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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of shipyard and shipowner heterogeneity on the price formation for individual newbuilding contracts.

The model controls for the shipbuilding market cycle, input costs, firm size, yard experience and contract-specific variables and captures the impact of yard and owner heterogeneity in fixed-effects regressions. The data sample contains contract information on 3,759 tankers, bulkers and container vessels constructed at 77 shipyards between 1990 and 2014.

Although the newbuilding price benchmarks (market conditions) and gross domestic product per capita (salary costs) are influential covariates, the main conclusion is that shipyards and, particularly, shipowners play an influential role on the US$ per Compensated Gross Tonnage price level in individual contracts.

The paper represents the first study of the impact of buyer and seller heterogeneity at the micro level in the shipbuilding market.

This study aims to measure the productivity of 21 major shipyards in China, South Korea and Japan.

Data envelopment analysis was applied to measure the productivity of shipyards. The contemporaneous and intertemporal productivity scores of each shipyard were measured. Additionally, the technical gaps among shipyards in China, South Korea and Japan were measured and compared.

The results indicate that Japan led the global shipbuilding industry in 2014 and South Korea dominated in 2015. Additionally, from 2014 to 2015, shipyards in South Korea and Japan maintained their levels of productivity. Comparatively, major shipyards in China made substantial progress from 2014 to 2015, revealing their strong ambition to improve productivity.

This study first used a metafrontier framework to measure the technical gap of shipyards among major shipbuilding countries. The model and approach objectively analyze the productivity of major shipyards and considers their nationalities. Additionally, this study is the first to measure changes in the productivity of shipyards. By decomposing the metafrontier Malmquist productivity index, major shipyards were categorized into eight sets. The results of this study can provide a clear direction for shipyards to improve their productivity.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the partner selection criteria reported by maritime firms in Norway. The study aims to analyze how a maritime firm's competitive advantage can be enhanced by the selection of the right partner with reference to a strategic alliance.

A multiple‐case study methodology was used. Archival, survey and interview data were explored relating to the partner selection process reported by Norwegian maritime firms. Primary data were gathered from semi‐structured personal interviews with managers of Norwegian maritime firms.

Case study evidence suggests that the strategic alliances were successful when partners had been carefully selected. As detected elsewhere, successful alliances were associated with partners that had managed to build trustful and honest relationships, had common strategic goals, and partners that supplied resources and competencies. Notably, it was detected that cyclicality in the maritime industry shaped the partner selection process. Trust between partners was used as mechanism to reduce uncertainty relating to the strategic alliance process. Firms seeking long‐term alliances selected partners with substantial capital and financial stability to survive a market's downturn, as well as the resources required for expansion during a recession.

Presented findings have implications for practitioners, especially for managers of shipping firms, banks, shipyards, producers of ship equipment, ship design firms, and ship brokers. Practitioners need to be aware that the rationale for inter‐firm collaboration change over time, and motives are linked to the phase of the maritime cycle. Inter‐firm collaboration provides competitive advantage benefits to firms and collaboration can protect as well as create jobs and can create wealth in maritime communities.

A novel conceptual contribution is the exploration of links between maritime industrial cyclicality and the partner selection process relating to strategic alliances. The study also adds to debates relating to the profiles of internationalizing smaller firms.

This paper aims to examine whether in old industrial regions, the trajectory of clusters follows that of their corresponding industry or deviates from it and which are the factors that account for cluster evolution. This paper deals with the issue of how established clusters either renew or transform themselves in such regions and how they adapt to changes in their corresponding international industries.

This research paper draws from in-depth case studies on six industrial clusters, takes a longitudinal perspective and uses a multi-level and qualitative analysis. Based on existing literature, the paper suggests and exploratory analytical framework with four alternative scenarios for cluster evolution and three broad factors: cluster knowledge base, social capital at cluster and region-level and public policies.

Clusters do not always follow the life cycle of its dominant industry. The paper clearly shows a diversity of cluster evolution across clusters and even within clusters (at subcluster level). This study suggests that cluster knowledge diversity and heterogeneity allow to broaden the scope of evolutionary trajectories available; the same goes for social capital at cluster and region levels.

The main limitation of this paper lies in its qualitative approach that makes its conclusions more suggestive than conclusive. In any case, further research on other Basque clusters may corroborate or question its findings.

The paper offers an empirical and longitudinal study on cluster evolution, very much needed to the ongoing theoretical discussion on this issue. So far, there are very few empirical studies on cluster evolution with this perspective. At the same time, it presents a theoretical framework to analyse diversity of cluster evolution in old industrial regions that builds on Menzel and Fornah’s (2010) model.

The paper aims to explore the effects of geographic proximity among firms in value networks on service provision and service exchange.

A case study of the offshore supply vessel shipbuilding and shipping cluster in the North-Western Møre region of Norway with focus on the new ship contracting process.

The case study reveals how service provision and service exchange are facilitated by geographical proximity among firms.

