Role of technology in promoting industrial competitiveness : hearings before the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, Ninety-eighth Congress, first session, on S. 428 ... S. 632 ... S. 1286 ... June 21 and 23, 1983.

"June 21 and 23, 1983"--Pt. [1]

Promotion of high-growth industries and U.S. competitiveness : hearings before the Subcommittee on Savings, Pensions, and Investment Policy of the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, Ninety-eighth Congress, first session, January 19 and 20, 1983.

Item 1038-A, 1038-B (microfiche).

Managing innovation under constraints: a glimpse on the brazilian conditions for innovation

To generate innovation in Brazil becomes a high level priority in the last two decades. Innovation, according to the Presidential speech, is the right way to conduce the nation towards the development of technological competitive capabilities through the high technology-based products and services. Although the nation has come a long way, Brazil has to face the challenge of overcoming obstacles in infrastructure conditions for innovation. This paper aims to describe the main conditions to manage innovation in Brazil. This work offers a quantitative analysis of the main factors that impact innovation. This is a documental research based on data collected from high reliability international sources complemented by a research field applied to a sample of technology–based firms located in São José dos Campos, Brazil. The results indicated that entrepreneurs deal with difficulties to develop managerial competences in order to manage the business growth while developing new products and services. The lack of qualified human resources to manage business in technological environment is also a matter.

Inter-organisational networks, value creation and the process of technology integration in research and development

Traditional methods of R&D management are no longer sufficient for embracing innovations and leveraging complex new technologies to fully integrated positions in established systems. This paper presents the view that the technology integration process is a result of fundamental interactions embedded in inter-organisational activities. Emerging industries, high technology companies and knowledge intensive organisations owe a large part of their viability to complex networks of inter-organisational interactions and relationships. R&D organisations are the gatekeepers in the technology integration process with their initial sanction and motivation to develop technologies providing the first point of entry. Networks rely on the activities of stakeholders to provide the foundations of collaborative R&D activities, business-to-business marketing and strategic alliances. Such complex inter-organisational interactions and relationships influence value creation and organisational goals as stakeholders seek to gain investment opportunities. A theoretical model is developed here that contributes to our understanding of technology integration (adoption) as a dynamic process, which is simultaneously structured and enacted through the activities of stakeholders and organisations in complex inter-organisational networks of sanction and integration.

Systemic absorptive capacity: creating early-to-market returns through R&D alliances

For most complex emergent technologies, product-market success depends on efficient linkages between changing lead innovators within the R&D process. In this paper, our unit of analysis is a complex high technology product and the system of alliance linkages formed to progress a product through R&D milestones. We present a model and evidence for advancing our understanding of how achieving early-to-market returns depends on systemic absorptive capacity. This systemic absorptive capacity is the cumulative efficiency in the use of absorptive capacity to link changing lead innovators across successive milestones in R&D product development. We advance propositions of how systemic absorptive capacity can explain performance differences between rival product development systems competing for early-to-market returns with similar products through accelerating speed to market, cost and quality advantages. These explanations are contrasted with the conclusions of previous studies that have focused on absorptive capacity of single firms or single alliances in RD.

Managing healthcare technology in quality management framework

Healthcare services available these days deploy high technology to satisfy both internal and external customers by continuously improving various quality parameters. Quality improvement in healthcare services is a complex and multidimensional task. Although various quality management tools are routinely deployed for identifying quality issues in healthcare delivery, there is absence of an integrated approach, which can identify and analyse issues, provide solutions to resolve those issues and develop a project management framework to implement and evaluate those solutions. This study introduces an integrated and uniform quality management framework for healthcare services. This study uses the Logical Framework Analysis (LFA) to improve the performance of healthcare services. LFA has three major steps - problem identification, solution derivation and formation of a planning matrix for implementation and evaluation. LFA has been applied in a case study environment to three acute healthcare services (Operating Room (OR) utilisation, Accident and Emergency (A&E) and intensive care) in order to demonstrate its effectiveness. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The future of offshoring FDI in high-tech sectors

This paper examines what is still a relatively new phenomenon in the literature, the outsourcing/offshoring of high-technology manufacturing and services. This has become a concern for both policy makers and academics for two reasons. Firstly, policy makers have become concerned that the offshoring of high-technology sectors in the West will follow the more labour intensive sectors, and move to lower cost locations. Secondly, international business theory has tended to view low costs, and high levels of indigenous technological development as being the two main drivers of location advantage in the attraction of FDI. We show that this may not be the case for offshored high-technology manufacturing or services.

