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The purpose of this paper is to map the cluster in the leather and shoes sector for improving the competitiveness of the firms. Toward this end, the study is organized to examine the impact of clustering on competitiveness improvement. The influence of competitive elements and performance (Porter’s diamond) and balanced score card was utilized.

A random sample of 131 respondents was chosen during the period from May 2016 to July 2016. A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was applied to investigate the research model. This approach was chosen because of its ability to test casual relationships between constructs with multiple measurement items. Researchers proposed a two-stage model-building process for applying SEM. The measurement model was first examined for instrument validation, followed by an analysis of the structural model for testing associations hypothesized by the research model.

The main findings show that there is a unidirectional causal relationship between improvements of performance and achieve competitiveness and also reveal that the Palestinian shoes and leather cluster sector is vital and strong, and conclude that clustering can achieve competitiveness for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Future research can examine the relationship between clustering and innovation. The effect of clustering using other clustering models other than Porter’s model is advised to be used for future research.

The relationships among clustering and competitiveness may provide a practical clue to both, policymakers and researchers on how cluster enhances economic firms such as a skilled workforce, research, development capacity, and infrastructure. This is likely to create assets such as trust, synergy, collaboration and cooperation for improved competitiveness.

The findings of this study provide background information that can simultaneously be used to analyze relationships among factors of innovation, customer’s satisfaction, internal business and financial performance. This study also identified several essential factors in successful firms, and discussed the implications of these factors for developing organizational strategies to encourage and foster competitiveness.

There is a growing awareness of intellectual property (IP) rights in European public research institutes. Since 2008 a non‐binding recommendation of the European Commission has been, in effect, proposing a consistent policy for IP in research and development (R&D). While there is a broad consensus on the overall goal – achieving a higher competitiveness of European industry in the international market place – there are, however, conflicting expectations on the micro‐management: are technology transfer agencies to be considered as profit‐centers, cost‐centers, mediators or all of the above? This paper seeks to provide an answer

The Physikalisch‐Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) is the national metrology institute of Germany with 1,900 employees and an annual budget of €145 million. It has established a micro‐management policy for IP rights, which is successfully fostering the development of modern instrumentation for metrology and may serve as an example for other public institutions as well. While it is obliged by law to operate as a regular market participant when licensing patents, there are additional conditions, some with the status of a law or a binding government decision as well.

The BSC approach, implemented at PTB, provides guidelines to reconcile seemingly conflicting requirements for a public entity while at the same time generating economic benefits in terms of additional income from licensing. In the authors' opinion this approach keeps costs at a reasonable level, fosters inventors' motivation and furnishes data for decisions for the technology transfer office as well as for the leadership of the institution.

To manage this conflict of goals the authors developed and implemented a balanced score card (BSC) system for IP management in order to optimize licensing income generation, cut costs, keep the inventor's motivation high and simultaneously realize macro‐economic technology transfer tasks. The BSC was originally introduced for the private sector by Norton and Kaplan in 1992, in response to a failure of purely monitoring financial indicators. The balanced score card considers economic and non‐economic factors, often denoted as “soft”. It is balanced with respect to result‐oriented indicators, like licensing income, and with respect to process‐oriented indicators, like the acceptance rate of inventions for patenting. And it tries to deduce from a trend of an indicator in the past a prediction of future development, associated with recommendations for actions to influence the ongoing process. The paper discusses the issues.

This paper discusses the application of the balanced score‐card (BSC) concept as a widely used management framework for optimal measurement of organisational performance within NHS facilities directorates and discusses the fundamental points to cover in its implementation. Thereby, the paper identifies this framework as a strategic measurement and management system for facilities management. BSC formulation within NHS estates and facilities is described as a case study based on a facilities directorate situated in the north west of England, and discussion covers its implementation procedures, evaluation standards and reporting process. The paper further establishes the conceptual framework for performance management for the facilities directorate, as well as consistent techniques useful in undertaking the performance management administration and system oversight functions.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the balance score card (BSC) approach based Lean Six Sigma (LSS) performance measurement system and investigate the critical measures currently practiced by Indian manufacturing organizations.

This study offers insights of LSS performance measurement from manufacturing industry. Initially, the BSC-based framework is developed to recognize the adoption of LSS performance measures. Then, the framework is applied to nine Indian manufacturing organizations to assess the LSS performance measure practice.

The BSC-based framework of LSS performance evaluation for manufacturing industry is formulated. Then, adoption of these LSS performance measures is investigated with nine Indian manufacturing organizations. The result indicates significant variability in terms of practicing level of LSS measures. However, the majority of organizations are more sensitive to the customer perspectives.

This study reveals a background as to why the performance measurement is required for the success of LSS and for providing practical guidelines for designing performance metrics. The framework interrelates and captures various LSS perspectives and indicator measures, and furnishes a comprehensive outlook of the organization for strategic analysis. This study provides BSC-based template for performing the benchmarking study. This analysis may serve as a reference point for manufacturing organization to determine their system weaknesses, and assist them to concentrate on their most vital and suitable criteria and objectives. However, the analysis contributes to the knowledge on LSS performance measurement system and catches differences in theory and practice, paving the approach to newer research.

This study renders an industry-oriented LSS performance measurement practical approach and suggests the easily adopted vital performance measures for different manufacturing organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) to prioritize its objectives. This will be achieved by providing strategy map using balanced score card (BSC) method.

This research result is based on 21 managers’ opinion about relation among university objectives, gathered by questionnaire. DEMATHEL method which is a structural decision-making model is used to process data in questionnaires and discover casual relationship between university objectives.