Study findings should be validated in further research, and the effects of other forms of proximity (cultural, social, cognitive and institutional) on co-creation of value also need to be considered. Considering the role of operant resources in developing competence in clusters and wider value networks offers interesting opportunities for further research.

This study proposes an alternative view of co-creation of value in value networks and responds to calls for research on how value network attributes affect aspects of co-creation of value: service provision and service exchange. The study contributes to more knowledge on the systemic nature of value creation in value networks.

This paper aims to add to the understanding of dynamic capabilities (DC) as sources of competitive advantage of successful Asian-Pacific shipping companies by demonstrating that DC development unfolds in three steps, from recognition that the environment has changed, to the decision to deploy DC, to assets re-orchestration.

Based on an approach involving two illustrative case studies, the author analyzed DC development of Chinese and Singaporean-based shipping groups in depth. The analysis was centered on DC by investigating how strategic decision-making on vertical integration, diversification and implementation of new technologies can be underpinned by developing DC to create sustained advantages.

The author found that strategic components of DC are rooted in strategic decision-making to initiate changes on the corporate and even on an operational level.

While capability development is thoroughly studied, capability erosion has not been integrated into the research. The exploration of human capital as a firm’s idiosyncratic resource in assets orchestration capabilities can be future work.

The proposed research contributes to the debate on micro foundations of DC and provides insights for practitioners striving for retaining competitive advantages.

Regarding implications for the society, the research shows how the DC serve to generate competitive advantages. The author has presented a logical structure of the competitive advantage paradigm as a product of DC and business models that can be useful to decision makers.

The research offers insights into the composition of micro foundations of DC and demonstrates that DC can be unbounded into well-known and concrete strategic and operational management activities.

This paper presents the second-generation estimates for the Italian engineering industry in 1911, a year documented both by the customary demographic census, and the first industrial census. The first part of this paper uses the census data to estimate the industry’s value added, sector by sector; the second further disaggregates each sector by activity, and estimates the value added, employment, physical product, and metal consumption of each one. A third, concluding section dwells on the dependence of cross-section estimates on time-series evidence. Three appendices detail the specific algorithms that generate the present estimates; a fourth, a useful sample of firm-specific data.

Given the lack of focus on a standardized measurement framework (e.g. benchmarking tool) to assess and quantify complexity within the supply chain, this study has developed a unified supply chain complexity (SCC) index and validated its utility by examining the relationship with firm performance. More importantly, it examines the role of firm owners' business knowledge, sales strategy and board management on the relationship between SCC and firm performance.

In this study, the unit of analysis is Indian manufacturing companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). This research has merged panel data from two secondary data sources: Bloomberg and Prowess and empirically operationalized five key SCC drivers, namely, number of suppliers, the number of supplier countries, the number of products, the number of plants and the number of customers. The study employs panel data regression analyses to examine the proposed conceptual model and associated hypotheses. Moreover, the present study employs models that incorporate robust standard errors to account for heteroscedasticity.

The results show that complexity has a negative and significant effect on firm performance. Further, the study reveals that an owner's business knowledge and the firm's effective sales strategy and board management can significantly lessen the negative effect of SCC.

This study develops an SCC index and validates its utility. Also, it presents a novel idea to operationalize the measure for SCC characteristics using secondary databases like Prowess and Bloomberg.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of heterogeneous strategies for new knowledge development in the internationalization processes of firms.

A typology of international learning strategies is developed. The typology is supported by a case study of seven Swedish international firms that show heterogeneous strategies. The case study suggests links between learning strategies and international growth.

The results suggest an international learning-strategy typology derived from extant theory on knowledge acquisition in internationalization, constituted by four types: Passive Learners, Endogenous Learners, Exogenous Learners, and Diversified Learners. The results further suggest that the typology is empirically relevant and, moreover, suggest a potential heterogeneity in outcomes for these strategies. The study suggests that there is a link between learning strategy and outcomes in terms of growth and international sales distribution.

The strategy for how firms learn when internationalizing has implications for the firm's international growth. The case-study design has limitations for generalizability and future quantitative validation is called for.

Managers need to be aware of the consequences of their learning strategy for the internationalization performance. This study informs strategic decision making for how to learn from international markets.

The results suggest a typology based on heterogeneity of international learning strategies and their consequences for internationalization.

The national logistics policy report published by Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Tourism in 2011 proposes to establish international logistics strategy teams in 10 different regions around Japan to satisfy the increasing demand for advance transportation infrastructure and stay competitive in Asia Pacific. The globalization of world economies creates many opportunities as well as challenges for international logistics companies to gain more business chances in this changing environment. The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of international logistics companies and explores the quality function deployment in terms of quality evaluation method. The logistics service is particularly characterized by offering a series of transport solution and including other logistics activities. The major customers of the logistics services are the industrial clients. The customer satisfaction is key managerial mission since the competitiveness is a growing issue in this industry. The quality function deployment is one of the unique procedures to expose the requirements of customer and transform them into managerial tasks by cross correlation analysis between requirements and technical measures. The empirical study is performed to investigate service quality of the logistics industry by focusing on a group of leading logistics companies.