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This research analyses the role of public policy and the state in science and technology industries in Asia. The research is based on field studies undertaken at the Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park (HSIP) in Taiwan. The state has been seen as crucial to the phenomenal economic success of capitalism and the business systems in Asian countries such as Korea and Taiwan (Wade (1990) Governing the Market, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA). On the other hand, entrepreneurship has been seen to flourish in countries where the state's role has been minor (in Hong Kong for example), and as concluded in the paper, the state has played a major role in nurturing entrepreneurship in Taiwan. The contributions of this paper are twofold: first, to better understand Taiwan's success and lessons for R&D management, and secondly, to raise the potential role of public policy for entrepreneurship and its close relationship with Asian business systems (Phan (2004) 'Entrepreneurship theory: possibilities and future directions', Journal of Business Venturing, Vol. 19, No. 5, pp.617-620). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature maintains that in the development models of the Asian tigers in the 1980s, policy-induced intermediaries played the key mediating roles in acquiring technology from abroad to enhance local capabilities. In this paper, we examined how the intermediaries fare in terms of their expected brokerage roles in the context of the Taiwanese biopharmaceutical sector. By applying social network methods to data on this specific sub-sector, we demonstrate that the intermediary organisations under-performed in terms of brokering the transfer and diffusion of foreign technologies. Two factors underlie this result: intermediaries need to possess sufficient capabilities to be able to drive the strategy of stimulating a science-intensive sector through foreign technology, and intermediaries alone are not sufficient for the success of this strategy. We conclude that, instead of heavily relying on intermediaries to act as brokers, enabling research organisations and firms to play more effective brokerage roles may be a more successful strategy to develop a science-intensive sector such as biopharmaceuticals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and other legislation enacted worldwide, effective information technology (IT) governance has become an imperative for many companies. To maintain effective supervision for keeping their organisation on track with its business strategy, top management need to understand their evolving roles in governance over IT by adopting relevant frameworks to assist the design and evaluate the performance of the company's IT systems. One commonly used framework is COBIT (control objectives for information and related technology) which provides guidelines and best practices to design and evaluate the performance of IT systems. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the general status of IT governance in Taiwan's small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and examine whether the key components necessary for achieving effective IT governance are in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares sectoral systems of innovation (SSI) related to software in the selected Asian countries: China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, focusing on outputs of scientific research for years 2002-2006 and using tech mining research method. The paper characterises the relative importance of specific domains of applied software research in every country and measures the responsiveness of researchers to emerging technologies. The analysis helps identify potential inefficiencies and strategic threats in the software sectors of the concerned countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the importance of foreign subsidiaries' network embeddedness as a strategic resource for market performance and technological competence in multinational enterprises. The conceptual framework of this study is made up of six components: network formative motivation, external network structure, business embeddedness, technical embeddedness, market performance and technological knowledge transfer. Two different types of network embeddedness - business embeddedness and technological embeddedness - are proposed to have an influence on the subsidiaries' market performance as well as on technological knowledge transfer of new products and production processes in the MNE. Using data on 106 Taiwan's electrical and electronic manufacturers gathered from a benchmarking questionnaire, eight hypotheses are tested in a LISREL model analysis. The results reveal that the seven hypotheses are supported, albeit under circumstances in which the relationship between network formative motivation and technical embeddedness is not significant. The study's findings highlight that the foreign subsidiaries' external network embeddedness is a determinate factor in enhancing the whole MNE's competitive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of leadership style, organisational structure, and market orientation upon export performance in order to provide suggestions for Taiwan's Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to improve their export performance by adjusting and adopting controllable, external, and internal factors. The empirical findings from 132 Taiwan's SMEs suggest that: (1) when instrumental leadership style is adopted, organisational structures exhibit higher formalisation, centralisation, and departmentalization; when supportive or participative leadership style is adopted, organisational structure exhibits lower formalisation, centralisation, and departmentalization; (2) leadership style, organisational structure, and market orientation all have impacts on export performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the association between board composition, managerial ownership, external shareholder control and the purchase of Directors' and Officers' (D&O) insurance, this paper examines the role of D&O insurance in corporate governance of 292 publicly listed High-Tech Companies (HTCs) in Taiwan. Holderness suggests that D&O insurance has an important governance role in publicly owned companies. O'Sullivan empirically tests Holderness's monitoring hypothesis, the results generally support the monitoring hypothesis. Although our results partly support the monitoring hypothesis, this study cannot only can be considered an important first step in attempting to understand the governance role of D&O insurance but also provide some further insights on the demands for D&O insurance in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In formulating competitive strategies, one must first measure the comparative performance of the entire industry, and also may understand one's advantages and disadvantages. This paper uses the effectiveness model to measure the relative managerial performance and performance change of 50 listed corporations of the electronics industry under multiple financial ratio criteria. On the basis of the measurement of managerial performance, the entire industry can be partitioned into six clusters. Effective management strategies are developed specifically to each of six clusters of electronics industry. It was expected that this study would provide improvements to the existing financial ratio analysis; at the same time, illustrate the linkage between performance evaluation and strategy formulation for future business management needs of managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has three main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to analyse the major trends in the development of Taiwan's hi-tech industries, and the supply and demand gap. Secondly, it examines the policies adopted by the government to address the shortage of hi-tech talent in Taiwan, by reforming the education system, strengthening on-the-job training, encouraging the recruitment of overseas talent and promoting the flow of talent between industry and academia. Thirdly, empirical analysis is undertaken to estimate labour demand deriving from the implementation of Taiwan's Regional Operation Center. The results of the empirical research show that, over the next three years, the shortage of manpower in the high tech sector will be most serious among companies in the electronics and electrical machinery industries. It is anticipated that engineers will be in particularly short supply, followed by senior technical personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to propose a conceptual framework that explains the relationship between knowledge co-evolutionary mechanisms and innovation development. Combining strategic management, innovation management and organisational ecology theories, we try to review and explain the development of product innovation or process innovation through organisational knowledge interactions between two or more firms. We focus on the knowledge co-evolutionary cycle and suggest two sub-mechanisms that should be considered: the knowledge micro-evolutionary mechanism (intra-organisation) and the knowledge macro-evolutionary mechanism (inter-organisation). We illustrate this framework by discussing the case study of a leading semiconductor firm, United Microelectronics Corp., (UMC) in Taiwan. Combining its strategic partners' fundamental research knowledge systems, the vendor's IP knowledge systems, the customer's IC design knowledge systems, and UMC's process innovation knowledge system, UMC not only enhances the process innovation capability for itself but also accelerates its customers' product innovation performance to market. Through partnership in the co-evolutionary ecosystem, UMC generates and accumulates dynamic capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]