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While all global leaders aspire to build a winning global company – one that is competitive, profitable, and sustainable – the business strategies and organizational models they pursue vary substantially, depending on the external and internal business environments they face. In this article, we outline the journey of Acer's growth and transformation from the founding of the company in 1976 to the end of 2004. Throughout this period, the Acer Group had grown tremendously and been transformed radically to adapt to the changing competitive dynamics of the global PC industry. We describe the two major transformations in strategy and organization implemented by Acer's global leadership teams to maintain and enhance the global competitiveness of Acer Inc. in a turbulent industry where many players had disappeared in the last two decades.

Based on our reflections on Acer's journey, we also highlight five key roles that global leaders play in building the sustained competitiveness of their companies. We believe that leaders must (1) develop innovative business models to leverage global resources for profitable global growth; (2) be sensitive to external environmental trends and internal bottlenecks and act on them proactively; (3) communicate persuasively with key stakeholders to gain commitment to the change; (4) reverse the negative vicious cycle of low performance into a positive virtuous cycle of growth; (5) be positive and optimistic in the midst of adversity so that opportunities for turnaround and eventual growth can be found. In industries that are fast-changing and highly competitive, we believe that it is more imperative than ever for global leaders to demonstrate such leadership roles and capabilities in order to navigate their companies through the turbulent times.

Despite their growing proliferation and significance, multinational enterprises (MNEs) from the developing countries have not received adequate attention. To close the gap, this paper seeks to answer a fundamental question: what is the evolutionary pattern of the MNEs from the developing countries? To address the above question, this paper focuses on a longitudinal case study of a successful multinational firm from a developing country in Asia. Both theoretical and practical implications of the case are discussed.

The economic development of Taiwan, from a poor island colony to a world leader in electronic hardware manufacturing, has been spectacular. This study shows that the success of Taiwan may be largely attributed to the synergistic combination of two separate factors: (1) the utilization of unique social capital inherent in the Chinese family entrepreneurs, and (2) the institutional support from the government and other entities, such as Technology Parks, for the creation of scientific and technical knowledge and, most important, for the diffusion and exploitation of technology-based opportunities by these family businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of ultrasonication on new natural dye obtained from leaves extract of Acer pectinatum Wallich using metal mordant for good cotton dyeing prospects.

For effective natural dyeing with leaves extract of Acer pectinatum Wallich, both conventional and sonication methods of dyeing were carried out using metal mordants. The purpose of using sonication was for improvement of dye uptake, improved dye adherence and good wash and light fastnesses. Results show marked improvement by the chosen dyeing method.

The superiority of sonicator dyeing over conventional dyeing in terms of enhanced resource productivity and, as a result, reduced wastes establishes it as the best available technique in the natural dyeing industry. Use of sonicator shows marked enhancement for cotton dyed fabric. Typical bath liquor to fabric ratio for conventional dyeing varies from 20:1 to 15:1 and for sonicator dyeing from only 12:1 to 10:1, thereby reducing specific water and energy consumption by, respectively, 30 and 50 per cent. The cycle time for dyeing was also reduced by 50 per cent and this would make possible more tonnage of fabric per unit time and lower waste generation for the dyeing process. This would also result in improved capacity utilisation leading to enhanced productivity levels in the dyehouses.

Although metal mordanting with copper sulphate and potassium dichromate is not ecofriendly, yet only 2 per cent of these metal salts have been used to prepare different shades with leaves extract of Acer pectinatum Wallich.

The method developed for natural dyeing of cotton fabric using sonication in conjunction with metal mordanting has shown marked improvement.

The method developed for natural dyeing of cotton fabric using sonication in conjunction with metal mordanting has shown marked improvement in terms of dye adherence and fastness properties and can thus be recommended for industrial application.

The United States has been experiencing economic change in many ways, particularly in the form of manufacturing competition from Asia. East Asia is emerging as the dominant region of the world for the manufacturing of computers. Most, if not all, major companies in the personal computer (PC) industry have manufacturing facilities in Southeast Asia. These include U.S. firms such as IBM, Apple, Compaq, and Hewlett‐Packard, Taiwanese challengers such as Acer and Mitac, and Japanese firms such as NEC. Still, some PC manufacturing operations remain in the U.S. despite large differences in labor costs, cost of capital, and tax structures. Clearly, the establishment of a production facility is not a simple matter of cheap labor or being close to markets. The decision is a complex one involving many variables. This paper addresses some of these variables, and how PC companies deal with them, in considering manufacturing as an issue in corporate strategy.

