a unity of interests within the business community, while adaptation tends to be associated with a fragmentation of interests. The discussion emphasises that the role of business in politics should not be seen solely in terms of business ‘influencing’ politics, but also as potentially adaptive.     

商业模式创新、先动市场导向与制造业服务化转型研究

服务化转型已成为制造企业创新商业运作模式并重获竞争优势的重要手段,然而,学术界对制造业服务化转型的内在机制仍然缺乏认识。基于商业模式创新与市场导向视角,探讨制造业服务化转型路径、商业模式创新和市场导向对制造业服务化的影响。实证研究表明,效率型商业模式创新与新颖型商业模式创新对制造企业服务化转型具有不同影响,效率型商业模式创新显著影响协作性服务,新颖型商业模式创新显著影响生产性服务。制造业服务化转型除受到商业模式创新的直接影响外,还受到企业对顾客需求响应的影响,即先动市场导向的中介作用。     

Estimating entrants' productivity when prices are unobserved

Entrant firms are constrained to set lower price–cost markups than incumbents due to idiosyncratic demand shocks faced in the startup phase. Productivity indices suffer from micro-level markup variation and underestimate entrants' productivity, when productivity is measured by nominal sales and expenditures but not quantities. This study makes the first attempt to estimate entrants' productivity by controlling for their markup difference, when prices or quantities are unobserved at the firm-level. The econometric methodology introduces demand side into a structural model of production to account for the price variation. The estimation routine deals with the endogeneity due to unobserved productivity using a control function approach, and retrieves average markups for entrants and incumbents together with a markup-adjusted productivity index. My findings show that entrants set on average lower markups than incumbents in Japanese manufacturing. When productivity is adjusted to markups, entrants are as productive as incumbents, while the standard measures of labor and total factor productivity indicate low productivity for entrant firms.     

Building internal business scenarios based on real data from a performance measurement system

This paper presents a new methodology to build internal business scenarios from the data gathered by some key performance indicators (KPIs) defined within a performance measurement system. The application of the principal components analysis technique leads to the identification of latent relationships between KPIs that underlies some important business aspects. Further, this methodology allows to represent not only the temporal evolution of the organisation as a function of these business aspects but also the definition and determination of internal business scenarios, being therefore the source of meaningful managerial information. At the end of the paper, results of a practical application are presented and discussed, as well as their importance for the organisation from a decision making point of view.     

新世纪中国商务旅游面临的挑战及其应对策略

进入新世纪之后,中国商务旅游面临着前所未有的各种挑战,采取何种策略应对挑战,确保中国商务旅游可持续发展,成了当今中国商务旅游工作者共同关注的新课题。文章详分析了中国商务旅游在新世纪所面临的各种挑战,并从多维的角度提出了应对各种挑战的策略。     

企业能力视角下价值主张形成机理研究——以小米公司为例

价值主张作为商业模式的核心要素阐述产品特征及价值定位，描述企业对顾客的价值承诺。因此，企业如何制定新颖有效的价值主张使自身在竞争环境中脱颖而出备受关注。现有研究虽认为内外部资源影响价值主张制定，但对于价值主张形成的内在机理缺乏深入探讨。利用探索性单案例研究方法，分析案例企业如何通过组织警觉能力筛选构建新颖有效的价值主张，进而归纳出价值主张形成机理及路径。结果表明：价值主张是经过组织对内外部信息线索进行“初步分析-解释判断”加工过程后形成的有效可行的决策结果；在不同发展阶段，组织警觉的重心由内源性到外源性再到内外多源性转变，不同警觉机制下的判断结果不同，导致价值主张由“经济型价值主张”向“情感型价值主张”再向“技术型价值主张”转变。