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This study aims to compare the purchase intention of counterfeit outdoor products between Taiwan and Hong Kong consumers.

A total of 584 respondents from Hong Kong (n = 247, 42%) and Taiwan (n = 337, 58%) were recruited for the study. Data analysis was performed by using structural equation modelling techniques.

The results showed that consumers' perceived risk had a negative influence on attitude and intention to purchase counterfeit outdoor products. Moreover, attitude towards buying counterfeit outdoor products, perceived behavioural control and subjective norm had positive impacts on purchase intention. Brand consciousness, however, had a negative influence on purchase intention. The multi-group analysis identified significant differences between Hong Kong and Taiwanese respondents.

This study provides a better understanding of how these factors affect purchase intention of counterfeit outdoor products across different cultures.

Ethical decision making, business ethics.

This case is applicable to MBA, EDP and EMBA courses.

TOREAD, a professional provider of outdoor equipment in China, started in business by producing and selling tents. To meet market demand, TOREAD expanded its product line which ranges from outdoor durable tent products to “pan-outdoor” products including footwear and clothing. During the critical expansion phase, TOREAD was challenged by a quality problem in a batch of outsourced sandals that had been manufactured by a contracted supplier. By researching different options and going through an ethical decision making process, TOREAD made the choice of destroying all “problem sandals”. Since then, TOREAD has focused development on product quality improvement and product innovation to establish a sustainable brand image and generate social benefits. TOREAD's decision making in the critical development phase helped it to become the leader in the outdoor product industry in China.

This case may be used for courses such as business ethics and strategy. By learning this case, students can understand the process of making ethical decisions when facing moral dilemmas among corporate decision makers, employees and relevant interested parties, and learn how to make strategic decisions to balance company profit growth and social benefits in critical development phases.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

This case describes the process that entrepreneur Paul Farrow went through to establish his kayak company between 1992 and 1996. After being laid off from a more traditional corporate position, Farrow came across an idea that suited his business skills, experience, and values. The case chronicles the steps he took to be the first in the industry to design and produce an inexpensive, high-performance recreational kayak from recycled plastic materials. Key to Walden Paddlers' $1-million sales in 1995 was the company's ability to forge close alliances with key suppliers and customers while keeping fixed costs down by managing a virtual corporation.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how a competitive company develops its own method to create innovation by utilizing imitation and learning.

The paper examines the case of Fast Retailing from the viewpoint of imitation strategy.

Fast Retailing constantly explores and imports business ideas, evolves its business model through trial and error and finally creates innovation.

The paper emphasizes the importance of imitation strategy that flexibly accepts and extends business ideas through learning, creates new values by evolving a business model and combines them with corporate identity and brand.

The case study of Fast Retailing suggests that the successful imitation is enabled by flexible corporate culture and redefining its corporate identity and brand through the process of evolving its business model.

This study aims to investigate the extent to which the presence of chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) in top management teams (TMTs) helps firms to reduce the incidence of product recalls.

The authors identified all recalls for the period 2010–2017 issued by publicly held firms regulated by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. These data were subsequently combined with information on TMT composition from BoardEx and financial performance data from Compustat to create a unique data set.

The study identified a significant and negative association between CSCO presence and incidence of product recalls. The evidence also supports the conjecture that this association is stronger in larger firms, indicating that CSCOs are especially effective when operating within more complex supply chains.

The findings provide important insights into quality management in contemporary supply chains and indicate that assigning specific responsibility for supply chain management to a TMT member improves product reliability.

These findings contribute to the growing literature on the underlying causes of a product recall by identifying corporate governance antecedents of external quality failures of this kind.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how global operations of manufacturing companies influence the choice of product architecture decisions, ranging from integral to modular product designs.

The authors perform a multiple-case study of three global manufacturing companies with integral and modular product architectures.

The authors find that the internal network capabilities, the number of capable plants, the focus of component plants, the focus of assembly plants, the distances from key suppliers to internal plants, and the number of market segments significantly influence the choice of integral vs modular architecture.

