Managing People and Technology for Enhancing Competitiveness

Abstract

Technology underpins business. This is evident in service sectors like the software industry, which is global in nature. The management of technology is well known in the software industry, where software professionals are the key enabler and knowledge carriers. The performance of the firm depends on the effective management of the technology by its workforce. Indian software industry is well known for its skilled software professionals and their technological knowledge to handle the domestic market and global projects as well. However, the global market share of Indian software industry is less than two percent. With such a dismal market share, can the Indian software industry call itself a global player? In view of this, there is a need to re-look into the strategies for sustainable and healthy industry. This paper discusses two key issues, people and technology, for enhancing the competitiveness of the software industry of India. The article also presents two case studies dealing with the issues related to the people and technology and examines how software firms explore the technology advantages in software development Operations.     

Corporate Strategies for Managing Climate Risks

This paper focuses on organizations and their management of climate risks. Climate risks stem from continued changes in climate means and the increase in frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. We ask whether companies also apply the usual process of corporate risk management to climate risks. In seeking to answer this question, we review several literature streams in order to set out an initial theoretical reflection. Based on this we conducted an exploratory case study with 11 electric utilities. Our results illustrate that these companies perceive climatic changes as a material issue for their business. However, management has restricted knowledge about such climatic changes and thus cannot precisely determine the potential negative impacts on business activities. As a consequence, the companies have implemented a climate risk management that does not differ from the usual process of managing other business risks. Our results further illustrate that there is some variation in how individual firms manage climate risks: While risk identification and risk assessment are equally important for all electric utilities, there are differences in how management determines the direction of the individual response to climate risks. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

“治心”比“治水”更重要

春秋时期,楚围令尹孙叔散在苟陂县兴修了一条南北走向的水渠、水渠又宽又长．足以灌溉沿渠的万顷农田,百姓受益很大,都颂赞孙叔敢是爱民如子的好官,要为他树碑立传。可是水渠修成后,沿堤的农民就开始存旱季把庄稼种到堤岸边,有的甚至把农作物种到了堤坝内。等到雨季来临时渠水上涨,     

浙江文化创意企业经营能力升级的策略探讨

文化创意产业正逐步成为国民经济支柱性产业,文化创意企业的经营能力不足,严重制约着文化创意产业的发展。针对经营能力出现的问题,需要从配套产业环境、搭建营销平台、提升企业核心能力、构筑人才高地以及创新投融资服务体系等方面推动企业经营能力升级。     

金融创新及我国金融创新对策研究

金融创新对金融业以及经济的发展产生了深远的影响。针对我国金融创新相对落后的现状，提出推进我国金融创新的对策建议。     

瑞士中小企业的经营之道

瑞士的中小企业在国民经济中占有很重要的地位,许多久负盛名的产品都是中小企业生产的.据瑞士联邦统计局的最新统计,瑞士工业部门的中小企业共有7万多家,占工业企业总数的98.9%.长期以来,瑞士中小企业克服国内市场狭小、周围都是工业高度发达的大国等不利条件,依靠传统的技术优势,生产高度专业化,产品主要面向国际市场,被誉为瑞士经济发展的"主动力"和"支撑点".     

都市语境下的建筑设计策略与手法

在人类的发展历程中,城市一直是社会进步、经济发展的集中体现。随着社会的高速发展、人类物质生活的极大丰富,人们在城市中的活动愈发多样,建筑的功能和类型也越来越复杂。而这些身处城市环境中的建筑,无论在设计还是使用的过程中必然会受到来自城市的影响。本文试图论述在面对都市现状、应对都市问题时,建筑设计的策略与方法有了哪些转变,并结合案例对这些转变进行进一步阐释。     

民营企业自主创新策略

自主创新是民营企业在经济、科技全球化背景下迎接竞争和挑战，并在这个过程中立于不败之地的战略选择。从目前我国民营企业发展的现状看，尽管我们有深圳华为、重庆力帆、浙江飞越等一批在自主创新中走在前列的优秀企业。     

Identifying and Managing Creative Tasks in Collaborative IS Research Projects

Collaborative research projects require a high amount of creativity to create innovative results. Project management has to ensure that it recognizes and encourages creativity. This can be done successfully only if the nature of creative tasks is well understood. The current literature on creativity provides a well‐accepted model to characterize creativity. Based on a literature review and case study we transfer the findings into the context of collaborative information systems (IS) research projects and we evaluate their applicability. We derive specific criteria and characteristics for the identification of creative tasks, find a set of different task types, and provide implications directly usable by project managers.     

