Developing new business-to-business professional services: What factors impact performance?

Business-to-business professional services has been a high growth area for over a decade. Increasing complexity and high technology characterizes this sector, making new product development both essential and risky for firms. Surprisingly little research has been done to understand the industrial professional services sector and, in particular, to discover what factors lead to new product success or failure, however. This article reports the results of an investigation that examines how professional services firms develop new products and what factors impact the performance of these ventures.     

Technical risk and new product success: An empirical test in high technology business markets

Following a methodology similar to the one used in Cooper's NewProd studies, this study examines the impact of technical risk on the ability to predict new product success in high technology business markets. Cooper's original 48 new product characteristics along with 10 new items measuring technical risk are used in examining 406 actual industrial new product success and failures. The findings show the importance of the addition of technical risk assessment in predicting the potential success or failure of new high technology industrial products.     

Globalizing the emerging high-technology company

Two traditional models of global expansion were evaluated in an exploratory effort to explain the globalization patterns of emerging high-technology companies. In-depth field interviews were conducted with 19 Massachusetts-based companies that supply software or peripheral products for desktop computing to explore: their timing and aggressiveness in entering markets outside of North America; their structures and patterns for expansion; and their success. Sampled companies report nondomestic revenues ranging from 6% to 58% of their totals. Statistical analyses of “globalization success,”, defined here as how quickly a company achieves substantial percentage of revenues from nondomestic markets, support an integrated model of globalization that combines a cluster of other influences with elements of Vernon's specific product cycle model and aspects of the more generic internationalization process models. In accordance with Vernon, high-tech products are developed primarily for the home market but are soon transferred overseas, more slowly to “lagging markets.” In contrast with Vernon, many different selling arrangements are employed, and overseas production does not follow for most high-tech firms. In accordance with the general internationalization theory, when high-tech companies perceive foreign markets as risky they proceed cautiously, often using outside specialists to facilitate market entry and increase their involvement over time as their familiarity increases. But in contrast with this, many high-tech firms, especially the most successful, do not even perceive such riskiness and do not exhibit such caution. Unrelated to either of those two models, and building upon the work of Ragman et al.[1], globalization success is most strongly linked to how aggressively senior management allocates internal resources to developing an overseas business model that approximates the company's u.S. model of selling/distributing. External environmental forces, too, such as the varied adoption rates of the underlying desktop computing platforms themselves as well as regulatory factors, also affect globalization of high-tech products and companies.     

Do High-technology Exports Cause More Technology Spillover in China？

The volume of China’s high-technology exports has grown sharply since the implementation of its export promotion strategy "Revitalizing Trade through Science and Technology" in 1999.This paper investigates whether technology spillover effects are greater for hightechnology exports than for primary manufactured goods exports.We present a generalized multi-sector spillover model to identify both between spillover effects from exports towards non-exporters and within-spillover effects among export sectors.Using panel data for 31 provinces in China over the period from 1998 to 2005,we find that although high-technology export sectors have higher productivity compared with other sectors,this productivity advantage does not lead to technology spillover to both domestic sectors and other export sectors,and export technology spillover mainly derives from traditional export sectors rather than high-technology export sectors.As such findings can be largely attributed to the fact that China’s high-technology exports depend significantly on processing trade by foreign- invested firms,policy implications are discussed in relation to how to best promote the role of China’s high-technology exports during economic expansion.     

适中论

当代的主调是和平与发展；在这个当代，本文尝试从人文、社科、科技三个方面共十个命题，论述一个观点，“为了适，必须中”：（１）人文思考——哲理，历史；（２）社科评价——政治运动，宣传导向，经济体制，收获递减律；（３）科技分析——数学的极值，系统工程的优化技术，材料物理的能量学与动力学分析，功能（性能、才能）过剩     

对中国经济的现状,特点及前景的几点思考

中国经济的现状和发展前景，是国人普遍关心的大问题。本文从辩证法和实证的观点出发，对几项宏观经济指标及其反映的问题，对经济发展的特点、机遇及挑战，对发展前景，进行了分析和研究，提出了几点政策性建议。诸如，大力发展中小企业、三资企业，使之成为国民经济新的增长点，强化宏观经济政策的落实力度，等等     

Population growth in U.S. counties, 1840–1990

We examine the location and growth of the U.S. population using county-level census data from 1840 and 1990. Natural characteristics (e.g., access to water transportation) heavily influenced where populations located in 1840, and produced characteristics in existence in 1840 (e.g., educational infrastructure) had a significant influence on subsequent growth. Evidence of population convergence appears only when the most-heavily-populated counties in 1840 are excluded from the sample. Moreover, when counties located on the western frontier are excluded from the full sample, on the assumption that they were relatively far from their steady-state populations, there is evidence of population divergence.     

The evolution of the productivity dispersion of firms: a reevaluation of its determinants in the case of Japan

This paper contributes to the literature that empirically analyzes the evolution of productivity dispersion at the firm level and its determinants. We investigate the case of Japanese firms by using a firm-level panel dataset taken from a large-scale administrative survey for the years 1994–2003. We confirm that there was indeed an overall increase in productivity dispersion. Moreover, we find that the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) decreased the within-industry labor productivity dispersion, contrary to what has been found for some other countries. On the other hand, we find evidence of a significant and positive impact of internationalization on productivity dispersion.