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As part of their growth strategy, many firms choose to expand internationally. Such expansion is an especially important decision for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These SMEs are vital to China's economy and have grown in importance since the reform and opening-up, measured in terms of size, number, financial status, or profitability. In addition, the Chinese electronics sector plays an important role in the economy. This inquiry explores the internationalisation behaviour of 50 Chinese electronics SMEs. The findings are presented and implications drawn for future research, along with those for policy makers and practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast manufacturing strategies and practices, and its impact on business performance between Korean and Japanese firms in the electronics industry. It is based on the premise that: (1) manufacturing strategies and practices differ significantly between these two countries; and (2) these differences significantly impact firm's manufacturing operations and business performance. The focus of the study is to explore the differences that may exist between Japanese and Korean firms in manufacturing strategies and business practices by analyzing survey results of electronics firms from both countries. Differences between Japanese and Korean firms are investigated in several respects.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on contribution of technical efficiency change (TEC) and technological progress (TP) to output growth (OG) and addresses the issue of poor total factor productivity growth of electronics hardware industry during liberalization. Inter‐sector differences in productivity have been explained from the perspective of management decision making and their performances.

The analysis is primarily based on 81 electronics hardware firms with incessant operations from 1993 to 2004. The firms have been categorized into four homogenous sub‐sectors and the years into two periods.

The industry, in general, emphasized more on TP than TEC as the industry moved to a greater liberalization regime. The industry lacked the efforts to develop indigenous technology. It catered to huge domestic demand by importing technology without proper adaptation leading to poor TEC.

The limited database prevented us from exploring the impact of the entry of multi‐national companies, foreign direct investment and foreign investments on the productivity of the electronics firms. The inconsistent and missing data on tariff or duty rates for item‐wise products further limited their scope.

The differences in TEC and TP among sub‐sectors has been due to the differences in managerial decision making and management performance which are firm specific in nature.

This paper has applied a novel approach of combining two established but independent theories of estimating stochastic production function and then estimating OG as a function of IG, TEC and TP. This paper provides a valuable reference for Indian electronics hardware industry not only in reviewing their efficiency, but also focusing on enhancing their management performance.

The paper examines the role played by foreign direct investment in developing local linkages in Singapore’s electronics industry. Backward material linkages have developed as a result of two processes: the development of indigenous local suppliers, mostly within the fabricated parts sector, and foreign investment by overseas suppliers, especially in the hard disk drive sector. The economic development potential of these suppliers varies, and local suppliers in contract manufacturing offer the best hope for future indigenous growth within the supply base. Public policies targeted towards supplier development and upgrading the quality of multinationals play a significant role in facilitating local linkage development in Singapore.

This paper aims to analyze the influence of business decision on process efficiency and production technology in the communication equipment and consumer electronics sectors of Indian hardware electronics industry after liberalisation.

The study is based on 26 sample firms, belonging to the two sectors of Indian hardware electronics industry with continuous operation from 1993 to 2004. Estimation of the contribution of production technology and process efficiency to output growth is based on stochastic production function. Influence of business decisions on production technology and process efficiency is based on indigenously developed business decision model.

Sectors, in general, fail to achieve improvement in process efficiency in comparison to progress in production technology. The business decisions factors like improve capacity utilization and operational efficiency together with decisions to adopt vertical integration to help sample firms to achieve both progress in technology and improvement in process efficiency in the sectors. However, R&D investments and technology imports are costly for both, indicating inadequate and inappropriate investments made by the sample firms. Disinclination of firms towards improving or developing their own technology is evident from their high dependence on import of technology.

This study only analyses the role and importance of business decision factors in the past. What lies ahead is to meet the challenges and improve performance to withstand the stiff competition. This study suggests for further research about how to improve on the effectiveness of business decision factors that can help Indian hardware electronics industry to survive competition.

The paper develops a business decision model which analyses the impact of business decisions on production technology and process efficiency for a sample of firms in Indian hardware electronics industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a development model of the Korean IT industry based on the concept of open and cluster innovation and reveal the synergistic effects between the textile and electronic industries.

The analytical data on the Gumi Cluster are panel data mostly from the 1970s‐2000s. The specific case studies are based on the field research and in‐depth executive interviews for four firms.

Through analysis of the innovation structure of the Gumi Cluster, the paper found that the Korean electronics industry has successfully caught up with first movers like the Japanese and US electronics industries. In this catch‐up process, industrial clusters of the Korean electronic industry took on an open cluster and sought open and cluster innovation through collaborating with foreign firms and the other industries like the textile industry for making a rapid catch‐up.

The contribution of this study is to highlight the essential characteristics of cluster innovation and the practical growth patterns in the context of Korea which has achieved rapid technological catch‐up. Future studies may involve the innovation patterns of other industries.

Prior cluster research does not necessarily integrate the two streams of research: development of national industries; open innovation processes within the clusters. This paper represents a unique approach to integrate two streams through analyzing the electronic industry.