Managing the Managers: Japanese Management Strategies in the USA

One of the greatest difficulties Japanese multinationals have had is managing American managers in their US subsidiaries. The reason for this is fundamental and profound: Americans and Japanese conceive of management very differently and have strikingly different conceptions of themselves as managers and of correct management practice.
We do two things in this paper. First, borrowing from social psychology, we explore the idea of the 'management self'. Second, we report our research on management self-conception and style in Japanese-owned factories or 'transplants' in the USA.
The research reports the results of 34 interviews conducted with 19 US and Japanese managers in three electronics transplants. Each factory had adopted different combinations or 'hybridizations' of the management styles of the two countries. The three factories had very different characters. One was dominated by Japanese management practice, another by American practice, and the third was a hybrid of the two styles. We found four factors critical determinants of management style: the nationality of the general manager, a stated preference (or lack thereof) for bicultural management, control over the budget-setting process, and the strength of the Japanese assignees     

Sustainable Corporate Entrepreneurship: Performance and Strategies Toward Innovation

The field of sustainable corporate entrepreneurship is in a nascent stage. By developing a position matrix of companies with respect to their corporate entrepreneurship and sustainability performance, we make conceptual contributions to an integrated perspective on elements supporting a sustainable corporate entrepreneurship process. We propose that such a process without evolving corporate sustainability is misleading. Methodologically, we investigate publicly available index ratings to assess strategies for and qualitative measurement of the sustainable development and innovation performance of eight top‐ranked international companies. Findings show that the strategies of the identified companies correspond well to our typology and allow suggestions of where efforts for corporate sustainability and/or entrepreneurship could be reinforced to gain or maintain a benchmark position. The article will clarify underlying elements of, and help to advance strategies for the implementation of, a sustainable corporate entrepreneurship process. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Sustainable Development Strategies for Product Innovation and Energy Efficiency

The interaction between product innovation and companies’ activities aimed at improving the energy efficiency of production facilities has been relatively little studied, but is of great relevance to society and companies given the strong focus of governments on grand challenges like climate change, green innovation technologies, and environmental problems in general. This paper utilizes the 2009 European Manufacturing Survey for the Danish sub‐sample including 335 manufacturing firms. Through factor analysis, this paper confirms three main areas of focus of new product development: efficiency considerations, market attention, and greening of innovation. Logistic regression analysis demonstrates that while market attention is important for the development of new products, green aspects of innovation and efficiency considerations are important for production companies wanting to improve their energy efficiency. When these models are combined, the results highlight that energy efficiency moderates the effect of market attention to new product development. This paper therefore finds that aligning product innovation and energy efficiency is a complex and intertwined process – focusing on one may have indirect detrimental effects on the other. These results point to the conclusion that researchers and practitioners in innovation management have to consider more carefully the specificities and interactions of different types of products and process innovations and their environmental implications, and must formulate new, more sustainable managerial practices combining energy efficiency and product innovation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Strategies for Technological Innovation with Learning and Adaptation Costs

This paper attacks the problem of developing strategies for a firm to deal with technological change. We show that the product market strategies of the firm—including pricing, product positioning, and rent preemption strategies—can play a role in the efficient search for technology-related information when information search is costly and there are adaptation costs due to the presence of agency. We utilize a dynamic model of spatial competition with uncertain technological innovations in which firms can learn from each other about technological developments. Private information and agency conflicts are shown to increase the effective information search costs of incumbents, who then use interfirm learning to their advantage in equilibrium. This viewpoint also allows us to see the role of mergers and acquisitions, subsidiary formation, and internal R&D labs in a new light. The more general point is that organizational structures and, in particular, the differential distribution of information within the organization impose constraints on the information-search and adaptation strategies of the firm, and the formulation of product-market and R&D strategies serves to relax these constraints.     