Many manufacturers are transforming into manufacturing service industry to enhance their value creation. Adopting the value‐added chain model, this study aimed to conduct four case studies, including Acer, Giant, TSMC and Eternal, to verify the high‐valued strategies and the common characteristics of service provisions.

Four case studies, including Acer, Giant, TSMC and Eternal, were conducted to verify the high‐valued strategies and the common characteristics of service provisions. Specifically, these companies are selected from different industry and value chain position to enhance the robustness of the research findings.

This study concluded that the manufacturing firms strengthen their position as system integrator. The provision of high‐valued services is orientated toward the integration of the value chain stages according to the industry and business model. The companies are going to upstream or downstream, outsource non‐core manufacturing activities, and sell some manufacturing assets. The high‐valued service strategies provided the manufacturing firms with new approaches to compete in a rapidly changing economy. The findings also provided the direction for the emerging economies in confronting with industrial structure transformation.

This study focuses on the transformation of four manufacturing firms toward providing high value‐added services. The results conclude that manufacturing firms can integrate forward and backward stages in the value‐added chain, and provide the knowledge‐based services including R&D, marketing, information system, branding, financial and after‐sale services to enhance the market value of their products. This study argues that the high value‐added service strategies can be a great opportunity for the manufacturers.

There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to satisfy this gap in scholarship.

The paper concerns a particular episode in the cultural history of education; an episode upon which print media of the 1930s sheds a distinctive light. The paper therefore draws extensively on 1930s press reports to: contextualise the key educational debates and prime-movers inspiring verse-writing pedagogy in Australian education, particularly distance education, in order to; concentrate specific attention on the creation and popular reception of Brave Young Singers (1938), the first and only anthology of children's poetry written entirely by students of the correspondence classes of Western Australia.

Published under the auspices of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) with funds originating from the Carnegie Corporation, two men in particular proved crucial to the development and culmination of Brave Young Singers. As the end result of a longitudinal study conducted by James Albert Miles with the particular support of Frank Tate, the publication attracted acclaim as a research document promoting ACER's success in educational research investigating the “experiment” of poetry-writing instruction through correspondence schooling.

The paper pays due critical attention to a previously overlooked anthology of Australian children's poetry while simultaneously presenting an original account of the emergence and implementation of verse-writing instruction within the Australian correspondence class curriculum of the 1930s.

Today’s knowledge economy era is characterized by short product life‐cycles, dynamic customer requirements and complex business processes, knowledge management (KM) is becoming the pivot of new product development. In this article, the interactions between five activities of KM and new product development process are discussed in detail. Then, a novel concept – electronic new product development (E‐NPD) is put forward. E‐NPD is defined as the convergence of customer relationship, business processes, enterprise IT applications, and knowledge management system necessary to perform continuous innovation through new business model in the new knowledge‐based economy. Based on a case study in the high‐tech industry, we demonstrate that the convergence of KM and new product development have greatly enhanced the efficiency of new product development, accordingly led to the success of new product. In the end, it is concluded that competence of NPD is from KM by describing the E‐NPD structure as an organism.

This research was designed to expand the understanding of how brand familiarity may affect the motivation to process word-of-mouth (WOM) information in brand evaluation. The pre-WOM brand attitude certainty is expected to explain the moderation effect. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Two experiments were conducted. The study participants were undergraduate students from a major university in Singapore. The main statistical analysis was done using a two-way analysis of covariance.

The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the prediction that consumers are more likely to use the perceived expertise of the WOM sender to evaluate an unfamiliar brand vs a familiar brand. Experiment 2 also provides some preliminary evidence that this interaction effect may be due to the difference in certainty of the study respondents in regards to the pre-WOM evaluation of unfamiliar and familiar brand.

This manipulation method of presenting WOM in a printed format may understate the impact of WOM. A more vivid manipulation of WOM that allows for a feedback loop may be considered for future research.

The results highlight the importance of considering the strength dimensions of brand attitudes (e.g. attitude certainty) in the marketplace. For marketers of unfamiliar brands, source factors (e.g. expertise of WOM sender) are important to consider for effective use of WOM to market their products. For familiar brands, source factors are less relevant.

This paper highlights the importance of considering attitude certainty and the subsequent malleability of attitude toward new information about the brand in the marketplace. Hence, marketers and researchers who are interested in changing brand attitude should take meta-attitude factors into consideration.