This study is limited to three large manufacturing companies with global operations. However, the authors investigate both integral and modular products. The authors develop propositions that can be tested in further survey research.

The findings show that the type of global operations network influences the decision on product architecture, such that certain global operations characteristics support integral product designs, while other characteristics support modular designs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this paper is the first study on the explicit impact of global operations on product architecture, rather than the other way around.

South American countries have experienced the arrival of large US and European retailers that attempt to occupy an important position in these markets. Nonetheless, the situation in Chile differs from its neighboring countries. The largest retailers in Chile are local family businesses that have established themselves as legitimate organizations and are well regarded in the Chilean business community. Based on an analysis of the three major sectors of retailing in Chile, this paper describes the actions taken by Chilean retailers to defend themselves effectively against the attempts of foreign retailers to operate in their market, and the outcomes resulting from this process. By having to deal with strong local and foreign competition, Chilean retailers imitated the best practices of foreign competitors and learned to adapt their retail offer to satisfy the local customers' needs.

The integration of supply chains together with the disintegration of individual actors in the supply chain shifts the focus from actors to challenges in the interaction between actors. This paper aims to identify risk strategies for different supplier interactions in triadic configurations to outline supply strategies.

Companies participating in a research project recounted the challenges they faced regarding the integration of customer order-based management and supply from a triad perspective. Six triad configurations were identified, based on the literature, resulting in three risk strategies, which were empirically illustrated in practice by the participating companies.

A key finding is that a triad perspective for a customer-differentiated approach to supplier interaction results in a material classification that highlights the circumstances in which to apply “balance efficiency”, “postpone”, “balance responsiveness” and “speculate” supply strategies.

The research has focused on process drivers and controllability, and the results may require careful interpretation when there is a mix of standardized and customized products because further interaction differentiation may then be required.

The strategies developed herein provide guidelines for differentiated supplier interaction with explicit focus on triads where customer actors directly influence supplier actors. This approach highlights how outsourcing must be carefully executed when supplier actors are involved in delivery to customer orders.

The paper sheds new light on how customer requirements impact supplier interaction in terms of decoupling points related to both delivery strategy and control strategy. The study also presents a novel application of the Kraljic matrix in in terms of risk strategies in different triad configurations.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the characteristics of complexity and how a retail supply chain can contain complexity in itself. A case has been provided to show the measurement of complexity with/without information sharing and the relation of complexity with the performance measures. Quantification of the complexity will help the practitioners to take strategic actions.

System dynamics simulation has been used to model the retail supply chain with and without information sharing and data visibility. Entropy-based metric used for quantification and comparison of complexity based on the outputs of the models. Performance measures proposed for the retail supply chains to understand the effect of data visibility.

Paper provides insight about the complexity of retail supply chain perspective. Using system dynamics modelling can be a useful way to perform what-if type analysis before business process changes. Including both complexity and performance measures can be useful to understand if the complexity is good or bad for the business and if it is in manageable amount.

Paper can encourage the future research on retail supply chains.

Approach can be useful to analyse what-if type analysis in practice easily. It can support strategic decision making process.

Combines retail supply chain with complexity and performance measurement.

In view of high consumption situation of raw materials in the apparel industry due to unique and diversified style, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the application of pattern transformation between clothing and tent, explore the feasibility of extending multi-functional product and provide experimental demonstration for realizing 5R (Reduce, Reevaluate, Reuse, Recycle, Rescue) design goal of garment product.

According to the results of market research, in order to make single product have the functions of both outdoor couple clothing and simple tent, the planar patterns of clothing and tent are compared and transformed to make them compatible with each other, then the removable multi-functional design and technique processing are adopted.

It was found that outdoor clothing and tent with similar application occasions and raw materials could realize the assumption of multi-functional product. Their combination has the functions of both clothing and tent by wearing and assembling.

By means of this transformation design, the diversification and enjoyment of garment styles and functions can be realized. This helps to improve the energy efficiency of raw materials and accessories by increasing the frequency of product reuse and sharing. In addition, the enjoyment design of products also helps to lead and promote ecological consumption.