Managing Dispersed Knowledge: Organizational Problems,Managerial Strategies,and Their Effectiveness

While there has been much progress in understanding organizational knowledge and knowledge management practices, some questions still remain unresolved. This paper argues that at least one important driver of knowledge‐related organizational problems has been rather neglected so far: that is, the dispersed nature of organizational knowledge. The paper analyses the organizational problems and managerial responses arising from dispersed knowledge. It identifies three drivers by which the dispersedness of knowledge leads to management problems: namely, it creates large numbers, asymmetries, and uncertainty. A number of managerial strategies for dealing with the different components of the problems created by the dispersedness of knowledge are identified and their effectiveness analysed, thereby informing managers as to how best to deal with dispersed knowledge. The analysis of uncertainty‐related implications of dispersed knowledge uncovers an overlooked distinction that is helpful for understanding dispersed knowledge and its managerial implications. This is the distinction between uncertainty and ambiguity, i.e. a strong form of uncertainty that cannot be remedied by the standard strategy of increasing the information available.     

地域型众创空间设计的创新与演绎

本研究以设计研究含工作、居住和娱乐为一体的新型众创空间建筑为目标。同时为不同地域型众创空间设计提供一些有价值的参考意见。本研究根据地域特色研究以"模块化"为原型对其创新与演绎设计符合本地区的众创空间。通过研究现有资料、分析案例、实地调研对不同地域的建筑形式和众创空间进行分析研究,在对其传统单一的众创空间结合地域特色创新与演绎成含居住、工作和娱乐为一体的新型众创空间。     

Career Management Strategies of People With Disabilities

People with disabilities (PWD) tend to experience less career success than their counterparts without a disability, and their talent and skill remain underutilized. Disability literature also outlines various barriers to careers of PWD. Yet there are those who successfully manage their careers. Our aim in the present interview‐based study was to understand which strategies PWD engage in to manage their careers proactively. Findings indicate that strategies include maintaining a positive mind‐set; trouncing competence stereotypes by sensitizing people to their ability through learning and applying new skills, and by seeking feedback; engaging in disability advocacy to remove performance myths; and building, leveraging, and contributing to disability networks. We noted gender and tenure differences with regard to strategies employed. Findings imply that career objectives of PWD are not those traditionally expected or lauded by organizations, and motivations for career self‐management are unique to PWD as compared to those without a disability. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

企业创新的文化策略研究

创新是企业持续发展的动力。从世界知名企业的成功经验看,他们都坚持通过文化策略推动企业创新。这些文化策略包括自觉的创新意识、市场化的价值导向、鼓励多样性的思想、公开自由的沟通方式、信息的交流与分享、注重团队合作、形式多样的奖励方式、宽容失败的文化氛围、敢于创新的行动取向、"创新斗士"的模范作用等。所以,企业创新也是一个创新文化建设问题。     

Strategies for Introducing Organizational Innovation to Public Service Organizations

As social systems, organizations need to ensure connectivity between established and deviant communication streams to accomplish organizational innovation. This article explores elements and systemic strategies of connectivity formation for the introduction of an organizational innovation such as the concept of crowd innovation in the public sector. For public administrations, crowd innovation represents an organizational innovation since it implies broad participation and the integration of external ideas, and thus often opposes prevalent organizational structures. Our findings contribute to the knowledge on systemic innovation management and suggest that public managers can enhance connectivity formation by addressing semantics, routines, practices, roles, and redundancies.     

Business Strategies of Incumbents in the Market for Electric Vehicles: Opportunities and Incentives for Sustainable Innovation

This paper focuses on the relation between large car manufacturers’ incentive and opportunity to innovate and their electric vehicle (EV) business strategies. We analyze how environmental regulation and the firm's incentive (measured by net income) and opportunity to innovate (measured by EV asset position, determined from a combination of patent, partnership and prototype data) affected EV sales over the period 1990–2011. During the EV's R&D period in the 1990s, large car manufacturers that were regulated by the full zero emission vehicle mandate developed a significantly stronger EV asset position, but did not sell significantly more EVs than their rivals. During the EV's commercialization period (2007–2011), large car manufacturers with both a strong incentive and a strong opportunity to innovate sold significantly more EVs. Based on these results, the paper offers a typology of business strategies, several managerial implications, and recommendations for policy makers to stimulate sustainable development. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment