Search

The fuzzy front-end plays a most crucial part in new product development (NPD), leading to the success of product development and product launch in the market. This study proposes a novel method, TTRI_MP, by combining Crawford and Di Benedetto's model and Cooper's model, to strengthen the management of the fuzzy front-end. The proposed method comprises four stages: market exploration and technology forecasting, idea generation and segmentation, portfolio analysis and technology roadmapping (TRM). In the first stage, SWOT was utilized to identify the key strategic areas, and the technology readiness level (TRL) was adopted to position the level of developed technologies. In the second stage, the business concepts were required to go through the viability test and customers, collaborators, competitors and company (4C). In the third stage, the Strategic Position Analysis (SPAN) and Financial Analysis (FAN) developed by IBM were employed in the portfolio analysis to screen out potential NPD projects. In the last stage, the selected NPD projects were linked with their functions and technologies in the TRM chart. The method was successfully implemented by a research team working on a flexible fabric supercapacitor at the Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster recovery sites are an important mechanism in continuous IT system operations. Such mechanisms can sustain IT availability and reduce business losses during natural or human-made disasters. Concerning the cost and risk aspects, the IT disaster-recovery site selection problems are multi-criterion decision making (MCDM) problems in nature. For such problems, the decision aspects include the availability of the service, recovery time requirements, service performance, and more. The importance and complexities of IT disaster recovery sites increases with advances in IT and the categories of possible disasters. The modern IT disaster recovery site selection process requires further investigation. However, very few researchers tried to study related issues during past years based on the authors' extremely limited knowledge. Thus, this paper aims to derive the aspects and criteria for evaluating and selecting a modern IT disaster recovery site. A hybrid MCDM framework consisting of the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and the Analytic Network Process (ANP) will be proposed to construct the complex influence relations between aspects as well as criteria and further, derive weight associated with each aspect and criteria. The criteria with higher weight can be used for evaluating and selecting the most suitable IT disaster recovery sites. In the future, the proposed analytic framework can be used for evaluating and selecting a disaster recovery site for data centers by public institutes or private firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business model of coffee shop chains is to copy the successful environment of the first store. This study summarizes the elements and related impact factors of service quality strategies for coffee shop chains to provide a reference for future entrepreneurship. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method, which combines analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy set theory, allows for more accurate descriptions of the service quality evaluation process. Next, decision makers were invited to take part in the measurement of service quality for coffee shop chains. A questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from 37 managers of coffee shop chains in Taiwan. Such findings underscore the importance of recognizing customers' varying preferences. This study tries to fill the gap by assessing the relative impact of service quality by considering various individual differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identified the components of interactivity and investigated the impact of perceived interactivity on customer trust and transaction intentions in e-commerce. Data for this study were gathered in 2011 by means of a questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of 512 graduate students and business workers in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and Shanghai, China. Owing to the problem of dilution of measuring results due to the traditional linguistic value in which every scale interval is equal can be solved by using the fuzzy linguistic scale. Therefore, the empirical results indicate that the level of perceived interactivity is a major determinant of e-trust and e-loyalty through the fuzzy linguistic questionnaire. The findings suggest that perceived interactivity has positive effects on the user that ultimately result in e-loyalty behavior. Further, the fuzzy linguistic scale enables researchers not only to deal with different recognition styles, but also to notice differences in individuals by providing different linguistic variable combinations for researching purpose. Finally, the outcomes will be of interest to web designers and online marketers for how to enhance interactive online web applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial research tends to be knowledge-intensive. Reports prepared by well-known industrial research concerns are often invaluable as they provide important directions for the industry. In Taiwan, the Industrial Technology Intelligence Service (ITIS) Program, supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, has served as a cradle for many industrial research professionals, and its success has been pivotal to the Island nation's industrial might. This paper studies how ITIS could promote and influence the industrial research capabilities utilizing the Knowledge Management (KM). Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the biggest state-fostered research institute in Taiwan, has successfully achieved its expectations by exercising KM. Each of the two has its own unique character that could generate different methodologies and processes. This research combines the two cases, analyzing archived log files of the past 15 years, to provide the key success factors of their use of KM systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first research paper on the topic of Taiwan fuel cell development to combine the two theoretical (AHP and FMCDM) approaches. The conclusion suggests that the priority for Taiwan to develop fuel cell are the fields of 3C electronics, power generation equipment, motorcycles and automobiles. The difficulties the industry has encountered and faced, in turn, are the technology bottlenecks, insufficient R&D investment, high costs, unclear government policy and short supply of R&D professionals. Experts believe the top five strategic actions needed to address the problems are to realise the clean energy policy, establish a national level research programme, increase R&D budget, carefully select the niche products and to plan the operating demonstration or pilot zone. The result will serve as a reference for the government to stipulate relevant industry policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles published in the August 2005 issue of the journal "Business Information Alert."

Presents information on a study which analyzed the competitive advantages of the Dynamic Random Access Memory industry of Taiwan. Research framework and factors established; Methodology; Empirical results and analysis; Conclusion and recommendations.

Deals with technological development. What innovative technology brings to enterprises; Objective of technological forecasting; Sectors whose people in charge should examine and monitor the environment for technological change; Processes involved for management of technology; Issues that should be covered by business plans.

This research is to categorise and analyse the academic publications and understand the contents of foresight, the empirical cases of foresight, the benefits of foresight, the foresight methodology, the risk and implementation framework of foresight to answer the pressing concerns for Taiwan's foresight projects by the overview and organisation of journal paper on national foresight. This research applies the SDOS search engine of Inderscience and Elsevier to screen 494 relate papers published from 1984 to 2005 in which 117 key papers were selected. By doing this, three distinct periods, four trends and six implications for Taiwan of national technology foresight are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology foresight has become a popular tool in the planning of the science and technology policy. This research is to analyse the blog foresight system, the literatures on the blog and consensus-forming, characteristics of blogs, blog-executed foresight mechanism, and compare different countries blog foresight systems. This paper uses a semiconductor material as an example. It was shown the developing internet/blog foresight system, which is good for saving cost of technology foresight and speed up technology foresight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participative foresight has become a popular tool in planning science and technology policy. This work systematically reviews three participative foresight cases based on three preconditions of consensus building, and attempts to draw some implications based on the comparison of these cases. This work conducts an analysis based on three dimensions of consensus building, including definition of problem, structure of negotiation, and motivation to participate, using three national foresights, including UK technology foresight in 1994-1998, Swedish foresight in 1998-2000, and German FUTUR in 2001-2004. The analysis reveals some significant factors of consensus building in participative foresight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cost of masks is rising rapidly as semiconductor manufacturing technology advances. This increase in cost is a major issue in the development of new products. This study focuses mainly on the business demands of semiconductor design companies who verify the prototypes and produce small-volume wafers, and analyses the constraints on the current Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) model. A new MPW model is proposed to reduce the mask cost and the unit die cost simultaneously. The proposed MPW model allows customers to find the optimal solution to the mask cost and unit die cost according to the chip size and the number of dice required. This study also compares the current model with the proposed MPW model using 0.13 um technology, as an example1 For a purchased quantity of dice from a few thousand to less than a hundred thousand, the proposed MPW model yields the lowest sum of the mask cost and the dice cost. Since this range of dice quantities covers more than half of the dice required for semiconductor products, the proposed MPW model can help the semiconductor industry to resolve the conflict between the mask cost and the unit die cost that is caused by the constraints on the current MPW model. When the technology advances to the 90 nm generation, and requested die quantities increased to more than 100,000, the small-volume MPW model proposed in this study will still yield the lowest mask cost and total dice cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]