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Polyetheretherketone (PEEK) is used to manufacture biomedical implants because it has a high strength-to-weight ratio and high strength and is biocompatible. However, the use of fused deposition modeling to print a PEEK results in low strength and crystallinity. This study aims to use the Taguchi method to optimize the printing factors to obtain the highest tensile strength of the printed PEEK object. The annealing effect on printed PEEK object and crystallinity are also investigated.

This study determines the printing factors including the printing speed, layer thickness, printing temperature and extrusion width. Taguchi experimental design with a L9 orthogonal array is used to print the tensile specimen and carried out the tensile test to compare the tensile strength and porosity. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to determine the experimental error and to determine the optimization printing parameters to obtain the highest tensile strength. A multivariate linear regression analysis is used to obtain the linear regression equation for predicting the theoretical tensile strength. An X-ray analysis is achieved to evaluate the crystalline of printed object. The effect of annealing is investigated to improve the tensile strength of printed part. An intervertebral lumber device is printed to demonstrate the feasibility of the obtained optimization parameters for practical application.

Taguchi experiment designs nine sets of parameters to print the PEEK tensile specimen. The experimental results and the ANOVA present that the order in which the factors affect the tensile strength for printed PEEK parts is the layer thickness, the extrusion width, the printing speed and the printing temperature. The optimized printing parameters are a printing speed of 5 mm/s, a layer thickness of 0.1 mm, a printing temperature of 395 °C and an extrusion strand width of 0.44 mm. The average tensile strength of printed specimen with the optimized printing parameters is 91.48 MPa, which is slightly less than the theoretical predicted value of 94.34 MPa. After annealing, the tensile strength increases to 98.85 MPa, which is comparable to that for molded PEEK and the porosity decreases to 0.3 from 3.9%. X-ray diffraction results show that all printed and annealed specimens have a high degree of crystallinity. The printed intervertebral lumber device has ultimate compressive load of 13.42 kN.

The optimized printing parameters is suitable for low-price fused deposition modeling machine because it does not involve a table at high temperature and can print the PEEK object with high tensile strength and good crystalline. Annealing parameters offer a good solution for tensile strength improvement.

This study aims to examine the relationship between organizational capacity, slack resource, platform strategic choice and firm performance. It also tackles the endogenous issues regarding the strategic choice of platform types.

This study uses Heckman’s two-stage procedures to examine the relationship between the variables. The sample in this study comes from Compustat annual company and segment files. The sample used in the main analysis consists of 252 individual corporations globally and 3,528 firm-year observations from 2004–2017.

The empirical results suggest that: (1) firms are more likely to develop physical platforms than virtual platforms when they possess higher levels of available slack, potential slack, research and development (R&D) capacity and marketing capacity; (2) in general, firms developing physical platforms perform better than firms developing virtual platforms after the endogeneity bias are controlled; and (3) firms that choose to develop physical platforms perform better than if they had chosen to develop virtual platforms.

This study contributes to the platform research literature by proposing the endogenous role of platform type choice in firm performance in the context of the retail industry. Prior conceptual and theoretical platform studies have seldom focused on the retail industry through a strategic choice perspective. Furthermore, one of the contributions of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the research’s prediction using data from actual firms carried out by global physical and virtual platform companies. This study also presents many opportunities for further explorations on the relationship between firm strategic choice and firm performance in the context of platform retail industry.

The findings of this study suggest that firms must realize that their performance is not necessarily affected by these platform type choice determinants in terms of potential slack, available slack, R&D capacity and marketing capacity. By contrast, they should pay more attention to developing physical platforms if it is possible. The study findings indicate that although virtual platforms have grown rapidly because of the development of technology, firm performance is at all times superior when firms choose to develop physical platforms.

Prior platform studies have focused on the topic of network structure, platform architecture, pricing strategy, platform leadership and platform design and governance within the context of video game industry, software industry, hardware industry and telecommunications industry. Seldom of them focus on other industries through a strategic choice perspective. Furthermore, one of the contributions of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the research’s prediction using data from actual firms carried out by global physical and virtual platform companies.

The purpose of this paper is to review and re-examine the role of the organization-level determinants from the perspectives of competence-based views.

Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses in a sample of 80 cases drawn from a population of the top 5,000 Taiwanese firms listed in the yearbook published by the China Credit Information Service Incorporation.

