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The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of social capital on knowledge heterogeneity in order to advance the understanding of the effects and to reconcile existing inconsistent findings.

Survey data collected from 105 new product development (NPD) projects were analyzed with regression-based methods.

The results indicated that trust, centralization and shared vision as the three social capital dimensions generally have negative impacts on the domain and presentation dimensions of knowledge heterogeneity. However, the three dimensions of social capital do not exhibit consistent influences on the tacitness heterogeneity (i.e. an epistemological dimension of knowledge heterogeneity).

More research is needed to explore the role of social capital dimensions in developing a range of knowledge attributes of NPD teams, among which knowledge heterogeneity is one. The various dimensions of knowledge an NPD team possesses should have performance implications and deserve future investigation.

The study is one of the first documented attempts to demonstrate contingencies in the relationship between social capital and knowledge heterogeneity. The effect of social capital on knowledge heterogeneity should be understood at the level of dimensions of the two respective constructs.

This chapter examines gender diversity with a focus on the proportion of females in companies in Taiwan. The investigation also examines the effect of the proportion of females on company performance. The research used two Taiwan government databases offering statistics of individual indigenous companies in the manufacturing industries in 1996 and 2001, with a sample size of 8,622 in 1996 and 8,731 in 2001. Results show that the proportion of females in managerial, professional, and administrative jobs is increasing and is positively associated with company performance. By contrast, the proportion of females in operational-level jobs is decreasing, and its association with company performance is inconsistent. This study extends previous gender diversity research in management groups and suggests that women can be invaluable resources for business organizations in Taiwan.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid decision-making model for optimizing the initial design strategies of pre-sales housing, identifying factors affecting the initial design of housing, and developing different initial design approaches and strategies based on buyers’ preferences.

Indicators and factors in line with the local initial planning and design are created according to the design quality indicator framework. The important indicators and factors are screened out preliminarily with the fuzzy Delphi method and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory based analytic network process. The performances of two actual cases under similar site conditions are checked with regard to the overall residential sales rate and time on the market (TOM).

The result shows that the proposed model can effectively improve the sales rate, shorten the TOM and better complies with buyer design strategy demands, and thus positively correlating to economic value.

Pre-sales make possible the customized strategy of allowing future residents to participate in the housing design process. However, buyers’ participation in the design process is highly limited, and developers usually determine their planning and initial residential design strategies based on experience and intuition. With the proposed approach, the initial residential design of a project can be effectively intervened, so that home users can truly participate in the design, and the residential construction service can be provided in a unique, but non-universal way.