International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

The pace of globalization is accelerating. It has been forecast that the Gross Domestic Products of the BRIC nations are expected to surpass those of the G6 countries by 2038. Regional economies will change rapidly, suggesting that engineering managers in the East will need to take different approaches to achieve success in the marketplace. This paper outlines five specific approaches, which constitute the EMIDE model, for engineering managers in the East to customize their engineering management practices, in order to capture these new growth opportunities, to expand beyond their local regions and to meet the challenges ahead.

It has been approximately twenty-five years since the Internet became available for public use and slightly over ten years since the World Wide Web became readily accessible. In this paper, we examine innovations in graduate management educational delivery methods that have increased the quality of distance education by investigating the literature surrounding distance education with a focus on four major concepts and their association with modern education technologies. Our exploration involves a comparison of an innovative, parsimonious, online educational model with other methods of graduate management education especially for adult management students. Through this model, we focus on four major concepts that can have a significant impact on management education quality. The first two concepts include dialogue and structure that have been used to describe and assess the quality of distance education programs. The second two concepts comprise students' ability to access courses and the flexibility that students have relative to their participation in courses. We note that these four factors can impact the delivery, content, innovativeness, and quality of graduate management education programs. We review existing models of distance education and note how each model relates to each of these four factors. We then suggest how the design and delivery of online education programs can be improved with a greater understanding of these four concepts in addition to their relationship with recently developed web-based technologies. Finally, we discuss several issues surrounding the administration of web-based education programs and identify several questions that call for further investigation.

Research on outsourcing normally focuses on outsourcing of production and often uses large firms as samples. Only a few studies address the outsourcing of services or knowledge-intensive activities such as new product development (NPD), and especially in the context of medium-sized firms. Our earlier research in medium-sized firms indicates that outsourcing of NPD is frequent in medium-sized firms, and that there is a lack of knowledge about the phenomenon.

This article offers a theoretical framework to study the outsourcing of NPD, and includes the results from a longitudinal case study carried out in six Swedish medium-sized firms to help understand the rationales behind outsourcing of NPD. Results from the present study indicate that 'good enough' is the keyword for medium-sized firms with limited resources. This means that it is considered more important with proximity and trust than world class competence, since close and frequent contacts are crucial, when outsourcing knowledge-intensive activities such as NPD. A conceptual model and a definition of the good enough concept are also presented.

Over the last decades, battles for technological dominance between competing technologies have had a significant impact on many industries. In this paper, we investigate how the fast-moving technology environment influences the tactical choices of companies trying to establish their products as de facto standards. We analyze contextual changes in the evolution of standards wars using a literature survey supported by three integrated case studies. We develop the portfolio of tactics that competing companies should apply in the management of emerging standards wars, composed both of traditional and new deployment tactics. We demonstrate that contextual and tactical changes heighten the pressures on timing and the competition exposure in today's standards competitions. As a consequence, it becomes more difficult for an alleged "winner" to "take all" in the marketplace.

Researchers have examined innovation by small and medium enterprises (SMEs), identified factors that contribute to innovation, and concluded that SMEs tend to be innovative and innovation improves performance. Do these findings hold for high-technology SMEs that are located in a newly industrialized economy? Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, and literature from entrepreneurship and innovation studies, we develop and test hypotheses using quantitative data collected from a survey. While the results of the study generally support prior research conclusions, there is a surprising finding: top management experience negatively moderates the effect of innovation on performance. Qualitative data from follow-up interviews with CEOs of SMEs helped us understand this finding.

There have been very active and significant studies done in the area of university technologies transfer (UTT). One interested topic among them is to measure performance of the UTT. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been regarded as a proper approach to measure the university technology transfer efficiency (UTTE). However, current studies stay in identifying efficient and inefficient universities and related output or input variables which could contribute to improve their efficiencies. This study is intended to understand further how the universities recognized efficient are different and the changes of their performance over years. For this purpose, this study proposes a new approach, the efficiency pattern diagram, to identify changing patterns of the technology transfer of 17 efficient universities out of 51 US universities from 2001 to 2004. Five efficiency patterns are identified by this study: "newly emerging", "strengthening", "strong", "weakening", and "declining". The properties of each pattern and limitations of the approach are discussed with verification of the pattern by extending them to 2005.