Technology transfer to developing countries : the case of physical asset management in South Africa

This research investigates technology transfer (TT) to developing countries, with specific reference to South Africa. Particular attention is paid to physical asset management, which includes the maintenance of plant, equipment and facilities. The research is case based, comprising a main case study (the South African electricity utility, Eskom) and four mini-cases. A five level framework adapted from Salami and Reavill (1997) is used as the methodological basis for the formulation of the research questions. This deals with technology selection, and management issues including implementation and maintenance and evaluation and modifications. The findings suggest the Salami and Reavill (1997) framework is a useful guide for TT. The case organisations did not introduce technology for strategic advantage, but to achieve operational efficiencies through cost reduction, higher quality and the ability to meet customer demand. Acquirers favour standardised technologies with which they are familiar. Cost-benefit evaluations have limited use in technology acquisition decisions. Users rely on supplier expertise to compensate for poor education and technical training in South Africa. The impact of political and economic factors is more evident in Eskom than in the mini-cases. Physical asset management follows traditional preventive maintenance practices, with limited use of new maintenance management thinking. Few modifications of the technology or R&D innovations take place. Little use is made of explicit knowledge from computerised maintenance management systems. Low operating and maintenance skills are not conducive to the transfer of high-technology equipment. South African organisations acquire technology as items of plant, equipment and systems, but limited transfer of technology takes place. This suggests that operators and maintainers frequently do not understand the underlying technology, and like workers elsewhere, are not always inclined towards adopting technology in the workplace.

Indigenous and foreign innovation efforts and drivers of technological upgrading:evidence from China

This paper explores the role of indigenous and foreign innovation efforts in technological upgrading in developing countries, taking into account sectoral specificities in technical change. Using a Chinese firm-level panel dataset covering 2001–05, the paper decomposes productivity growth into technical change and efficiency improvement and examines the impact of indigenous and foreign innovation efforts on these changes. Indigenous firms are found to be the leading force on the technological frontier in the low- and medium-technology industries, while foreign-invested firms enjoy a clear lead in the high-technology sector. Collective indigenous R&D activities at the industry level are found to be the major driver of technology upgrading of indigenous firms that push out the technology frontier. While foreign investment appears to contribute to static industry capabilities, R&D activities of foreign-invested firms have exerted a significant negative effect on the technical change of local firms over the sample period.

Firm dynamics and job creation in the United Kingdom:1998–2013

This article is motivated by a very simple question – ‘what types of firms create the most jobs in the UK economy?’ One popular answer to this question has been High-Growth Firms (HGFs). These firms represent only a small minority – the ‘Vital 6%’ – of the UK business population yet, but have a disproportionate impact on job creation and innovation. We re-visit the discussion launched by the 2009 National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) reports, which identified the 6% figure and, using more recent data, confirm the headline conclusion for job creation: a small number of job-creating firms (mostly small firms) are responsible for a significant amount of net job creation in the United Kingdom. Adopting our alternative preferred analytical approach, which involves tracking the growth performance of cohorts of start-ups confirms this conclusion; however, we find an even smaller number of job-creating firms are responsible for a very significant proportion of job creation. We conclude by considering the question – ‘what are the implications for policy choices?’.

Inward investment and the drivers of post recession recovery in Germany

This paper examines changes in the drivers of productivity in Germany over the period 1997-2012. We start by comparing the performance of German firms and inward investors before and during the recovery from the recent global financial crisis of 2008 across a range of sectors, and subsequently examine the channels through which different firms are able to generate productivity. Our results show that foreign investors are more productive than German MNEs and purely domestic firms, with the gap narrowing in the manufacturing sector, but growing in the service sector during the recovery period. We also contrast those firms for whom productivity growth is related to greater use of intangible assets, compared with those for whom productivity is linked to cash flow. Productivity of inward investors is driven by cash flow rather than intangible assets, these being limited to high-technology investors from the EU and the USA.

From Unemployment to Sustainable Livelihoods in Ottawa's Technology Sector (Working Paper 44)

Since submission of the draft report to the OECD‐LEED Program on 30 June 2007, a unique seven‐years retrospective study of the unemployed high technology workers was released by Statistics Canada.1 Drawing upon Statistics Canada’s confidential Longitudinal Worker File – itself constructed from four administrative data sources that linked Records of Employment and tax filer information by the Social Insurance Number and firm‐level data by a company identifier – this study was able to identify and trace the re‐employment of those permanently laid off in the high‐tech industry by location. The findings are stunning.

Sleeping gazelles : High profits but no growth

Among 104,231 limited liability firms in Sweden with at least two employees during 1997- 2010, almost 10% did not hire new employees in any given 3-year period despite having high profits. Nearly half of these firms continued to have high or medium profits in the next threeyear period, but still no growth. Regression analysis indicates that these firms were not randomly distributed; rather they were small and young, did not belong to an enterprise group, and operated in local markets with high profit-opportunities. We conclude that it might be more beneficial to focus policy towards these firms instead of towards a few high-growth firms that, having just grown exponentially, may not be best positioned to grow further.