The purpose of this study is to explore green supply chain management (GSCM) practices and their relationship with organizational performance. More specifically, this research explores the effect of GSCM efforts and other organizational factors on firm performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that serve as suppliers to large customer firms in the electronics industry.

This study developed a research model relating GSCM practice and business performance through three organizational variables (employee satisfaction, operational efficiency, and relational efficiency) as moderators. Statistical analyses were based on the data collected, through survey questionnaires, from 223 SMEs in the electronics industry in Korea. Reliability, validity, and goodness‐of‐fit of the research model were tested by the widely accepted statistical tools. To test the hypotheses relating GSCM practice implementation and business performance, structural equation modeling was used.

The most anticipated finding of the study was a direct link between GSCM practice implementation and business performance. However, no statistical significance was found. Instead, significant indirect relationships were found between GSCM practice implementation and business performance through mediating variables of operational efficiency and relational efficiency. This result indicates that business performance will be improved when GSCM enhances operational efficiency and operational efficiency.

Research on GSCM is still at the early stage. Further refinement of the questionnaire is needed. Generalizability of the findings is also limited because of data collected from electronics firms in Korean. This study shed several important insights. The findings of this study are generally consistent with prior studies in other parts of the world. SMEs in the Korean electronics industry believe that GSCM practices help generate new opportunities to attract clients in addition to complying with the buyer firms' demand. It was also found that implementation of GSCM practices help improve operational and relational efficiencies of supplier firms.

Few empirical studies have been done in GSCM based on the conceptual footing of resource dependence theory. Also, this study was conducted from the supplier's perspective in examining the weaknesses of SME suppliers. Thus, the authors emphasize the importance of support from large buying firms for improving SME suppliers' green management capabilities.

This empirical study aims to examine an organizational response to the needs of e‐business, virtual organization, and associated determinants of its successful adoption in the Taiwanese electronics industry.

The research examined a large sample of Taiwanese electronics companies. A research population of Taiwanese electronics companies was drawn from firms listed on both the TAIEX and the OTC markets and included 305 firms. Questionnaires were sent to firm administrators who were asked the degree to which the company had undertaken virtual organizational structuring that was enabled by information technologies.

The findings of this research reveal significant impacts of individual and organizational factors, but no effect for environmental variables on virtual organization adoption.

While the results might provide clues for understanding the adoption of virtual organization structure in the manufacturing sector, there still remains uncertainty in generalizing to service industries. The variety of types of service firms and their outputs makes any generalization to services from this study difficult.

First, information technologies may provide the potential means to implement innovative organization structures, such as virtual organization, to respond to the pressures of change. Second, the adoption and diffusion of virtual organization might transform firms to meet the demands of e‐commerce.

The study identifies factors which may impact on the successful use of information technologies to implement innovative organization structures, such as virtual organizations, to respond to the pressures of change.

This study aims to refocus the analysis of global political economies using concepts from studies on Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) to track Taiwan’s rise in the Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) industry. Taiwanese electronics firms began to outpace their competitors from Japan in TFT-LCD industry’s competition from about the year 2000.

Drawing on depth interviews and analysis of secondary source material, newspaper and magazine.

A time factor that helps determine advantage and/or disadvantage of high-tech industry in Japan and Taiwan. Stable organizational structure and less talent mobility in the Japanese TFT-LCD firms may well have been an advantage initially in the transformation process from US firms’ experimental technologies to tacit mass production technologies, but proved to be a disadvantage in the subsequent competition with more mobile talent in Taiwanese firms eager to standardize mass production techniques. Japanese firms’ rigid organizational structure could not keep pace to the market-oriented technology strategy in the global TFT-LCD industry, lost competitive advantage in a rapid pace.

VoC literature should be focused to highlight two insights. The first is the premise of institutional forms specific to national models of capitalism. Patterns of technology transfer appear critical in the innovation process, and differ markedly between Taiwan and Japan. Second, the VoC literature suggests comparative institutional advantage.

Through the comparative analyses between Taiwanese capitalism model and Japanese counterparts, we can understand the reason and process of the rise of Taiwan in global TFT-LCD market.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a focal firm can manage sustainability in its lower-tier suppliers which lie beyond the firm’s visible horizon.

This paper presents a new approach to managing sustainability in multi-tier supply chains with an illustrative case study that analyzes how electronic equipment firms make efforts to verify that they are not using conflict minerals.

The nexus supplier (smelters in the electronics supply chain) plays a relevant role in increasing visibility and tracing the source of minerals, thus guaranteeing sustainability upstream in the supply chain.

The paper is based on a specific supply chain (i.e. electronics supply chain) and therefore its conclusions might be only partially generalized to other sectors.

Firms in complex supply chains need to make efforts to identify and manage nexus suppliers to extend sustainability upstream in the supply chain, especially beyond their visible horizon.

The paper focuses on management of sustainability in the invisible zone of the supply chain, which has been neglected in previous literature and is increasingly important to the managerial world in an economy with a growing number of global supply chains.