The empirical results indicate that formalization is positively related to new product performance while decentralization has an inverse U-shaped curvilinear effect on new product performance. Furthermore, the regression findings also indicate that market-oriented strategy negatively moderates the relationship between formalization and new product performance, while technology-oriented strategy positively moderates the curvilinear relationship between decentralization and new product performance.

Extant literatures have paid attention to investigating the determinants to the performance of the new product development, but some of the results, such as in the organizational levels, are confusing and mixed. Contrary to previous works, the purpose of this paper is to review and re-examine the role of the organization levels determinants from the perspectives of competence-based view.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between knowledge management capacity and organizational performance from the social interaction perspective.

The empirical study employs a questionnaire approach. The sample for this study is drawn from the population of the top 5,000 Taiwanese firms listed in the yearbook published by the China Credit Information Service Incorporation. Regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses in a sample of 105 Taiwanese firms.

The findings suggest that two assessments of knowledge management capacity, knowledge acquisition and dissemination, and the communication factor of social interaction are positively related to organizational performance. Further, social interaction has complementary or synergistic interaction effects with knowledge management capacity on organizational performance.

Given the need for the use of knowledge management capacity as an enabler to improve organization outcome, firms need to be aware that social interaction would moderate the link between knowledge management capacity and organizational performance. Therefore, firms should pay special attention to formulate appropriate social interaction conditions under which knowledge acquisition and dissemination are most likely to enhance organizational performance.

This study contributes to the literature by theoretically developing a conceptual model and then empirically examining the relationships among knowledge management capacity, social interaction, and organizational performance.

The aim of this paper is to investigate predictors of online medical research by nurses.

A cross‐sectional study was conducted and a representative sample of nurses was selected from three Taiwanese hospitals from 1 January to 31 March 2007. A total of 274 female nurses completed the questionnaire.

The results indicate that the expectancy value of internet characteristics, attitude towards online information seeking and perceived credibility of online information significantly and positively predict online information‐seeking behaviour in nurses. Specifically, the multiple hierarchical regression analysis revealed that the perceived credibility of online information is the strongest predictive variable of online information seeking.

The findings of this study suggest that an important task for professional health organisations is to educate nurses in assessing the reliability of medical information found on the web, such as looking for credible institutional sites, verifying available information with that from other sources or sites, and using common sense.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of organizational climate and structure on knowledge management and firm innovativeness from the social capital and social network perspectives.

The empirical study employed a questionnaire approach. The sample for this study was drawn from the population of the top 5,000 Taiwanese firms listed in the yearbook published by the China Credit Information Service Incorporation. Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses in a sample of 146 Taiwanese firms.

The findings suggest that knowledge management is positively related to firm innovativeness. In addition, the effect of knowledge management on innovativeness is positively moderated by supportive climate and decentralized, integrated, and less formalized structure. The study also examines the effects of organizational climate and structure on knowledge management and the results indicate that innovative and supportive climate are positively related to knowledge management. When the organizational structure is less formalized, more decentralized and integrated, knowledge management is more enhanced.

Firms need to be aware of the critical role of organizational structure and climate in the transition process of knowledge management to innovative products or services.

This study contributes to the literature by investigating the relationships among organizational contexts of climate and structure, knowledge management, and firm innovativeness from the social capital and social network perspectives.

This study attempts to investigate the relationships among organizational capabilities, strategic choice, and firm performance and examine three questions: What are the relationships between organizational capabilities and the firm's strategic choice – contract manufacturing and branding? Do branding firms perform better than contract manufacturing firms after controlling for endogeneity bias? Do firms usually choose their strategy (contract manufacturing/branding) appropriately to achieve a better performance under the conditions they encounter?

The empirical study employs a questionnaire approach to collect data from the population of the top 5,000 Taiwanese firms listed in the yearbook published by the China Credit Information Service Incorporation for testing the validity of the model and research hypotheses. This study uses a Heckman two‐step estimation procedure and follows the procedure proposed by Shaver to examine the economic implications of strategic choice on firm performance.

Firms are more likely to adopt the branding strategy when they have better marketing and R&D capabilities while they are more likely to choose the contract manufacturing strategy when they possess superior manufacturing and process capabilities; in general branding firms perform better than contract manufacturing firms after controlling for endogeneity bias; and firms achieve a better performance if their strategic choice (contract manufacturing/branding) fits the conditions they encounter.