According to this research result “Having productive competent human resource that are committed to Islamic values and professional ethic” has the highest priority among FUM objectives while “Achieving educating excellence especially in graduate programs and research” has the lowest.

FUM managers need to focus on their human resources and enhance their competency in order to achieve academic excellence.

Achieving superiority in university competitive position based on its education and research activities is FUM vision. As a non-profit organization due to resource restriction and environmental circumstances it has to fulfill this goal with higher productivity. BSC as a performance management system will help it to achieve this goal by translating vision into objectives and defining casual relationship between them. This method is rarely studied in the context of universities especially in Iranian universities. This research applied strategy map, one of BSC implementation stages, in a public university in Iran to illustrate series of objectives that leads to mission accomplishment.

In today’s fast changing and non‐linear business environment the only way to gain competitive advantage is by managing intellectual capital, which is more commonly known as knowledge management (KM). There are basically three broad objectives of KM: leveraging the organisation’s knowledge; creating new knowledge or promoting innovation; and increasing collaboration and hence enhancing the skill level of employees. The most common KM programme involves development of a knowledge repository, and forming and nurturing of the communities of practice. These two, jointly, address all the three objectives of KM. Many organisations are embracing KM but few of them are able to implement it successfully to see the benefits. Implementation of KM is a strategic process and needs careful target setting and review. Organisations, which use balanced scorecard for strategy deployment, can effectively implement KM in their organisation by developing and deploying a KM index.

Higher education management institutions play a vibrant role in imparting managerial skills to the students to face the corporate world. Performance evaluation of such institutions is mandate to ensure the outcome quality. To establish this, the present research explored the critical performance indicators of management institutions using the balanced scorecard (BSC) approach.

This research explored the critical performance indicators of public, private and standalone management institutions in India. Data were collected from the representative sample of all the stakeholders in those management institutions. A specific vision was created and a systematic procedure was employed to arrive at the objectives, measures and metrics of the scorecard specific to the vision. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to perform analysis on the collected data. For the objectives and measures that evolved from confirmatory factor analysis, metrics were formulated based on the expert opinion.

The study resulted in 16 objectives, 46 measures and 54 metrics encompassing all the four perspectives of BSC. This paper has contributed a concrete, concise, comprehensive and context specific framework.

The nature of the BSC framework paves the way for continuous assessment and eventually helps the institutions to attain sustainable growth. This research contributes to the literature of balanced scorecard and also to the performance assessment of the management institutions.

BSC-based benchmarking is a unique contribution to the academia of management education to precisely measure the performance of institutions. The model comprehensively includes the indicators from all the perspectives of stakeholders in terms of objectives, measures and metrics, thus proposing a holistic assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to present a holistic approach regarding evaluation of knowledge management (KM) practices on organizational performance. The effects of seven critical success factors (CSFs), namely leadership role, organizational culture, KM strategy, processes and activities, training and education, information technology, and motivation and rewarding system, on organizational performance in the framework of four perspectives of balance scored card (BSC) approach were surveyed.

The research hypotheses were raised based on the four perspectives of this approach, namely, growth and learning, internal processes, customer and financial. By literature review, CSFs of KM and organizational performance along with their items were identified in the framework of BSC’s perspectives. Based on these constructs and their items an instrument was designed and distributed among managers and employees of the subsidiary firms of Iran National Petrochemical Company (INPC). Reliability of the instrument was calculated by Chronbach’s α for the two sections of the instrument i.e. KM practices and organizational performance. Also, using factor analysis the construct validity of the questionnaire was approved. Finally, based on the hypotheses of the study and using structural equation modeling the impacts of KM practices on organizational performance were investigated.

The results revealed that KM practices positively and meaningfully (though weak) impact overall organizational performance. This impact is significant only regarding growth and learning dimension and on the other dimensions is insignificant. Also, as customer and financial constructs were loaded on one factor based on the entity of their indicators we considered these two constructs as stakeholders construct. In addition, among the above mentioned seven CSFs, motivation and rewarding system obtained the lowest rank among the survey organizations.

The sample is restricted to only three companies, so gathering data from various parts of Iran including both manufacturing and service industries could increase the generalizability of the results obtained. Also, as in this study the data gathered were cross-sectional, a longitudinal study could help gain deeper understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship among the variables.

The most significant gap in the literature is the lack of enough application of statistical and comprehensive methods like BSC that KM makes a difference to organizational performance. This study contributes to the field of KM by empirically investigating the impact of KM practices on various measures of organizational performance in order to prove the suitability of a comprehensive approach like BSC.

This paper provides a brief account of the work of the PEI since its inauguration. Furthermore, a number of current issues are discussed such as the way the scope of the subject has been extended to broader issues including intellectual capital and the balanced score card. A final conclusion is drawn that while much has been achieved by the PEI and others, there are still many central measurement issues to be resolved in the future.

This article attempts to devise an integrated performance measurement framework to assess the Hong Kong Hospital Authority (HA) management system by harnessing previous performance measurement systems.

An integrated evaluative framework based on the balanced score card (BSC) was developed and applied using the case study method and longitudinal data to evaluate the HA's performance management system.

The authors unveil evolving HA performance indicators (PI). Despite the HA staff's explicit quality emphasis, cost control remains the primary focus in their performance measurements.

Data used in this study are from secondary sources, disclosed mostly by HA staff.

This study shows public sector staff often attach too much importance to cost control and easily measurable activities at the expense of quality and other less easily measurable attributes'.

A balanced performance measurement system, linked to health targets, with a complementary budgeting process that supports pertinent resource allocation is yet to be implemented in Hong Kong's public hospitals.