Cooperation and the Ability to Minimize the Time and Cost of New Product Development within the Spanish Automotive Supplier Industry

New product development (NPD) cycle time has become a strategic competitive weapon for corporations and a focus for research on product development management. Reducing NPD cycle time may create relative advantages in market share, profit, and long‐term competitiveness. This article follows recent research that already has moved beyond anecdotes and case studies to test factors empirically and variables that are associated with the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities. One emerging research area is the impact of comprehensive lists or sets of firm variables (not project variables) on the ability to speed up NPD. At the same time, several authors' findings suggest a contingency approach to speeding up innovation. Contingency theory argues that there is not one “best answer” to a particular problem: Instead, the appropriateness of managerial interventions is dependent on the prevailing conditions that surround that problem. On the issue of NPD, several scholars point out that cooperation accelerates learning and product development: Firms that combine resources can gain a competitive advantage over firms that are unable to do so, and this is viewed as one of the key benefits of interfirm cooperation. A firm's network of cooperations represent a valuable resource that can yield differential returns in the same way as other tangible and intangible assets such as product brands or R&D capabilities. Combining both lines of research, this study seeks to add to the growing literature and further to inform practicing managers in speeding up NPD by analyzing the relationship between cooperation and the use of some NPD firm practices. This article shows the results of a survey of 63 Spanish automotive suppliers to test the moderation effect of cooperation in the relationship between the use of NPD firm practices and the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities. Factor and regression analyses were used to test the article's hypotheses. It was found that high‐cooperation companies used more intensively sets of firm practices than low‐cooperation companies. It also was found that two out of four identified factors of NPD firm practices—Design‐Manufacturing Interface and Cross‐Functional Design—were related positively to the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities in the subsample of high‐cooperation companies but not in the low‐cooperation companies. These results support late research in the area of speeding up NPD. The article discusses some implications for managers.     

企业费用"粘性"行为:基于行业差异的实证研究

本文以沪深A股上市公司为样本，研究我国企业费用“粘性”行为是否存在行业差异。通过选用1998-2005年企业的年度财务数据，并建立计量模型进行检验，结果发现制造业和信息技术业存在较强的费用“粘性”行为．而房地产业等行业的费用“粘性”相对较弱或不存在。另外，在考虑销售收入下降幅度及宏观经济增长等因素后，企业费用“粘性”行为的行业差异也很显著．结果均表明对企业行为的研究不能仅从总体上把握．而应充分考虑不同行业归属之差异．     

Vertical Integration and Efficiency: Ownership in the Swedish Sawmill Industry

This study investigates different types of vertically integrated ownership types inrelation to technical efficiency, in the Swedish sawmill industry. The theoreticalfindings connecting vertical integration and efficiency points in two directions:both in favour for non-integrated firms and in favour for fully integrated firms.In the study, significant differences between ownership types are not found. Onepossible interpretation of this result is that the integration advantages outweigh thepossible negative effects an integrated firms will have from maximising an integratedobjective function.     

低成本战略和新世纪中国石化工业的风险规避

随着亚太地区正逐渐成为新的全球能源消费中心，我国炼油、石化企业有较大的发展，我国的石油资源供需缺口和对外依存度正在逐年上升，由此带来的资源风险也在逐年提高。文章通过对国际油价变化的市场和政治因素的分析，提出了21世纪的中国石化工业在石油资源、能源消耗、氢资源利用以及资产投资等方面需要采取的低成本战略，以规避石化行业各种风险的到来，保障我国石化工业以致整个国民经济的健康发展。     

人力资本积累与中国制造业技术创新效率的差异性

经济全球化背景下,技术学习能力和技术人员人力资本积累是影响我国企业自主创新能力的重要因素。本文从技术学习的视角,运用随机前沿方法对人力资本积累与中国大中型企业技术创新效率的关系进行了产业层面的计量检验。研究结果表明,在劳动密集型产业和中低档次的机械制造业领域,我国大中型企业的创新效率较高,在0.7到0.8之间;而在石油加工、黑色金属冶炼及压延加工业等研发资本密集型产业,技术创新效率相对较低,如石油加工、黑色金属冶炼及压延加工业、电力生产和供应业的创新效率为0.262,0.278,0.216。研究还发现,国内企业技术人员的人力资本积累存在明显的门槛效应,低于这一临界值,国内企业技术学习能力和自主创新能力的提升将十分有限。