This study contributes to the marketing literature by exploring an important issue of strategic choice (contract manufacturing or branding) and contributes to the strategy literature by proposing the endogenous role of strategic choice in the relationship between organizational capabilities and firm performance.

Firms should take into account organizational capabilities when choosing a contract manufacturing strategy or branding strategy. Further, managers should not ignore matching their strategic choice (contract manufacturing/branding) with the conditions they encounter in order to optimize firm performance.

The strategic choice of branding or contract manufacturing is a prevalent phenomenon that has received little attention in the strategy and marketing literature. Based on the competence‐based perspective, this study examines the relationships among organizational capabilities, strategic choice, and firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of two dimensions of relational risks, namely, opportunism behavior and interest conflict, on knowledge flow and to explore the moderating effect of network power among these untested relationships and to examine the positive effect of opportunism behavior and interest conflict.

This paper adopts survey data collected from 180 enterprises in China's high-technology industry and examines the relationship between relational risks, network power and knowledge flow.

This research empirically shows that opportunism behavior and interest conflict significantly and negatively impact on knowledge flow. Those relationships are positively moderated by network power.

To be more generalized to the high-technology industry, future research should adopt the quantitative research, which can obtain more comprehensive information to explore the nature of phenomenon. The future research can also combine with other variables. In addition, this research extends the current literature by investigating the relationship of so far understudied theorized antecedents.

This research enriches the related network perspective literature by providing new insight combining relational risks and knowledge flow. Especially, the moderating effect of network power is empirically examined.

This study considers transitive service triads, which consist of three dyads formed by three actors: supplier, logistics service provider and customer, who remain directly linked by one or more of the upstream and downstream flows of products, information and finances. This paper aims to explore the link between information governance, decentralized information technologies and supply chain self-organization, and their resulting impact on network performance in the transitive service triads.

Drawing upon the tenets of the theory of complex adaptive systems and supply chain practice view, this paper involves an empirical investigation that uses survey data gathered from transitive service triads in the European countries. The study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling to estimate the formative-reflective hierarchical component model and test the research hypotheses.

Information governance defines how supply chain information flows are controlled, accessed and used by a focal organization and its business partners. As empirically evidenced in this study, it can be depicted as a latent construct consisting of three distinct dimensions of information custody, information ownership and right to data access. Likewise, the study also indicates that supply chain self-organization, as a second-order construct, consists of three interactive self-organization actions undertaken by specific firms participating in the triadic arrangement. Supply chain self-organization is thus produced by firms that are reciprocally interrelated and interacting, having effects on one another. Furthermore, the study also highlights that information governance creates an environment for applying decentralized information technologies, which then positively affects supply chain self-organization. Finally, the research also empirically operationalizes the construct of network performance within the transitive service triads.

Although the results provide several major contributions to theory and implications for practitioners, the study still demonstrates some methodological constraints. Specifically, although the study uses a relatively large research sample of 350 transitive service triads, it still focuses only on a selected group of industries and is limited to investigating solely a particular type of service triads.

Given the increasing interest in investigating triads, this study examines how information governance and decentralized information technologies support supply chain self-organization to yield network performance in transitive service triads.

Upper echelons theory regards the CEO as a top management team (TMT) member. Research has rarely distinguished the CEO from other TMT members and has not explained the boundaries between them, which causes little attention to be paid to the interaction between the CEO and TMT members. The authors want to divide the CEO and other TMT members into two independent parts and explore the types of interactions between them and the impact of these interactions on organizational performance. The two independent parts and their interactions are important for the integration, supplementation and refinement of leader-team research in the empirical field.

A-share listed companies in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange with continuous operation from 2012 to 2015 were selected as samples. The data in the sample were mainly from the CSMAR database and the obtained data were checked with the data in RESSET, Sina Finance, Phoenix New Media and Eastmoney to ensure their accuracy and completeness. Finally, 209 companies were selected as the sample. The authors used SPSS 22.0 to process data.

The results showed that social network interaction, skill interaction and social experience interaction between the CEO and TMT members significantly affected organizational performance and the effects are more significant than those of the CEO and TMT members individually.

Such consideration can more clearly clarify the organizational use of CEO and TMT members and the complementary and overlapping relationships between them. Further, such consideration is instructive for the rational allocation and efficient operation of leaders and their team members in practice.